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Strengthening your brand is one of the most effective ways to keep your campus resilient and prepared for what’s next. Brand equity—the value your brand holds in the minds of your audiences—is how you understand and grow that strength over time. When you evaluate brand equity using social intelligence, you can track shifts in brand awareness and identify the key factors that influence it.
Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity, with the four remaining elements building on your level of awareness. As awareness grows, so does your campus’s market position and demand for what you offer.
This post is the first in a series that explores each aspect of the brand equity framework in depth.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is a reflection of your brand being “top of mind” and familiar to your stakeholders, whether that’s the general public or those indirectly or directly affiliated with your campus.
Levels of brand awareness
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Recognition: Stakeholders can identify your brand or logo, know your colors or mascot, or identify a tagline.
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Recall: Stakeholders remember your brand when thinking about a product category.
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Top-of-mind: Your brand is the first that comes to mind when stakeholders think about a college.
Why brand awareness matters
High brand awareness creates a higher perceived value of your brand and builds greater stakeholder trust and credibility. It improves your competitive standing and increases your revenue generation through applications, enrollment, and fundraising.
Social intelligence evaluates and expands awareness over time
Social intelligence allows you to progressively measure changes to the level of brand awareness and examine the key factors that drive it. The data and insights provide a full understanding of your brand awareness so you can best position your campus for the future.
Top-of-mind. Combine campus-specific data with industry trends to understand how people discuss topics even when they’re not specifically talking about your campus. Examining segments or categories that drive awareness helps identify opportunities to expand audience engagement.
Level of recognition. Analyze how new stakeholders learn about your campus and evaluate where you promote your campus compared with where others talk about you. Understanding if your brand is recognizable at the national, regional, or local level helps you determine how and where you want to be known.
Recall. Analyzing the conversation volume and amount of earned conversation indicates the likelihood your audience will remember and talk about your brand. The more often it’s mentioned, the more your key stakeholders recognize and remember your campus.
Brand preference. Competitor comparisons set the stage for determining your differentiators later in the framework so you can strengthen and grow your unique identity.
Awareness insights drive action
Define a content strategy that amplifies awareness
A medium private college in the East that recently transitioned to D1 athletics had a strong strategic direction but was growing faster than expected. The quick growth created a need to determine if their perception aligned with who they want to be in the market. Evaluating their brand awareness uncovered that people were most likely to talk about them in relation to athletics.
To support their strategic direction, they needed to focus content development on the growth, mission, and impact areas of their plan—underrepresented objectives that needed to be amplified to broaden brand awareness. Ongoing assessments clarified how the content they create influences how their audiences talk about them, and how their awareness changes over time.
Shape an audience-centric strategy to extend awareness
A medium-sized, highly ranked public university had extremely high brand awareness but it didn’t necessarily translate into more applications. They needed support converting their online presence into a greater number of applications through an audience-centric content strategy.
Once they had an understanding of where their audiences talk about them, they were able to prioritize resources. The campus focused on the primary spaces where prospective audiences discuss admissions strategies and decision-making processes to increase their opportunities for conversion. Ongoing social listening is another strategy for extending their brand awareness. Understanding how they’re discussed online empowers the team to deliver relevant, audience-centric content that nurtures relationships and builds brand affinity.
Brand equity framework
Broader knowledge and understanding of your brand awareness prepares you to examine the rest of your brand equity and build a brand strategy aligned with your future vision.
Learn more about the value of measuring brand equity.
