How to measure your restaurant’s brand awareness

The concept of a brand can sometimes be difficult to define. For many of our clients, they express a vision of what they believe their brand is, and what kind of experience they offer their customers. For some restaurants, they hit the mark, while others may find that there is a gap between what they perceive their brand to be and how their customers view it. At Absolute Marketing Solutions, we have helped businesses and organizations re-align their overall marketing strategy to help bridge the gap between consumer and brand expectation. This often begins with a full analysis of a brand and defining the metrics by which success is measured.

While measuring brand awareness is a complex topic to marketers and business owners, we feel it essential to discuss how a restaurant can measure itself in this way. Some schools of thought believe that measuring brand awareness is an exercise in vanity metrics, but we think otherwise. While it may be one of the most difficult things to measure, understanding brand awareness is a powerful piece of information that can help business owners make business decisions.

There are several tactics you can employ to monitor and measure your brand’s awareness, and we are going to explore a few of these in this blog, so you can start tracking your brand awareness today.

Direct search

Google Analytics is a robust suite of tools that can reveal insights into your audience, performance, and brand awareness, but you need to know where to look. In the acquisition report, keep track of changes in direct traffic patterns. Direct traffic indicates how many users typed your website’s URL directly into the search bar. It could also show if a user clicked on your website from an email or bookmark. Either way, you’ll be able to see, month over month, whether there are any changes in your direct traffic report. Be sure to filter out irrelevant traffic (such as your own searches, and those of your employees) to ensure clean data.

In Google’s Search Console, you can review queries to see whether there is a change in branded search terms or other keyword searches that users search to find you. For example, you can see if users are searching for your restaurant’s name, and if the frequency is increasing or decreasing over time. Users searching directly for your brand name in a Google search is a powerful indicator that users are familiar with your brand and are using your business name to specifically search for you.

Surveys

If only a small percentage of your customers take the time to fill out a survey, you can still learn some essential details about your brand such as how they heard about you, and what they can recall about their experience at your restaurant. Whether you send out a survey using Google surveys, an email blast, or a dedicated page on your website, conducting surveys is a good way to better understand how your customers perceive your brand.

Monitor brand mentions

Keeping track of the number of times your brand or restaurant name is mentioned online can provide a wealth of information not only about the number of conversations surrounding your business but also the consumers’ sentiment. Not every mention of your business will be tagged, or have the correct handle, or will be linked to any of your official channels. Set up alerts to also monitor and track conversations such as plain text mentions that occur outside of your owned, or official channels.

Measure your share of voice (SOV)

Share of voice, aka SOV, calculates how big your share of organic, paid, or social is, compared to all of your competitors. The original formula traditionally came from the advertising industry, but for the purposes of this blog, we will consider your brand’s entire visibility as a key indicator of your brand’s overall awareness. There are tools that automate this process, such as Spyfu’s Kombat tool, sifting through millions of keywords to create a snapshot comparison of your share of voice compared to your competitors.

Measuring the awareness of a brand can initially appear as a difficult exercise, however, we believe that it is needed for every business. If you would like more information about how to measure or build your restaurant’s brand awareness, contact the digital marketing experts at Absolute Marketing Solutions at 813 908 6862 today to get started!