How to measure Top of Mind Awareness
You’re a business owner or marketing manager. You work hard to get your company out there and noticed. Ideally, you’d like an ever-growing list of dedicated clients or customers who think of you first, each and every time. This has several obvious benefits, including increasing your profit margins and word-of-mouth marketing – which is free, wahoo! The question remains, of course, how to get there.
One of the best methods of increasing your customer reach and market share, not to mention understanding your own brand better, is to measure top of mind awareness.
What Is Top of Mind Awareness?
So just what is top of mind awareness? Simply put, a brand has top of mind awareness if it is the first one a person thinks about when asked to name brands in a particular category. You yourself likely have top of mind awareness of several brands. Some of the most common examples include:
- Copy machines: Xerox
- Tissues: Kleenex
- French fries: McDonald’s
- Cola: Pepsi or Coca Cola
- Vacuum: Hoover
Of course, top of mind awareness differs from consumer to consumer. Variables such as where they live, what brands they were raised with, what experiences they’ve had to date and what kind of television they watch all play into which companies they’ll name off the “top” of their heads.
Hence, top of mind awareness for a brand is measured as a percentage. Of the respondents surveyed, how many of them will name a certain brand? The brand that wins the largest percentage of respondents is the one with greatest top of mind awareness. Ideally, that’s your company … but how exactly do you measure it?
How to Measure Top of Mind Awareness
Many people mistakenly believe that brand awareness – the more generic marketing niche in which top of mind awareness lives – is nebulous and immeasurable. That’s not true, though. In fact, measuring it really isn’t that tricky. You just have to keep a few things in mind:
- Don’t name specific brands upfront: If you ask respondents leading questions about brands, whether you list yourself or the Pepsis of the world, that thought will now exist in their heads where it might not have before. To get organic results, don’t name specific brands.
- Keep questions open–ended: Again, avoid questions that lead consumers’ minds toward a particular product, region or attribute, which can muddy your data.
- Ask for lists: Part of your survey should include lists of brands in your category. If you only ask for one brand, you might get the Kleenex response and nothing else, which isn’t useful. Instead, ask for lists. Your company might not come up before REI, but a list will tell you whether it’s coming up at all.
- Treat rankings seriously: The ranking of companies will give you several different metrics. The top company ranking is a straight percentage … who has the highest awareness? Afterwards, you can gain more subtle data by weighting companies according to their position in the list.
- Don’t forget qualitative data: It’s not all about the numbers. Once you get the unprompted responses, it’s fine to conduct interviews to get more specific information about your company.
Now, what to do?
What to Do with Top of Mind Awareness Measurements
Once you know where you stand, you have the ingredients for great marketing campaigns. You can use top of mind awareness metrics to influence your SEO strategy, bid on keywords, know which brands to emulate and more.
Ready to dominate your marketplace? Here at Realtop Digital Marketing Agency, our goal is to help ambitious business owners like you create, launch and optimize the marketing campaigns that will see your company successful long into the future. Get in touch to learn more!
Best regards, Nik Tsoukales, CEO
Direct Line: 617-315-1138
Main Line: 800.676.8350
Skype: nikitastsoukales
Email: nik@realtop.com