Building awareness
Getting people to find out about what you do is going to be a priority, especially if you’re looking to start selling, acquire beta testers, or secure early pre-seed and seed investment.
A great way to build brand awareness is on organic social — basically, all the free stuff you can do on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Across all of these, there are two key metrics you should focus your attention on:
- 1. Number of social followers - who’s following you personally on LinkedIn and on any brand channels you’ve created for your business.
- 2. Engagement - the interactions people have with the content you’re putting out there, including likes (thumbs up, love, support, etc.), comments, and reposts.
Note, you can see all of this data on the individual platforms, broken down at a post level or as an overview of all your activity.
The biggest takeaway here is that things aren’t going to happen over night. It takes time and effort to build a presence across social media, so don’t be disheartened if your numbers are looking really low to start. That’s exactly how it’s meant to be but things will look healthier, just stick with it!
Outside of social media, you can also leverage press coverage to build brand awareness. You can tactically position yourself as an authentic disruptor to stand out from the crowd and connect with audiences outside of your existing networks, by working with journalists to provide expert commentary, industry insights, and a unique point of view. A great metric to monitor here is:
- 3. Number of press mentions - how many times you’ve been included in an article or blog.
Unlike social media, you don’t have access to this data directly, so you’ll have to track this manually through the replies you get from journalists or by using Google News to monitor any mentions of your name or your business.
If you’re not sure where to begin with gaining press coverage, watch our recent webinar for insider tips on the best ways to contact the media, pitch your story, and secure coverage.
Driving traffic to your website
Building awareness is just the first step. The next thing you’ll want to do is encourage people to go head over to your website — your one-stop-shop for everything your business has to offer — to find out more about your products and services. An easy way to do this is to include a link to a relevant page of your website in your social media posts and any press coverage you’re involved in.
So, how do you monitor traffic? Google Analytics (GA4) is your new best friend. It’s completely free and easy to set up, giving you a lot of helpful data about the visitors to your website, including:
- 4. Number of sessions - the amount of individual, unique visits a person makes to your website.
Once GA4 is connected, you’ll start to build a bigger picture of what your average monthly sessions look like, with a graph showing you any peaks or troughs of visitors, which is helpful to map to your recent activity. For example, if you’ve been featured in an article or news story and see a sudden spike in sessions in the days following its release, you can make an informed guess that it was a result of this. You can also use GA4 to see directly where your traffic is coming from, but without sophisticated tracking in place, at this stage, it’s not essential!
Converting your audience
So, you’ve built awareness, got people to your website, and now what? You need to think about what you want your audience to do — the actions you want them to take:
- Do you want them to make a purchase?
- Do you want them to sign up to your newsletter?
- Do you want them to reach out and contact you?
Whatever your goal is, here’s the metric you’ll want to measure:
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5. Conversion - placed an order, signed up to waitlist, subscribed to a newsletter, completed a contact form, etc.
Whichever website platform you’re using, be it HubSpot, Webflow, IONOS, and Shopify etc., will have this information available to you in their own reports and dashboards. Alternatively, you can manually record this in a spreadsheet.
Most importantly, whatever action you want your audience to take, make sure they can do it as easily and frictionlessly as possible — you don’t want them falling at the last hurdle!
Metrics are your key to success
Knowledge is power and with these 5 metrics, you’ll have a much clearer picture of how your brand awareness, website, and conversion activities are performing.
And this is just the beginning. The more data you collect and analyse, the better your understanding of which activities are moving the needle and which aren’t, allowing you to double down your efforts and optimise for performance.
But as they say, all good things come to those who wait.
