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Branding is vital to the growth of any business, and the most patronized brands have better awareness and more recognition than their competitors. This enables such brands to adopt a premium pricing strategy for their product offerings and still retain their customer share.
Brand perception is the difference maker in influencing consumers’ decision to choose one brand over another. The key to a strong brand perception is Brand tracking. In this post, we will simplify brand tracking, its benefits to your brand and various methods of brand tracking, metrics to use, and the frequency at which you should evaluate the strength of your brand.
Brand tracking is the consistent monitoring of your brand’s performance. It is also a way to gauge the effectiveness of your marketing efforts on sales, conversion, and what impression you make in the mind of your consumers and target audience.
Brand tracking is also a way to perceive how the market responds to your brand messaging and understand or know why consumers prefer your products.
Beyond this brand, tracking is not just focused on consumer response or data.
It is a way of monitoring your competitors, helping you recognize new potential customers, helping you spot marketing efforts that are not bringing in the required results, and highlighting efforts that churn in the best results.
Finally, it helps you understand your position in the market space amongst your competitors, all in a bid to help you deliver optimum value.
Brand tracking was a big deal in the past. However, with smart tools available, brand tracking is now a piece of the cake.
Consistency in brand tracking would yield favourable business performance.
In order to get the best result from this effort, here are some key performance indicators to help you gauge your brand’s performance.
Brand Loyalty:
This indicator shows the frequency at which a customer would choose your brand when confronted with similar products in the market. A customer database with records of their purchase over a period of time is a good place to start. Survey questions inquiring into how likely they would repeat a purchase help as well.
Brand Awareness:
This consists of two metrics, brand awareness and brand recall.
Brand awareness is the rate at which your brand is distinct and easily identifiable in a saturated market—recognizing your brand’s message, voice, and overall personality. Brand recall is a customer’s propensity to remember the brand, whether after using a product or seeing a piece of advertising. This depicts how communication from a marketing campaign has impacted brand awareness.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): This refers to the frequency or rate to which your customers are likely to promote your brand via word-of-mouth marketing, otherwise called a referral. It can be measured with questions like this;
On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend [brand] to your family and friends?
Brand Associations: This measures what perceptions consumers form about your brand and what they associate it with in terms of brand image and characteristics. By measuring brand association, you can tell if their perception matches your actual brand personality.
Ideally, your brand target in this regard would show you what makes you distinct from other brands. Feedback from your consumers is one of the easiest ways to track brand association.
This way, you can tell their true feelings about your brand. Adopting the right analytics software would help you group your customer feedback and show insight into which associations are the most dominant.
Questions like: Please share what negative and positive associations you have had with our brand, respectively.
Brand Preference: This easily-achievable key performance indicator calculates the number of customers who choose your brand amongst similar products from your competitors. Brand preference can be checked by a survey asking customers to select or choose their favourite brand from a list featuring your brand and other brands.
It can be measured with a list of tick boxes of your brand alongside similar brands and the question: Indicate which brand of [product] you would prefer to buy.
Brand Usage will tell you how often consumers purchase your product or service. Using tick boxes with your and competing brands, ask the question: Please select which of the following brands you buy or use regularly.
Brand Purchase: This will identify customers who have made a purchase previously. With the question: Have you shopped these products from our brand previously?
Brand Quality Perception: Customers will have different experiences regarding the total value your product offers and how the products align with the brand promise. Questions to check this metric can be tailored to garner insight into consumers’ perceptions of the quality of your brand products.
Competitor Tracking:
Being in the dark about your competition is a recipe for failure. Tracking your brand makes you aware of the activities of your competitors.
That way, you can capitalize on their weak areas and strengthen your brand in those areas where your competitors are experiencing lapses.
Target Audience Tracking:
Identifying your target audience is vital to the success of campaigns and brand messaging—this way, your messaging and campaign align with your target audience interested in your brand.
Brand tracking aids in profiling our niche audience and also collects feedback on their responsiveness to your marketing efforts.
Provides Data On Branding Campaigns:
Tracking marketing and branding campaigns can be overwhelming. However, brand tracking achieves a holistic view of your brand’s health and performance. This, in turn, would help you understand your brand equity.
Provides Insight Into The Future Trends Of Your Brand
Brand tracking harnesses data from the various facets of your brand. This information can easily be analyzed to predict future trends and insights.
Maximize Branding Investment Efforts
Return on Investments (ROIs) in branding campaigns and messaging can be monitored through brand tracking. This way, you are not groping in the dark and can tell which brand campaign effort is yielding results.
KPI Tracking
Brand tracking helps to track key metrics that show how well your brand is doing. This way, brands can narrow down which KPIs are actually relevant to their brand strategy. With brand tracking, KPI tracking customization allows you to track metrics relevant to your overall marketing strategy.
Brand tracking is essential for a holistic marketing strategy. All the other aspects of marketing have readily available tools to measure their marketing efforts. With brand tracking, brand managers can help have a 360 view of your brand.
Customers are the lifeblood of any organization, and their feedback is vital to ensure the continued success of a brand. Brand tracking collates feedback from customers, analyzes it, and pinpoints their areas of concern. These bits of information help to further hone your business to meet the customer’s real needs.
With brand tracking, businesses can now achieve the following;
Consistent brand tracking in real-time aids in nipping problems in the bud long before things escalate. More so, with the continuous collation of qualitative and quantitative data, marketing and brand strategies can be tailored to match evolving customer demands.
This increases customer loyalty and empowers you to maintain premium pricing for your products. With brand tracking, organizations can understand the various segments of their target audience, which they would not have had access to. This allows personalized service to clients based on their location.
In addition, brand tracking reveals what customers love most about a product. This can help the product design team in churning out new lines of customer-friendly products that would be a success.
While brand tracking activities might be cumbersome, some methods would simplify the whole process and make it effective and easy to implement.
1. Keep a tab on your category and brand.
This helps you gain insight into how your brand fares compared to our competitors. Secondly, it allows you to measure your brand health holistically. Understanding how your brand compares with your competitors allows you to gauge your overall brand health and see its performance over time. Adopting a mix of metrics gives insights(awareness, recall, and association) and performance.
2. Proactively respond to special circumstances (product updates, promotions, etc.) This method is a great way to feel the success of your marketing activities and help you identify the activities with the greatest impact.
3. Predict trends using a recurring reporting system.
Brand trackers are the most effective when you can instantly action the data, design your system, and set up recurring reports to share crucial time-series data with stakeholders.
Factor 1: What You Are Tracking:
This refers to the specific area you want to monitor. However, most brands focus on the pace and ease at which the target audience evolves from the brand awareness stage to the will and intent to purchase and finally to a buying customer and a loyal one. This phase is usually referred to as the brand funnel.
Factor 2: The Market Velocity:
The frequency at which the market changes is also a determinant in brand tracking. This also depends on the products being tracked.
For instance, market velocity may not affect products like table water compared to mobile phones or similar products in the tech industry. For companies like Apple, tracking might be as often as a new product is released.
Factor 3: The Influx of New Competitors:
The influx of new competition in the market space should initiate new brand-tracking activity.
For example, the rise of digital cameras and mobile phone cameras should have prompted Kodak to run a pre and post-entry brand tracker gauging the impact of the rise of digital cameras on their products.
This would have saved them from going belly up and eventually filing for bankruptcy. The entrance of any brand that directly competes with yours should evoke the need for brand-tracking activities.
Factor 4: The Frequency of Your Ad Campaigns:
The frequency at which campaigns are launched should equate to brand tracking studies. This way, the exact impact of the marketing campaign can be revealed, and you can get insight into which campaign works best for your brand.
Factor 5: Unplanned Occurrences:
Unforeseen occurrences, which are sometimes unpleasant, should prompt brand tracking.
For instance, a bad review or an unfavourable post from a celebrity about our brand, whether it goes viral or not, should result in brand tracking.
This is in a bid to measure the impact on your brand. That way, you can take proactive steps to manage any damage before it occurs. The same applies to positive mentions about your brand. There should be brand tracking studies to evaluate its impact and strengthen its results.
Ideally, several credible organizations prefer to embark on brand-tracking activities annually or biannually. This level of frequency creates adequate time in between the tracking phase to align with their budget planning or allow marketing activities to permeate the market effectively before conducting any brand tracking studies.
Brand tracking seeks to provide answers to questions like;
Brand tracking may seem like an uphill task, but with the right tools and resources and how brand tracking aligns with your marketing strategy, it becomes as easy as a walk in the park.
With effective brand tracking, you will be equipped to appeal directly to your target audience rather than fishing in the dark with expensive baits.
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