The secrets of successful brand awareness surveys
Tips for building a beautiful experience and getting the feedback you need.
Tips for building a beautiful experience and getting the feedback you need.
Let’s try something. If I say “tissues,” what company comes to mind? What about “cola,” or “tablet,” or “fast food?” What just popped into your head? Brands, logos, and products. Companies are now circling your head like little branding rock stars. Wait, what just happened?
Top-of-mind awareness is the marketing gold standard that makes brands bounce inside your cranium the moment you drop a name. This is what you want. And here’s how to get it using brand awareness surveys.
Glue people to the process
Brand awareness measures how familiar people in your target market are with your brand and can help you understand whether you’re reaching the right audience. And all this matters because—ding ding—awareness can drive sales.
“That’s all great,” you say. “But brand awareness surveys are annoying, long, and people hate doing them.” Well, things have changed. Today’s survey experiences can be more conversational and engaging, giving respondents more natural ways to express themselves.
Try this one out to see what we mean:
Well-designed surveys can help improve the respondent experience and give you clearer insights into where your brand stands with customers.
Then what? You contend for the worldwide heavyweight title of Top-of-Mind Brand. You seize the glory. You see it, believe it, taste it.
Want to skip this article and start surveying? Get started with a brand awareness survey template.
Choose the right respondents
Unless you’re some enormous brand like Nike, a survey aimed at the general population is going to be irrelevant. Your marketing efforts probably aren’t “Nike size” in terms of target group, so your survey won’t end up informing your promotion.
Instead, survey people who match the audience you’re already trying to reach. This can help you understand whether your marketing is reaching the right people and how aware they are of your brand.
Demographics, demographics, demographics! These details can help you understand which groups are responding to your brand and segment your results by characteristics such as age, location, or other relevant factors. From there, you can create the segments you need and start polling for awareness.
The brand awareness business calls this audience profiling. It’s a way to understand your audience’s identity. The size and makeup of your audience will depend on your brand, market, and research goals.
Let’s say you’re surveying online sneaker customers:
You could begin with:
If the respondent answers yes, follow up with:
List your brand next to its competitors.
Then towards the end of the survey, you can politely ask more personaldemographic survey questions:
Once you know your ideal customer, you can dive deeper by creating a brand awareness survey that matches your target audience. Then you can really find out if your messaging is working.
David Slatter, of ExperiPro, goes further into the process:
Look carefully for differences in brand perception between segments—particularly knowledgeable and user segments. They’re indications that you may not be delivering on your promise. Then compare with competitors and you may uncover a weakness that you can turn into a competitive advantage.
—David Slatter
Make it feel fun
Keeping respondents engaged can be a challenge when they’re surrounded by digital distractions. That makes a clear, enjoyable survey experience especially important.
Long, cluttered survey pages can feel overwhelming. Breaking questions into manageable steps can make the experience easier to navigate and help respondents stay focused. Typeform still supports a one-question-at-a-time approach, although it now also allows multiple compatible questions on a single form page when that format makes sense.
Treat the respondent’s time like a precious commodity, or they’ll bounce. Use visuals instead of plain text whenever you can. Pose questions in a friendly, conversational tone to make people feel comfortable. Just like any other form of communication, variety and economy of words will always win the day.
Matthew Mercuri, Digital Marketing Manager at Dupray, offers the following advice:
- Humor kills. If you open your survey with an industry-related joke that gets a few chuckles, certain individuals will be better engaged right from the start.
- People love GIFs. Tie them to your survey, and you’ll clear some individuals from thinking of a hard reset on questions.
- Be succinct. Say and ask quickly, but provide people with the opportunity to read more if they want additional info.
Learn to use unaided and aided questions
There are two types of questions you can use in your brand awareness survey: unaided and aided. Both can help you understand different aspects of brand awareness when used in the right context. Here’s how they work.
No helping hand: unaided questions
If your brand’s been around for a while, and you feel confident that your audience has a faint idea of who you are, go for unaided questions. They’re useful for measuring top-of-mind awareness because they ask respondents which brands or products they recall without prompting them with specific names.
A typical unaided question for an Advil campaign could be:
Participants can respond freely without being shown a list of brands. Once the data has been collected, hypothetical results for Advil could include:
- 20% of respondents think of Advil when they are in pain, while 60% recall Tylenol.
- After compiling all data, we found that Advil is one of the top three brands in the pain relief category.
To get a more complete picture, it can also help to look at the range of cues or situations that trigger brand recall.
To learn more about these cues, Advil’s survey could also ask about brand subcategories:
Consumption preferences:
Or places of purchase:
One last word of advice: brand awareness survey results are never 100 percent accurate. As Alex Kemmler from Aiwa explains:
Since an affirmative response to an awareness question often leads to follow-up questions, respondents try to avoid answering additional questions by pretending they haven’t heard of brands. For example, through a survey run by Google, only 85% of people in the US claimed to have heard of Coca-Cola.
—Alex Kemmler
Here’s a clue: aided questions
Aided questions are a little different. They use prompts or cues to measure whether respondents recognize a particular brand.
You can include rating scales:
Or open-ended questions:
So what’s the best way to combine aided and unaided questions? We asked Digital Brand & Marketing Consultant Julia Laguarda and here’s what she said:
Whenever you’re unsure, always start by asking spontaneous [unaided] questions like ‘Which brand comes to mind?’ and follow up by providing visuals of actual brands to test respondent recognition. Normally, people know way more brands when you actually show them some.
—Julia Laguarda
Following up with strong marketing is also key:
Steadily invest to make your brand visible to your customers. Then once you reach that top of mind status, your marketing effort comes down. People are automatically attracted to your brand because it’s been planted as a preference.
—Julia Laguarda
Design for completion
Once you’ve got your questions, you’ll need to consider your survey’s design.
Your goal is to create a seamless user experience (UX) that makes the survey easy to complete and helps encourage thoughtful responses.
Julia agrees:
UX is an excellent way to ensure that people keep clicking through your questions. It’s all about clarity and making answering easy for respondents. The fewer clicks and typing that’s needed, the faster and easier people will move forward.
—Julia Laguarda
Here are a few more tips to keep in mind.
Or, if you want to let the UX handle itself, try one of our survey templates.
Don’t forget about mobile
People use a range of devices to complete online surveys, so your survey experience needs to work well across mobile, tablet, and desktop screens.
So make sure your brand awareness survey looks good on small screens and can adapt to the device being used. A responsive, mobile-friendly experience can make it easier for respondents to participate wherever they are.
Mobile devices have a limited screen size, so surveys should use minimal visuals to keep the user focused on the question.
Julia chimes in on the mobile trend:
Although simpler in design, the goal remains the same for mobile users. Get the respondent moving through the survey by using a clutter-free combination of text and visuals. If successful, people will even participate when they’re on the go.
—Julia Laguarda
Make answering easy
Make sure people understand what you’re asking. Be brief and informal like you’re talking to a good friend. This is especially important in rated questions.
Julia recounts her experience:
User mistakes can make data irrelevant. Ask clearly and concretely, avoid any open interpretations, and apply graphical tools in rated questions whenever you can.
—Julia Laguarda
So instead of asking something wordy and ambiguous like:
Say something that’s friendly and easy to understand:
Also, make sure people know they can skip questions. Brandi Olson, owner of The Olson Group, offers her advice:
Don’t get greedy; only ask the most important questions. And don’t force questions. Give people the option to skip any of them. It’ll be the difference between quitting a survey because of a question or skipping it and moving on to the finish.
—Brandi Olson
Brand your survey
Branding your brand awareness survey can help reinforce credibility and make the experience feel more consistent with your company.
Respondents may look for familiar visual cues that signal the survey is legitimate and connected to your brand.
So, screen space permitting, use familiar artwork to build trust in your respondent. Cues like your company logo, corporate colors, and branding typeface will reassure people.
Just remember to keep things clutter-free and leave enough visual space to guide the respondent’s attention where you want it. Templates can speed up the process.
Set a price for your answers
But who’s to say respondents still won’t turn away the moment they smell popcorn cooking in the microwave? This brings us to our next important point: rewards.
Incentives can give respondents an extra reason to complete a survey. Here’s what Julia’s seen:
By offering a benefit for answering and completing a survey, collected data becomes way more accurate. Providing a reward makes users feel more responsible for answering and they deliver more accurate responses as a result.
—Julia Laguarda
To put this strategy into practice, offer rewards upfront and make sure they’re relevant to your audience and study. Think meal coupons for a fast-food questionnaire or another incentive that makes sense for the people you’re surveying.
Or if you’re Majestic Wines, free wine:
A few final thoughts
Make a note of this: brand awareness and brand reputation aren’t the same thing.
People may be familiar with your brand while still having negative perceptions of it. Awareness tells you whether people know your brand; it doesn’t necessarily tell you how they feel about it.
So send out brand awareness surveys regularly to see how awareness changes over time and under different market conditions. The right frequency will depend on your brand, goals, and how quickly your market changes.
To quote IT pioneer Mitch Kapor:
Getting information through the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant.
—Mitch Kapor
Our job is to break it into little sips, one question at a time.
