by Andrew Kasper - Feb. 19, 2024
When executing an awareness campaign, audience feedback is crucial in understanding if your message is resonating. Without that feedback, you won't have the data to understand if the campaign is working -- or not. There are three effective methods to gauge the temperature of your audience and measure awareness; research, surveys and focus groups.
The first step of any campaign is to do your research to ensure you know your audience. Understanding who you are trying to reach, including age, geographic location, interests, income, will help you better determine if you’ve succeeded at touch points along the way. Because an awareness campaign doesn't necessarily have a call to action that is digitally measured, there are other measurement methods marketers can employ. Marketing methods such as billboards or flyers posted in certain areas present the same difficulty of measuring effectiveness. The goal of an awareness campaign is to reach as much of the target audience as possible after all. This leads us to two methods to measure your campaign’s success: surveys and focus groups.
Surveys are a great way to receive quick feedback to gain an overall understanding of how the campaign resonated with users. By utilizing close-ended questions, such as "Have you heard about our brand in the past 60 days?" and "Have you seen our brand on social media?'' We can quickly gather specific data points that offer a general sense of the campaign's impact on users. The questions in this type of survey should be close-ended and shouldn't take the user longer than 2 minutes to complete. Surveys can be easily distributed digitally, which allows them to reach our target audience. For marketers and executives looking for a high level understanding of reach and awareness, once the survey data is collected, it can be converted into visual graphics, such as charts and graphs, to provide a clearer and more intuitive representation of the campaign's performance. Visualizing data in this way allows us to identify trends, patterns, and areas that may require attention.
Focus groups, on the other hand, are a way to gain reactions from a smaller pool of your potential audience. While focus groups are more time intensive for the facilitator than a survey, one of the benefits of focus groups is that you will likely receive in-depth feedback that a survey may not capture. Focus groups also allow for discussion among participants and may offer marketers insight they would not have received otherwise . When holding a focus group, the questions posed to participants should be more open-ended and may look like, "What do you think about when you see our brand?" or "How has our brand resonated with you in your day-to-day, if at all?" Participants can build on each other's responses, providing a more comprehensive view of their collective opinions. This group dynamic can uncover shared sentiments, uncover unexpected issues, or highlight aspects of the brand that resonate particularly well with the audience. While focus groups may not have the quantitative range of surveys, they excel in uncovering qualitative data that adds context and depth to the overall understanding of the brand's reception.
Understanding an audience’s awareness of your marketing campaign can be a difficult thing to measure. Ensuring the proper methodologies are in place before, during and after your campaign is the key to measuring success.
Looking for help with research, surveys or focus groups? Anglin helps organizations get the message out and measure audience awareness. Email us at aprinfo@anglinpr.com.