20 B2B Brand Awareness Survey Questions That Improve Strategic Planning

Asking the key brand awareness survey questions will help you assess where you stand on this crucial marketing metric.

Understanding brand awareness for your company, products, and services is especially useful in B2B marketing. Brand awareness leads to brand recall and brand recognition – all is essential to making sales prospecting and client introductions so much easier. And further down the sales funnel, brand tracking, brand surveys, and other types of market research it makes every step of the sales journey go that much smoother. This is why it’s imperative to be asking the right brand awareness survey questions.

Your brand name is tied to your brand identity. While brand awareness is incredibly important in B2B marketing, measuring it can be more challenging. Your market is more specific than consumer mass markets. Your products and services might be more complex and involve a lengthy, multi-step sales process, depending on your target audience. And closing a deal might require integration and customization, sometimes with third parties.

Why measure brand awareness?

The benefits of measuring brand awareness are well worth the effort. Brand awareness has two parts. First, it is a metric for measuring which potential customers know your brand exists. Second, it is a measure of what they perceive, understand, and believe about it. 

Whether you’re using brand awareness survey question templates or finding a partner to run a large scale brand perception survey, brand surveys conducted on the right target audience can provide valuable information.

Measuring brand awareness provides a baseline for your brand’s standing in the market today. With this knowledge, you can create a marketing strategy that plays off your brand name’s strengths and addresses weaknesses. 

Tracking brand awareness over time shows where your strategy is working and where you might need to make more investments. Knowing the effectiveness of your marketing and brand tracking efforts will help you focus and get the best ROI.

Tableau, a leader in the crowded market of visual analytics platforms, tracks brand awareness with data from professionals that have deep analytics expertise and influence to benchmark against competing platforms and across geographies.

How do you measure brand awareness?

A brand survey is an efficient way to measure brand awareness, both to establish a baseline, and then to track performance over time. When deciding what brand awareness survey questions to ask, consider the benefits of unaided and aided awareness questions:

• Unaided brand awareness questions are meant to discover if your brand is top of mind with clients and mainly measures brand recall. These questions ask what brands potential customers can recall without a prompt or hint.
• Aided brand awareness questions seek to uncover whether your brand is recognized or not. You can focus on customer impressions and knowledge with these kinds of brand recognition questions.

20 insightful brand awareness survey questions 

The right brand awareness survey questions ensure you have an effective recruiting and screening process. Without it, the questions you ask don’t matter. You want to find respondents who are in the right industry who are involved in making or influencing a decision to buy products and services like yours so that their answers are valid.

“We put an emphasis on recruiting the right people,” says Patiwat Panurach. “The brand awareness screening questions we ask are extensive, designed to weed out people who are not in the decision process. And then we take the extra step of performing data quality checks to remove low quality or nonsensical answers. We also measure time spent to answer each question, which is an indication of thoughtfulness and engagement.”

1. When you think of [your industry or product category], what brands come to mind?
2. Which of the following brands have you heard of? [list your brand and competitors]
3. Which of the above brands are most recognizable?
4. Which brands are most visible in advertising, at events, sponsoring programs, etc.?
5. Do you recall seeing any marketing materials from <your company, brand>?
6. What was your main takeaway from what you have seen?
7. Were the messages in these materials relevant? Believable?
8. How familiar are you with <your company, brand> products and services?
9. For each brand that you recognize, what words would you use to describe them?
10. Which brands are the market leaders and why?
11. Which of the above brands do you purchase?
12. What aspects of the brands you purchase drive your decision?
13. Which of the above brands might you consider in the next 6 months?
14. What factors matter to you in your consideration of the brands you might buy?
15. How familiar are you with our brand?
16. What is your opinion of our brand?
17. What words would you use to describe our brand?
18. If you were to tell someone about our brand, what would you say?
19. Has your opinion of our brand changed over the last few months?
20. How likely would you recommend our brand to others?

Tips for using brand awareness survey questions

Measuring brand awareness can become an invaluable tool for your marketing and sales teams, and can help you drive brand loyalty. Here is advice for doing brand awareness survey questions right:

• Survey the right people. Make sure that you find the real decision-makers for products or services like yours. B2B market research services from NewtonX make that easy for you. You need to talk to people with direct knowledge and experience. They should have an active role in using, recommending, and buying a product or service like yours. 
• Structure your survey logically. Start with unaided questions, then move to aided, and go in for the specifics. Use narrow questions in the beginning, then follow up with open-ended ones to capture meaning and nuance.
• Commit to brand awareness tracking. Doing a single survey can provide a point-in-time view, but you will miss out on the real value if you don’t track brand awareness growth over time. You’ll know what is working and will be able to report the ROI your marketing is generating.

Asking the right people is as important as asking the right questions

The right brand awareness survey questions can uncover valuable information and help you establish brand loyalty if you talk to the right audiences. Ask the right types of questions, from  customer experience survey questions, message testing survey questions, brand perception survey questions, and more, with NewtonX. Contact us today if you have any questions about brand awareness and how tracking it can help your business.