At some point in our lives, each of us has set personal goals, whether to lose weight, complete a marathon, earn more money, or meditate frequently. But what happens if we realize these goals are not easy to reach? Most of us will stop trying to achieve them, but we forget that they serve as a tool in driving progress toward success. The same principle applies to setting brand awareness goals. Rather than obsessing over achieving them, viewing these goals as guiding lights can clarify our mission and bring us closer to the desired outcome. For example, we want to reduce stress through yoga. Setting a goal to practice three times a week for 45 minutes may be over-committing and make us stop trying. We should adjust to just 5 minutes daily and see where it leads us.

An essential aspect of goal-setting for any marketing department or company is to concentrate on a specific topic and improve it through dedicated effort. This forms the foundation of the measuring brand awareness framework. Drawing inspiration from Teresa Torres’s approach, which was originally developed for product-driven goals, and has tailored it to suit our needs in charting an effective direction to follow.

Clear the fog of your goals and objectives.

It’s important to recognize that brand awareness activities alone don’t directly impact business metrics. How people interact with your brand influences business metrics. For example, if they find it appealing and familiar then they’re more likely to choose your brand when looking for a solution to their problem. A brand interaction outcome provides a metric that, in the end, can drive this business need and increase revenue. Translating this need to brand interaction objectives, such as increasing the number of new prospects from mid-sized companies, empowers the marketing team to influence market audience behavior toward your brand awareness goals.

Answering these 4 questions will help to clarify this process:

*We’ll use Jupiter's B2B tech leader company, in the HR industry, with 150 paying customers reached through networking and organic demand, facing a scaling challenge. and Saturn's insurance Market lead at the home Insurance company. Their customers were shifting to their competitors for lower prices — a battle the executives didn’t want to get into. cases from the first chapter as examples of how to implement this part of the framework.

1. Are you launching a new category/product or want to scale an existing one?
   • Jupiter's Answer
     Launch an existing company product
   • Saturn's Answer
     Scale home insurance product (existing one)
2. What is the desired outcome?
   1. What is the financial need the company is looking to fulfill?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        Increase new revenue by $75,000
      • Saturn's Answer
        Increase share of wallet by 12.5%
   2. What business outcome can affect this need?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        5 new deals from large companies (200+ employees)
      • Saturn's Answer
        300 new big-size deals associated with "home insurance" per month. (These deals are the most profitable to the company)
   3. How can you translate it into an accessible objective to drive this outcome?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        Gain familiarity and recognition with HR personas in large companies
      • Saturn's Answer
        Increase the number of new prospects for "family home insurance by 25%
3. Messaging and target audience:
   1. At what maturity stage is your target audience?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        Early adopters. The product isn’t familiar yet, but the solution given is mandatory
      • Saturn's Answer
        Late majority (mainstream). After redefining the target audience as high-income families. It's a known and established category in a higher competitive environment
   2. Does the messaging resonate with them? Does the campaign approach serve your brand agenda/story?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        Yes. The research was conducted to understand their pain points
      • Saturn's Answer
        They believe in the new message they structured, which also fits the brand and agenda. Now, they have to test which message copy resonates the best
4. Planning and reach:
   1. Is this brand awareness campaign part of a long-term strategy?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        Yes. It’s the first campaign. The purpose is to learn from it for further brand activities
      • Saturn's Answer
        Yes, it's part of an annual plan
   2. Considering the campaign media plan and budget, what’s the potential reach for engaged users (as a rule of thumb, each new user costs $2.5)?
      • Jupiter's Answer
        The total activity budget is $75,000 ($25,000 per campaign) = 30,000 new users
      • Saturn's Answer
        Campaign budget: $100,000–40,000 users

Define the goals and their objectives.

After answering the first 2 questions, you will be clear on the main outcome you’re looking for. Write a paragraph describing how your brand awareness activity can impact the outcome (using 3–4 answers as a guide).

Jupiter’s Answer:

The goal is to address the most important target groups (market launch to early adopters) and to make them aware of the company’s values and benefits (messaging). Since this is the first campaign with a limited budget, we want to see if it affects new signups on the platform and get a feel for which messages and channels will be most effective for the next campaign.

Saturn’s Insurance Answer:

Find one solid message that resonated the best with the target audience. Increase the number of new prospects for “family home insurance” by 25%.

Then, break it down into SMART objectives, following these guidelines:

🎯To get specific, consider how you can tell if you’re making progress toward the goals.

📊Is this measurable? Do not debate whether there is a way to measure it (we’ll tackle this later). Just ask if you have a benchmark.

🔓Make it attainable to assess how far you are from achieving the goal based on your research.

🤝To check for relevance, ask if the objective gets you closer to the expected outcome (question 2).

⏲️And in what time frame is this goal expected to be achieved?

Jupiter’s Campaign objectives:

1. Increase traffic from HR personas to Jupiter’s digital assets by 30,000 users (total activity).
2. Start to feel an increase in brand recognition. With the increase in brand search volume (currently, 100 per month) and social mentions (currently, none).
3. Increase monthly marketing qualified leads (MQL) by 30% (current monthly average is 10 MQL).
4. Identify the message (if any) that resonates better with the target audience. This will be the growth base for the next campaign.

Saturn’s Campaign Objectives:

1. Uplift of 25% on “Saturn Home Insurance” search terms and social mentions.
2. 1.5K monthly users visit the “home insurance” company page and choose the “family insurance quote.”
3. Identify the message (if any) that resonates better with the target audience. This eventually will be used as the main product slogan.

Nail your brand awareness goals and objectives

Hey, we totally get it! Diving into this requires some planning and thinking, and it can feel overwhelming, which might put you off trying it. But no worries, we’ve got a cool approach that’ll help you make it happen. Let’s set some minor habits over the next 2 weeks.

In the first week, take just 7 minutes each day to list 2-3 colleagues in the company who can assist in the process and point them to parts of the article where their knowledge is useful. Then, in the second week, give each step a go every day, even if it’s just part of it. Breaking this part into small steps makes it much more digestible and even fun. Give it a try! Best-case scenario, you’ll have clear goals for measuring your brand awareness effort.

After the goals and objectives are all set, we can determine the KPIs that will be used to monitor different activities—all this and more in the next part of the framework.