Marketing gets asked to grow awareness with less clarity than almost any other function in the business. For example, Sales knows the pipeline target, Product knows the roadmap, Finance knows the budget and Customer success knows the retention goal.
Marketing gets, "We need more awareness."
The company wants "more awareness," but nobody has defined "more" from what baseline, among which audience, by when, or against which competitors.
I get that awareness is hard to measure, but that doesn't make it exempt from discipline.
Marketing needs the same clarity every other department gets: a baseline, a benchmark, a goal, and a way to know when something is off.
Every other function gets numbers:
- Sales has pipeline, meetings, close rates, revenue.
- Product has roadmap milestones, adoption, usage, release dates.
- Finance has burn, margin, forecast, budget.
- Customer success has retention, expansion, health scores.
Marketing gets activity.
Some of those numbers matter, but they don't always answer the awareness question from leadership: are we becoming more known, more understood, and more considered by the people we need to reach?
To set this up, break it down into two pieces:
1. Brand health
This is the weekly scorecard.
Are the basic signals healthy? Are we showing up consistently? Are there drops in SEO, content engagement, G2 activity, review volume, LinkedIn performance, web traffic, branded search, analyst mentions, share of voice, or third-party citations?
It's not perfect, but it's useful. You should be able to scan it and see whether something is off. The report should be benchmarked, color-coded, and easy to read.
Brand health belongs on the leadership dashboard because awareness isn't just a marketing concern. It affects sales confidence, recruiting, partnerships, pricing power, investor perception, and how much work the company has to do just to be understood.
2. Brand awareness
This is slower-moving and should be measured differently.
Awareness probably shouldn't be judged weekly. Quarterly or semiannual measurement makes more sense. That could come through a blind market survey, analyst/advisor research, customer/prospect interviews, or a defined awareness study inside a priority segment. The key is getting a baseline, and once you know that, marketing has something to move.
So here's what doesn't count as measuring awareness:
- A conference "felt good."
- A prospect had never heard of us, so everyone panics.
- A founder searches something and doesn't see the company, so a new workstream spins up.
- A competitor gets mentioned in an analyst briefing, and suddenly the whole plan feels inadequate.
None of those reactions are irrational, but they happen because there's no benchmark. Without a real, numerical benchmark, every anecdote feels like evidence, and the activity that follows detracts rather than builds momentum (plus, it's exhausting for everyone involved).
Brand doesn't have to be a perfect science. It just has to be defined well enough that marketing knows what it's moving. If awareness matters enough to worry about, it matters enough to measure.
BrandThnk specializes in building (and measuring!) awareness, so let me know how I can help!