Over 30% of companies conduct their business online, giving them a competitive edge over competitors slow to embrace digital marketing. This can be especially beneficial for small companies planting seeds to increase brand awareness and revenue.

Concentrating on your business’s key performance indicators (KPIs) is significant in measuring your marketing and taking people from unfamiliar with your products to championing them.

But first, what do brand awareness and KPI even mean?

Here’s a quick refresher on brand awareness. This term describes people’s familiarity with your business’s products and services.

The marketing tactics you choose and the key performance indicators applied to them can give insight into what people think about your business, the industry and what they want to see from both.

Your KPIs serve as a gauge to measure how well your marketing is or isn’t working to achieve your objectives. The SMART goal method is commonly used to help define them.

In this instance, your KPIs would need to be:

Specific – Clearly defined goals laid out.
Measurable – Trackable metrics evaluated over time.
Attainable – Achievable objectives you can reach.
Relevant – KPIs make sense for your business goals
Timely – Have an exact timeframe to observe KPI progress

But for now, we’ll focus on the KPIs that make sense for brand awareness.

Website traffic

Tracking the amount of traffic coming to your site is one of the top metrics for small businesses to pay attention to. It shows how many people are coming to your site and also answer questions like:

• – How long did visitors stay on the site?
• – Which pages did they visit?
• – Are they finding what they need to learn about the business quickly enough? Or did they bounce right away?

Several free and paid tracking tools are available to answer these questions and more. Here are a few of the most popular ones.

Google Analytics: Google is by far the largest search engine, and with the latest release of Google Analytics 4, it’s easier to track traffic and engagement through this web reporting tool. And the best thing is that it’s free!

Adobe Analytics: This powerhouse analytics tool measures and reports user journeys across multiple channels and platforms. Adobe Analytics is a paid tool providing more advanced data analysis to create a better experience online.

Fathom: Fathom is another paid tool similar to Google Analytics. However, it prioritizes user privacy. You can track a user’s behavior on your site without exploiting their personal information.

Using these tools reveals the pages that accomplish your on-site goals and those that do not. They also show how people find your business and discover your content.

Search engine visibility

In the early 2000s, many websites stuffed their pages full of keywords to rank higher in the search engines. You were almost guaranteed to increase your site traffic and brand recognition if you reached the top.

Search engines like Google penalized sites for this practice as the internet evolved. Now they prioritize websites optimized for user intent.

Tools like Google Search Console, Moz, and Semrush provide incredible data about which keywords people use to find your site, which you can incorporate into your marketing strategy.

MarketMuse is another tool to create and optimize your company’s content so people can find it online. This software also exposes topics and keywords your competitors aren’t covering.

Search engines reward valuable content and authoritative sites. As you create better content and gain more backlinks, you’ll be able to see which keywords and content are bringing people in.

Social media engagement

Social media is an inexpensive way for businesses to expose their brands to new audiences. However, where many companies slip up is by placing a heavy emphasis on the number of likes and comments they receive on posts.

It’s a missed opportunity to create engagement that turns into brand advocacy and sales.

Some metrics to measure for social media engagement include:

• – Tracking post performance (likes, shares, and comments)
• – Post performance by type (text, image, video, animated)
• – Audience growth (new followers or subscribers)
• – Conversion rates (website or landing page visits, email subscribers, etc.)

Social media business accounts from the largest platforms provide basic analytics about follower engagement. It might not be very robust, but it does provide a starting point to understand how your content resonates.

If you want all-in-one scheduling and reporting tools, Social Sprout and Hootsuite are among those helping businesses build their communities through content.

Content reach and engagement

When your company’s video or blog post goes viral, it reaches a broader audience, leading to more exposure and brand awareness.

A couple of metrics to evaluate when measuring your content reach is to look at the number of times your blog post, video, or other digital media was viewed or shared.

Next, you want to see if there was an increase in people taking action to learn more about your brand. This could include more email newsletter subscribers, website visits, or social media followers.

As more people are introduced to your brand through your content, you’ll pull them deeper into your marketing ecosystem.

Partner collaborations

It’s common for small businesses to partner with companies providing a complementary product or service. This practice is an opportunity to cross-promote offers and share audiences. It can be especially appealing when the goal is to expose your brand to a new group.

Tracking the metrics for these partnerships involves a lot of transparency and trust on both sides. Before embarking on co-branded campaigns, each party must establish what the assets will look like and what data they’ll share with one another.

Some metrics tracked for these types of campaigns could include reach, engagement, and referral traffic stats. If you’re on a partnered email campaign, you want to gain access to the list of new subscribers so you can continue marketing to them in the future.

Increasing brand awareness through your KPIs

Exposing your brand to new audiences means tracking the success of your marketing efforts. As a small business, observing whether you’re meeting your KPIs helps you make better choices about where to invest time and resources.

This makes refining your strategies easier and gives potential customers reasons to want to experience everything your company offers. But more importantly, it gives your business a way to measure your brand awareness campaigns and create a path for people to continue their journey.