As a marketer, I am a late bloomer. I spent most of my career in technology, not doing any marketing at all until 20 years into my career, in 1998. Now I spend all of my time on marketing technology, so I have experience only in digital marketing–not with any traditional marketing tactics and techniques. One question pops up over and over again is: “what about brand awareness?”
I understand why brand awareness has always been measured in traditional advertising. The only way to tell if most TV ads are working is to survey your market to find out what they know about your brand. If your brand is Coca Cola, then the way you use digital is to generate brand awareness, just as you do with TV. No one buys a Coke online. You don’t need to find a dealer.
But most companies aren’t Coke. Most companies sell online or start their sales online, with people taking several steps to a purchase. Trust me, if someone buys your product, at some point they became dimly aware of you. It’s just that online metrics aren’t tuned around awareness–you’d have to survey people just like everywhere else. To me, the two metrics you really care about are impressions and conversions.
Those metrics cover the two things that you can do in marketing. You can get more people to see your message. Or you can persuade more of those that see it to buy from you. It’s not always easy to measure impressions or conversions, but it’s not easy to measure brand awareness, either. We try to measure what is important.
If brand awareness is important to your brand, keep measuring it, but it isn’t more important to most companies than impressions and conversions.
