A new WARC Strategy report, What’s working in raising brand awareness, digs into the various aspects of awareness and explores how brands can drive better results.
Why brand awareness matters
Brand awareness can demonstrate how customers think about brands, with or without prompting, and how they move closer to buying decisions. That makes it a key component of brand equity. Despite being perceived as a weaker metric, its tangible and positive effect on sales makes it critical to the marketing function as well.
Key stat
Research by Fospha found that brands allocating at least 5% of their budgets to awareness and consideration saw a 22% higher return on advertising spend, and when higher-awareness brands boosted their spend by 10%, they saw a 13% increase in sales.
Takeaways
While brand awareness is a top funnel metric, marketers must be clear about what “awareness” means as a concept, an objective, and a measure of success to avoid confusing it with deeper signals of brand strength like mental availability.
Research has identified a “strong, repeatable link” between awareness-led advertising impressions and business outcomes and awareness impressions and performance indicators, meaning that brand awareness is most valuable when measured holistically rather than in isolation.
Reach and frequency are necessary to build and maintain brand awareness, as reach exposes the brand to a broad audience and frequency reinforces brand recall and recognition, cornerstones to moving customers along the funnel.
Source: warc.com