13 Simple Ways to Set Achievable Brand Awareness Goals
It’s a new year and, despite the ongoing pandemic, the energy is palpable around maximizing yourself and your business through pivots, resolutions, and vision setting. While it’s easy to focus on an ideal revenue goal for your business or growing your team or making new industry connections, it’s much harder to set concrete and actionable brand goals. We look at our brand as though it will achieve its own goals despite the focus turned to operations or management.
Setting brand goals feeds the larger mission and vision of your brand by harnessing energy around major areas of brand building. These goals are tactical executions of key performance indicators of your brand.
The major areas of brand building are Awareness, Empathy, Equity, and Differentiation. By focusing on these key areas and defining key metrics or milestones, you can begin to bring your brand to the forefront of your goal setting and determine where you need to allocate proper resources to ensure the growth you want.
Before we jump into the steps of how to set your brand goals, let’s dive into those areas of brand building.
Brand Awareness
Awareness is all about increasing total brand recognition within existing and potential customer bases. Awareness should focus not just on recall or immediate recognition with the logo or the brand name but should innately trigger a response to the product or service offerings. It’s great to be the face of a brand that has beautiful graphics and high-quality photography, but your audience should also be able to recall with clarity what it is that you do and how it’s better than other options.
Building Brand Empathy
Empathy is the step that takes brand building outside of the founder and designer’s frame of reference and dives deep into customer and audience perspectives. It’s not just about addressing customer needs but about intricately understanding how a customer engages with the world, their peers, and your brand. By increasing your knowledge of their experience through surveys and conversation, you can better increase your brand’s positioning in their mind.
Identifying Brand Equity
Equity is the authority-building piece of brand building. This is the intangible arena where customers prefer and seek out your brand over others because of the value they perceive your brand to have. This is the place after Awareness has been reached, Empathy has been maximized and Value is determined. The benefits of having high brand equity seem almost too good to be true — capturing more market share from competitors, charging a price premium, having the freedom to pivot and adjust without customer loss, and having greater social impact.
Determining Brand Differentiation
Differentiation refers to the details of your brand that make it an obvious choice over a competitor in the eyes of your customer. This is where specificity, relevancy, and “special sauce” or uniqueness make all the difference in keeping the equity you’ve built. Differentiation requires an understanding of the overall competitive landscape including the new disruptors and the trusted old guard.
Now that we have our arenas defined and our minds positioned for growth let’s set some brand goals.
Step 1: Get a Brand Baseline
Your first step in creating brand goals for the new year is to get a baseline of where you’re starting. Start with two columns of what you feel your brand achieved in the previous year; these are the intangible elements of your brand. At this stage, don’t worry about measuring those achievements, simply list them out.
Then in the second column, get focused on measurements. Calculate and pull data for the following areas:
Customer Retention Rate
Customer Conversion Rate
Social: Total Followers
Social: Total Average Monthly Reach
Social: Total Average Monthly Engagement
Web Traffic: Top 3 Channels
Web Traffic: Bounce Rate
Web Traffic: Most Visited Page
Marketing: ROI on Ad Spend ($)
Marketing: ROI on Ad Spend (Followers)
Marketing: Total Email List
Marketing: Average Email Opens
Marketing: Average Email Clickthrough Rate
Step 2: Edit Your Brand
Chances are while you were busy for the last 12 months (surviving another year of the pandemic) and building your business that your brand started to move and grow in directions it shouldn’t. Just like a bonsai, your brand needs to be trimmed up (read: edited) each year to maintain proper growth and health. The top areas to edit would be in any areas where you feel a change or removal could better position your brand in the eyes of your customer.
The most tactical place to start is through your social and marketing metrics. Compare your perception of overall efforts with the results you just cataloged. Is there an area that produced low results but high efforts? Cut it. Is there an area that provided high results with minimal effort? Expand on it in 2022. Only you will know where you should make the cuts so we’ll keep this section brief. Just remember: more editing leaves more room for future opportunities!
Step 3: Define Brand Goals
Now that you’ve defined your baseline and edited out the areas that aren’t working for you. It’s time to define what you want your brand to achieve in both the intangible and tangible arenas. Start with two columns again: the left as the intangible, the right as the measurements. This should be easier to brainstorm now as you’ve already worked through the key areas to focus on.
On the intangible side, try to capture the feeling of accomplishment and clarity you might have twelve months from now. What major stride did your brand make? What partnership materialized? What are your customers saying about you online? How did your brand awareness grow — or change?
On the tangible side, or measurement side, list out the same areas and define the new key performance indicator you want to see in January 2023. If you’re not sure how to estimate your growth in each area, try this simple formula: Baseline Number * 1.5. This will determine your growth rate at 50% for each area and is a good place to start. You should adjust the calculation accordingly for how much investment (time and monetary) you plan to give that area. For instance, use Baseline * 1.25 for areas you plan to use the same amount of effort. Otherwise, use Baseline * 1.75 for areas you plan to invest heavily in both effort and spend.
Step 4: Split Goals Into Halves
Now that you have your goals for both the tangible and intangible aspects of your brand it’s time to give them space to come to fruition. Unlike with personal goals or revenue goals, loosely organizing your brand goals allows for more flexibility and less rigidity in achieving your growth rate and other performance indicators.
For each goal, mark 1st or 2nd to refer to the first half of the year or the second half of the year. Try to keep an equal balance between both 1st and 2nd so you can adequately give your goals the attention and planning they need. Or, if you know that one half of the year tends to be busier than the other, split your goals according to when you can appropriately give them attention or delegate effectively.
Step 5: Get Clear on Why It Matters
Lastly, and optionally, create explicit statements defining the reason why each brand goal matters. It’s one thing to achieve a 50% growth rate of your email newsletter list, but it’s another thing altogether to want to create an inbox-based community of like-minded spirits — or whatever your reason is! If you don’t define why you must make this goal happen for your brand, you’re much less likely to achieve it and make excuses for why it never came to fruition.
If these five steps feel like an impossible feat or you’re unsure of how to set a realistic goal for your brand or you’ve got too many ideas of what you could be doing, you might be lacking a solid brand strategy. Your brand strategy to use as a cornerstone to vet your ideas against.
No matter how many brand goals you write down, don’t forget that it’s the measurement and vision-setting that truly matters — not just checking a box of achievement.
