How to measure brand awareness with Mark Dilson

Mark Dilson:

Hey there.

Anna:

Awesome. It’s so, so good that you join us today. And we have a really, really cool topic for our listeners, which is all about measuring brand awareness and building a report to track the success of your brand performance. So my first question to you, Mark, is at what point should companies actually start measuring brand awareness in your opinion?

Mark Dilson:

Yeah, I would recommend tracking brand awareness as soon as possible if you have the resources to do so. Just figuring out how the brand increases your brand awareness is obviously a good focus to gain more customers, but at the starting stages, it really is to help you kind of figure out where you fit in the market space, as well as potential spots where you can improve. It’s not just like social mentions as far as people what they’re saying about your company, but it could be responses about the quality of your product. It could be indications of what you could be doing better as a company.

Mark Dilson:

So it’s really important to really get that honed in when you’re starting your company out so you can best represent what you’re doing. So, yeah, I highly recommend starting as soon as possible. Also, when you have fewer mentions like only a couple hundred a month, that’s way easier to start getting things set up that way than once you start hitting a hundred thousand, 10,000, who knows how many, way more a month, and it’s just easier to come through stuff to figure out what people are talking about and get down to that sentiment level of what’s going on from your customers.

Anna:

That’s awesome. I really, really like your point about starting early, and this way it would be easier once you have a few mentions and then moving on to a more complex setup where you have hundreds and thousands of mentions. So I think it’s really, really good that you called it out. So my next question would be how marketers or analysts should think about reporting. So before they are to create a report, what kind of questions should they ask from the brand? Are there any specific pieces of information they should collect before they should start thinking about the metrics?

Mark Dilson:

For sure, yeah. I think at the bare minimum, I like to start out with the five Ws, which is pretty common in journalism to be used. That being who, what, when, where, and why. It can really be applied to the reporting you’re doing on specifically what you should be doing for considerations on building out that report. So who could be an example being what stakeholders are going to be seeing the report you’re working on, identifying are they C-suite executives? Are you just working with someone directly that only they are going to see the report? And that kind of goes into what, being what business objectives, KPIs is going to be the most meaningful for the stakeholders. Along with that, like what channels, what data sources are you going to be accessing or needing the report out on. When being, when are you presenting these reports because it’s pretty common you might have a weekly report, a monthly report, or quarterly, and you might be able to prepare differently or store data differently based on those answers that you get for the cadence?

As far as the next one on here would be where, where are these reports going? So are you going to be presenting out in a monthly meeting or are you going to be sending out just via email as soon as you’re done, will it be sent to whoever your client is, and will they be up-leveling it to their boss, then passing them from their boss’s boss to the next boss and kind of moving up the chain or maybe it’s a group meeting like I mentioned on a weekly or monthly basis where all the stakeholders are together and you’re presenting it all at once? And finally, I think the most important is why are you doing the report.

And ultimately it’s to figure out why this report is important, not only for the KPIs based on it but what kind of value is it really driving for the organization? It’s pretty common that reporting, dashboarding, all these kinds of things are really important obviously, but sometimes they’re just kind of a buzzword and you end up just doing work without creating value for an organization.

So if you can actually answer that why it really will end up showing the value to the client. So yeah, I just recommend continuing to kind of ask that question why are you doing this to drive the best value for the client? And ultimately that also builds a better relationship with the client. You can continue to improve the reporting. And I guess along those lines is just I have a recommendation as far as like just continue to have engagement with the client on those reports, especially if they consistently look the same, they can get kind of dry or kind of boring I guess, essentially as far as it’s not as exciting or fresh or new anymore. So figure out how you can include more KPIs or do training, workshops, and just try to keep them as engaged on that kind of report as much as possible so the project doesn’t fizzle out essentially.

Anna:

The five W framework is great and I think it provides a really, really good baseline for reporting. Now let’s talk about the structure of these reports a little bit. So how, in your opinion, should marketers structure their reports in a way that it is clear to the audience they’re trying to create the reports for? So what kind of things should they take into consideration?

Mark Dilson:

Yeah, so this kind of goes back to seeing the report. If it’s going to only be used by someone on the internal team, a particular stakeholder, but I find maybe focusing on insights and recommendations early on in the report. So if you’re doing a deck like the first few slides, just so if… I’ve commonly run into this where executives will look at only the first couple of slides. And so they want that information quickly, like quick hits of like what’s happening, what do I do next? So I like to make that really clear as far as like big call-outs to KPIs that are most important to the main stakeholders on it so they can quickly jump in there, see what is up, what is down, any recommendations or insights in bulletin form, and what to do next. And this is just a quick way to have them get right into it without having to comb through the deck to see what those recommendations are or any insights that pop up.

It’s kind of all in one spot. And from there, kind of go from telling basically a high-level overview of what’s happening and then diving deeper into the story as far as breaking things out into different business units, different channels. So often you might have as I mentioned before, could be a call with numerous stakeholders across different teams that might not communicate with each other. So they might have different segments within the report that they just need to focus on. So being sure to split it out then, or if it’s for the company and everyone’s using the same channels and they’re aligned in that area, you could break it out by channel and kind of get into the weeds so to speak for someone that’s more in the day to day of building out campaigns, running media campaigns, whatever, and kind of settling with that story of working out for every one of those stakeholders so it’s not just focused on the executives at the front, but also giving value for everyone else as they continue you going throughout the deck.

Anna:

All right. That’s great. And now let’s go a little bit granular and talk about the metrics themselves. So what kind of metrics should a market track in order to measure brand awareness?

Mark Dilson:

Yeah, depending on your data source, tracking mentions of your brand name and sentiment around that primarily I’d focus on that initially if you have numerous products, business units, or anything with different sort of segmentation drilling down to that as well. So you can set up different queries depending on the tool that you’re using, different keywords, grouping those keywords based off of a topic, based off of different ways that you could spell your product name, considering even misspellings of your name, which is pretty common. People might misspell it, especially if they’re angry about the product. They might be quickly typing something, a review, a negative review potentially, or even a positive review, and especially if you’re using a phone auto correct who knows what you might end up spelling, but just being aware that people are out there talking about numerous products, might be on different data channels as far as it could be Yelp, Google review, Reddit, Facebook, everything, all these different areas to really explore as far as that goes.

Anna:

All right, these are great tips. And now let’s go to probably the most favorite part of any interviews I have which is the tool stack. So now that marketers have gathered all the information, talked to the executive team, figured out for who they’re building this report, what kind of tools can they use to actually create this report? And maybe you could walk us through a couple of different scenarios here.

Mark Dilson:

For sure. Yeah. For getting data from your own channels, obviously use Supermetrics. So far for me, it’s been the easiest and most cost-effective as far as other tools out there and also the most accurate. So I would highly recommend that as the first stop for your own channels. Honestly, you could also do it for listening. There are integrations for that as well. But for listening on brand awareness, along with Supermetrics, if it doesn’t have the connection for it, great tool Hootsuite is great for listening to hashtags or keywords. If you’re at the enterprise level, it’s going to be more costly, but tools such as Sprinkler, Meltwater, which was Bot Systems, which is a common tool name that was going around. But yeah, not under Meltwater, cone rows, core rows, formally Spredfast is also a good one I recommend as far as like listening, have those capabilities on there.

So those are some pretty common enterprise-level ones, but yeah, ultimately with all of those really to your research as far as like what’s coming out there, especially if you’re involved with that technology decision because as you probably know, this industry’s totally evolving all the time. So it’s good to look at what’s coming out because you never know what the new and best thing is. As far as deck building, something my team uses is Google Slides. It’s just for easier collaboration. It’s nice to talk in there, integrate with the Google workspace or work front. And also it integrates really well with Supermetrics and we actually have a blog, I touched on this where you can, if you have some data tables in your reporting, you can fairly easily automate this between Supermetrics, Google Sheets and Google Slides where you could have it updated on a weekly, daily, monthly basis.

And all you have to do is essentially refresh the data tables within Google Slides and you’re kind of all set up with formatting, which is a real-time saver. Lastly, as far as data visualizations being a tool, Beta Studio, kind of going back to that Google thing is included with that so it kind of keeps costs low with everything within one interface. You could use Google Sheets or Excel as far as creating charts in there or pivot tables. But if you can afford it, I also highly recommend Tableau as they are a great visualization tool compatible across different platforms. They have Tableau online and they also have recently Tableau Prep, which is also included in their license. So if you do need to do a little bit more advanced cleanup or join [inaudible 00:14:35] any of your data sources, especially if you have a lot of them, it’s a great kind of workaround to save costs as it’s bundled in already.

Anna:

All right. Awesome. I heard many, many, many great suggestions and I’m super happy to hear that your team is happy with Supermetrics. So a great addition there as well. And finally, after the report is created, what are the next steps? So what should marketers, analysts, data teams consider after they’ve created and shared the report?

Mark Dilson:

Yeah, I would highly recommend that they follow up anytime they present a report as far as attaching it to an email, that’s the primary way to communicate and just kind of having followed up notes or questions that came up and answer it so everything’s in one consulted place and it just makes it really clear to who you were working with was with X, Y, Z, whatever you’re going to include in there as things you’re going to do or things that you need to follow up on. And it could be vice versa too as far as like maybe the client needs to know they didn’t take notes, but now they have someplace from your email now to kind of check-in on like, oh, I need to go get this so they can further analyze something within the report. So yeah, I recommend doing that after reporting or doing a presentation and then kind of putting those recommendations and insights into the report as well.

This is also I find really helpful for executive-level as sometimes they might not even jump into the report or they do want to jump into the report or share some quick fact with someone as they’re walking down the hallway essentially and so they can kind of check their email real quick and just have a couple of bullet points that they can quickly remember or pull up and look at without having to actually pull the report open. And yeah, as I kind of going back to keeping them engaged, if you can have weekly, biweekly check on and just make sure everything that you’re doing is providing value for them, try to incorporate this data into decision making that they’re doing so it’s not… Basically what you have in the report is being used and that data that you have in the report is something valuable to them.

Yeah. And lastly, on here, if you have the resource to do so, always keep testing new things. This doesn’t mean you have to spend a bunch of money to kind of do testing, but you can at least come up with data-informed decisions on what or what isn’t working as you could do little tests as far as tweaking CTA messaging in there, or you could do AB testing on platforms as far as images. So there are lots of different things that you can do as far as testing on platforms, but you can also do this in your reporting as well as far as like where do they like their arrangement of the report? Do they like certain sections above or do they like certain chart types? So there’s kind of a way to keep the client engaged or whoever you’re working with, not only when you’re doing AB testing out there, but also for your own kind of a report with them as well.

Anna:

Awesome. Thank you so much, Mark. There were some really, really, really nice tips throughout the whole podcast episode so I’m sure our listeners will take them into consideration. And now if the audience would love to learn more about you, where can they find you?

Mark Dilson:

Yeah, they can check out more about Thesis the agency I work for at thesis.agency. If they’re curious about checking out more about myself, you can go to metricsmark.com, kind of hashtag metrics Mark. I don’t really have much on social, but that’s also an option.

Anna:

Yes. Metrics Mark is the place to be so everybody goes ahead and check it out and thanks you so much for coming on the show, Mark.