People tend to choose what is most familiar to us, even if we only do so unconsciously.

Which means that the more visible your brand, the greater is your ability to acquire and retain customers.

Many factors influence how a prospective customer or client chooses one brand over another, but one thing that inarguably matters is simply how visible your brand is.

We could think about it from a risk mitigation perspective.

The safest decision is often to follow the most popular option. It’s why we have the old saying, “no one ever got fired for buying IBM.”

Today, we might change that saying to “no one ever got fired for buying Salesforce,” but the point stands: the most well-known brand in a space is often the most trusted, whether or not that level of trust is deserved.

Which is why brand visibility is one of the most important metrics your brand isn’t tracking.

What Is Brand Visibility?

Brand visibility is defined as the proportion of exposure a brand enjoys in relation to its competitors and its industry.

It’s a component of brand awareness, which is an umbrella term that describes several different methods of measuring a brand’s overall coverage and sentiment in a market.

Because brand visibility measures, quite literally, how “visible” a brand is to target customers, it matters greatly how and where you measure this.

In other words, brand visibility is something you should calculate on a per-channel basis, not necessarily in aggregate.

You can have a search brand visibility number that resembles a metric like “share of search.”

You can have a social media brand visibility number that calculates your overall brand reach vs that of your competitors.

Unlike metrics such as market share or share of search, however, the brand visibility metric need not be calculated in relation to competitors or your market in general. It can act as a standalone metric, something you benchmark and hope to improve over time.

Marketing91 gives the following explanation of brand visibility:

“If you can recall at least one person whom you see on your newsfeeds daily, that is how band visibility works. All the posts may not be quality content. But appearance is what matters.”

Brand visibility is an important input metric into your overall brand awareness, but you still need to care about quality, sentiment, and targeted placements.

I’ll offer some advice below on how to make sure your brand visibility efforts are actually translating to increased sales and business impact.

Brand Visibility vs Brand Awareness vs Brand Perception

To define brand visibility accurately, it helps to see where it sits among other related metrics like brand awareness and brand perception.

Brand Awareness

At the highest level, we have brand awareness.

Brand awareness is a catchall metric that includes various measurements and methodologies that answer the question, “are prospects aware of our brand?”

In measuring brand awareness, it may be best to …

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