How can you measure the success of marketing efforts to increase brand awareness? This might seem like an abstract metric, but it can be tracked. The answer is creating benchmarks. Without anything to measure against, you can’t determine results.

Before you start your new efforts, run some surveys of existing customers to determine brand reputation, then some surveys of potential or non-customers to determine brand awareness. You can ask questions about the company, products, services and you can even include the same questions about your competitors, so you can measure yourself against the competition.

You can also use a similar method to measuring brand penetration. As an example, over the period of a month in a market of 10,000 households, 1,000 households purchased your product, you’d have a 10% brand penetration rate ( 1,000 / 10,000 = 10% ) you then compare these results month over month to see if your brand is being purchased by more households.

You can also scour the web for mentions and discussions about your company, it’s products or services. Keep track of these websites and keep an approximate number of mentions, incoming links and average mentions per day or week. Track this over an extended period of time.

Once you’ve got enough data to measure against, start your marketing campaigns. Then go back and measure the same factors and compare them with the data you gathered prior to your marketing efforts.