[Video] How to Track and Measure B2B Brand Awareness

Solving the Ultimate Conundrum for B2B Businesses

October 26th, 2026
👋 By Alicia Disantis, Chief Brand Strategist and Owner
LinkedIn Profile

Tracking and measuring brand awareness, especially in the B2B space, is one of the most stupefying efforts in marketing. I've been developing rebrands for 15 years now, and being able to understand if the organization is being perceived differently because the rebrand investment can be a real challenge.

And it makes sense, right? A brand is a living, abstract thing, changing and shifting daily. As I always say, you don't own your brand. You control the activities that influence how people see it, but you certainly don't own it. So how in the world can you track the success of a rebrand?

By using primary-source, qualitative surveys. Surveying prospects and customers, staff, and event attendees provides the opportunity to generate trackable data points and cross examine dozens of different parameters, like demographics, client industry, staff tenure, etc.

In my newest tutorial, I show you the exact survey questions I use to track brand awareness with strong success. You can watch the video over on my blog.

Full Transcript of the Tutorial: How to Track and Measure B2B Brand Awareness

Alicia Disantis: Hey, y'all. Today we're going to talk about something that continues to be a huge thorn in B2B organization side. And that is how do you track brand awareness? One of the most common questions that exists with B2B marketers and business leaders.

You update your brand. You spend a bunch of money on brand strategy.

You introduce it or reintroduce it into the market. How do you know if it was successful? How do you track if your brand is evolving over time in the way that you want it to?

There are several different methodologies to track brand awareness for a B2B organization, but the one area I'm going to focus on today is by using surveys. One of the most underutilized components of any marketing strategy across both B2B and B2C surveying both qualitative and quantitative, is hugely valuable, often very affordable and almost instantaneous in the results that you can get.

So let's dive in to learn how to use surveying to track the brand awareness for your B2B company.

So the first thing we can use surveying for in tracking brand awareness for B2B is immediately after you introduce your organization or you rebrand your organization. And this is in the form of a short, sometimes single question survey that you send out to your audience. This could be your customers, your prospects, or your customers and your prospects. And what the survey says, or what the survey asks of you, is one question.

And that is when you think of company name. This could also be a product name. If you've rebranded a product or introduced a product. When you think of company name. What's the first word or phrase you think of? And you will use an open text box so they can answer however they please. Now, the beauty of this is that you aren't swaying them by having a multiple choice or checkboxes.

You're not swaying them into five different options. You're not creating any sort of cognitive bias. It's truly the most.

Subjective open form option you can have in tracking a brand awareness. So by doing that, you will have gathered this huge swath of single words or phrases that describe your organization from your customer's point of view. Then you can, you know, compare and look at if there's any trends, if you're finding any similarities or, any contrast, and go from there.

Now, the key to doing this is that, you know, what's the point of serving? If you only do it once, you have to survey multiple times. So if you're if you're conducting a rebrand or you've launched a new business or product, you should try to do this quarterly where you survey, your customers or your audience. So then over time, through your marketing efforts and your messaging efforts, you'll be able to see any changes in that single word box or that single phrase.

And this provides really fascinating real time results.

Let's say you launched a rebrand where your whole company, the foundation of your company, is built on the idea of partnering with your customers well, before you worked more as, more of a lecture kind of role where you told them what to do and they did it, and now you're reaching out as much more of a partnership.

Us and them are equal. So the way that the single question survey would work is that you could track over time if the word partner or similar words like that appear in this text box. And that's a really great way. That's that's exceedingly, low barrier to entry to track brand awareness from a primary source method of serving.

Now, the second thing you can do to measure brand awareness, for B2B, is what a lot of organizations fail to do is to look inward and ask this exact same open ended question to their staff. It it's a really tremendous effort to compare what your staff say about your organization. If you could describe your organization in one word or phrase, what would it be?

As it relates to how your customers answer that question, you can very easily start to see a disconnect, especially if you're doing this quarterly over time, in the shifts and patterns of how your customers and your staff, which I call your internal branding, whether they are in alignment or over becoming more aligned or becoming less aligned, which can create a huge problem if you aren't aligned on what your brand values are.

Now, the third type of surveying you can do for brand awareness, tracking or brand awareness is at events. Now, no one likes to be surveyed to death at events, and normally you don't have a lot of time with the attendees. So having a tablet or even a phone, I've done this on a phone before.

A single question: How did you hear about us? What do you know of us? When you think of us, what's the first word or phrase that comes to mind? Using that again, you could even offer them, you know, a coffee gift card or an Amazon gift card. Just for just for 30s of their time. But by doing that, you get a whole different group of people than what you would normally get if you were sending us out to like a prospect group, or target audience, or your customers.

And they're also in a different place. You're face to face with them. So that also changes how they perceive you based on what your event looks like. If you're at a trade show, what your tradeshow booth looks like, how you're interacting with them in the moment. So then you can take this research, this, this primary source material, and compare it to the other two surveys that you had going in to remind you that was the, the client, and the prospect survey.

And then your internal staff survey. And by adding on this additional layer of real time events, you get an even more robust picture of how people are perceiving your brand by using just one word or phrase.

The fourth survey you can do, which I absolutely love and I don't think B2B companies do enough of, is creating an end-of-year survey. Not a satisfaction survey, not a product value survey, but an end of year brand survey where you track how your customers are perceiving your brand. Now again, you can ask that same single sentence, single answer question.

But you can also ask some more, robust questions because these are customers. It's a year end survey. They're likely to have a little more time sitting down and doing this. So you can ask questions about what they like about your brand, what they dislike.

When they think of a competitor, what do they think of when they think of you? What do they think of? Much more robust questions, like I said, because you have them, it's a much more captive situation than a rebrand where you send out an announcement asking people what they think. And because their customers are usually much more likely to spend a few more minutes on a survey than a prospect.

So the beautiful thing about this is that you have yearly benchmarks from your customers on what they like about you, what they don't. Why do they trust you? Why did they come to you in the first place? Why do they continue to do business with you? All of these things that create a brand awareness profile so you understand how the market sees you, how they feel about you and why they do business with you.

So of course, all of this is primary source material. It's all qualitative material. So we don't have a lot of hard facts. We don't have a lot of hard numbers to include in this.

That's the real challenge with brand awareness is that unless you're going to focus on, how many clicks are in an ad or SEO or GEO, you're going to have to rely much more on qualitative research to understand how people are perceiving your brand. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, because a brand is very esoteric. It is constantly evolving day to day.

Learn how to Measure Brand Awareness With 38th & Kip Studio

If you’ve rebranded or launched a new product, don’t wait another day to survey your audiences. Using this framework, you can develop a qualitative strategy that lasts throughout the course of the year to really understand how your brand is being perceived. 38th & Kip uses brand tracking methods like these to lead with data, not gut feeling, during a critical effort like a rebrand. See how we can help guide your organization - and create key measurements - during your rebrand or new company launch today.

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