How to Monitor and Increase Brand Visibility with Surveys

Brand visibility is a necessity for any company hoping to gain recognition within its field and compete with top players. 

It is increasingly important to stand out among a crowd for businesses, as the ecommerce space is swelling to new heights; the ecommerce sector is projected to reach 4.9 billion users by 2025. 

Ecommerce, in its entirety, is on the rise, as there has been a 44% increase in ecommerce sales in the previous year from the US alone. 

These figures relay the presence of a wide swath of businesses and potential customers in the space. Thus, brand visibility is ever-important for a business to be noticeable by the upturn of customers.  

This article explains brand visibility and its importance, along with how surveys can be used to both measure and increase brand visibility.

Understanding Brand Visibility

Brand visibility is a crucial aspect in the branding sub-discipline of marketing, but it is not a precise metric. Rather, brand visibility refers to the extent to which customers can detect and remember a brand within various environments and conditions. 

An offshoot of brand awareness, brand visibility also concerns itself with those who have heard about a brand and how much they know about it. 

However, rather than mainly focus on recognition and recall, the main concept of brand visibility is the condition of having keen knowledge of a brand and frequently keeping it in mind. 

In order to achieve this, brand visibility also deals with the exposure of a brand. For example, a brand that can easily be found online via organic search has higher visibility than a brand that only appears on organic search when people search for it directly by name. 

As a major aspect of branding market research, businesses must regularly check up on and endeavor to improve their brand visibility. 

The Importance of Brand Visibility

Brand visibility, as mentioned in the above section, carries considerable weight in the discipline of branding. 

But visibility goes beyond the idea behind branding alone, as it is critical for hitting performance-marketing goals. In fact, the object of many such campaigns, such as advertising and partnerships is to increase brand visibility. 

As a facet of brand awareness, brand visibility is often one of the earliest stages in gaining leads. This is despite the fact that visibility is also the objective or goal of many branding and marketing campaigns. 

The reason behind this phenomenon is that visibility exists in two ways:

• Visibility by first exposure
  • Closely tied to brand awareness first steps (building it up)
  • This helps determine whether members of the target market are good MQLs and have the potential to convert

• Continuous visibility

• • The condition of having a strong awareness/knowledge of a brand
  • When a brand is lodged within the minds of its target market
  • One of the building blocks of brand equity, in which brands wield the power of name recognition, leading to overall success

As such, brand visibility is both a key ingredient in improving a brand’s positioning in its industry, as well as a marker of success, in that it fosters brand equity when constantly visible.

On top of this, brand visibility is also necessary for the growth of a business. Firstly, this is because brand visibility is used to gain new clients, which is critical for businesses that offer few products or services. 

Secondly, the upkeep of brand visibility is also crucial for customer retention, as brands that are constantly visible to consumers have the chance to do so in a positive light, triggering consumers to favor such brands. In this way, visibility also factors into a business’s customer lifetime value (CLV).

Surveys provide a source of monitoring brand visibility, as well as a method of increasing it. 

How to Foster Brand Visibility

There are various ways in which brands can work towards achieving their brand visibility goals. First off, increasing your organic rankings via SEO (search engine optimization) is a major factor in online visibility. It is especially important for acquiring new customers, as many customers first stumble upon a brand while searching for a specific product, service or even another specific brand.

Then, there is the visual aspect that is especially critical to branding. This involves logos, company color schemes and visual setups across digital and physical properties. In regards to the latter, some companies implement design specifications aside from the color scheme.

For example, some brands may include or exclude text from their hero images, or in-content images. Others may require adding specialized framing, borders or watermarks across all images. These and other visual factors establish a brand’s identity in such a way that either makes a brand stand apart from others or helps customers associate a brand with visual elements.

There is also the aspect of social listening as a means to monitor brand visibility across social media channels. Social listening involves tracking social media channels for mentions of your brand and product. This grants insights into how strongly your social media visibility is. It also allows brands to make improvements based on the disclosed preferences customers make on these channels.

Businesses can also forge band visibility with media placements. A PR task, these placements have traditionally been earned, but now, most businesses source a PR agency to provide these placements as another channel for brand visibility. 

Or, a business itself may include a PR department that creates content, such as press releases and finds outlets and other sources to distribute the content. This, in turn, produces more digital visibility for a brand.

Aside from implementing these methods for better brand visibility, businesses can advance their brand visibility with surveys.  

How Surveys Help Monitor and Raise Brand Visibility

Surveys serve a critical function in market research, as they allow businesses to conduct primary research around any topic and in any format, should the online survey platform used allow it. 

Surveys help businesses understand how their brand is received and viewed, along with how visible it is. That is because they can cover virtually any topic in one iteration, or be broken up into smaller iterations that consist of several surveys.

There are various key subtopics that a brand visibility survey helps you better understand in relation to customers. First off, you can track brand recognition, which allows companies to understand whether or not their brand comes to the minds of customers when they see their product or service.

Next, there are the related topics of the brand and customer profile. When a brand changes its messaging, theme or image in general, it should track how well customers are aware of this change. Additionally, they should check whether this change has received visibility.

The same should apply to the customer profile; when your customer base changes, even to the slight degree of adding new segments with just one change (say a demographic addition), you should track this. That way, you will understand how to accommodate their needs by changing your messaging.

This kind of survey can also help you track the visibility of any other marketing campaign. For example, you can determine how many people have seen your advertisements, your video content, social media content and virtually all else.

As for increasing brand visibility, surveys that explicitly mention your brand bring more brand awareness by proxy. Additionally, the insights you derive from surveys will allow you to make informed decisions on how to increase your visibility — in a way that is appealing to your target market.

After all, visibility is important, so you must assure that the visibility your business receives is positive. Not all press is good press, so it is therefore necessary to run a brand tracking survey in addition to one that focuses on brand visibility.  

How to Set Up a Brand Visibility Survey

Set up a brand visibility survey by first finding its larger purpose or purposes, prioritizing them and then organizing them into any of the topics mentioned above.

For example, decide whether you need to monitor the visibility of a new company announcement. Or, perhaps you may need to see how visible your advertisement is. Thus, each survey you create should be centered on specific topics. This will not merely organize your market research efforts, but keep your surveys short — a key best practice.

You can also design a survey for general brand visibility purposes, if you do not have a set campaign or sub-purpose to monitor for visibility. 

Then, identify the segments of your target market that you intend to study. When you use an online survey platform, you should be able to target those segments flawlessly. 

Afterward, create a set of questions based on the core concerns of your brand visibility survey. The following includes a list of question examples to use when setting up your survey.

1. When you think of buying a product, which brands come to mind?
   1. Type of visibility question: brand recognition
   2. Answers: multiple-selection, with an open-ended “other” option 
2. Which brands do you think of when thinking about the [industry, niche]?
   1. Type of visibility question: brand recognition
   2. Answers: multiple-selection, with an open-ended “other” option 
3. Have you heard of [your brand name]?
   1. Type of visibility question: general visibility
   2. Answers: yes or no
   3. If yes, follow up with questions on the company 
   4. If no, follow up with questions about a niche, if customers would like products that deal with issues in that niche, etc, then offer your product and ask if they’d like to learn more.
4. Have you seen any of the following advertisements?
   1. Type of visibility question: advertising campaigns
   2. Answers: multiple-choice, must include images of ads
   3. If yes, ask questions about what respondents like/dislike about them
5. What do you think of [company news/announcement]?
   1. Type of visibility question: company changes/ updates
   2. Answers: multiple choice
   3. Many in your target market may not have heard a particular announcement, this question will bring visibility to your news, while gauging customers’ opinions on it.

Gaining More Brand Visibility for Your Business

Brand visibility is a key topic of contention in marketing, as marketing is largely bent on promoting a business in order to scale it. There are various methods businesses can apply to increase their visibility.

Some are examined in this article; there are several others that brands can attempt as a means to accelerate and augment brand visibility. In order to do so proactively, brands ought to conduct experimental research. 

Consequently, surveys are the common denominator in experimental research and general market research. These tools allow brands to evaluate their target market on a variety of brand visibility-related issues.

However, in order to reap the most benefits from survey research, you must use a trusted source as your online survey platform. The strongest such platform uses RDE sampling, offers various question formats, deploys surveys across a massive network of sites, apps and other digital properties along with being able to conduct a survey in 5 easy steps.

Thus, the proper online survey tool makes all the difference in your brand visibility campaigns, allowing you to both monitor visibility, along with raising it.