Building a strong brand image helps you accelerate your sales pipeline. But how do you set the right KPIs to measure growth?
For a brand that wants to scale, it makes sense to invest time and resources toward your market presence. Having your brand appeal to a wide audience may seem tough to begin with. However, studies highlight that 81% of buyers will purchase from a brand they trust. Brands can leverage tracking to gauge how well the brand performs among the target audience.
It keeps your brand’s health in check, helping you understand how your customers perceive your business and their patterns of purchasing your offerings. A solid brand tracking shows you what has worked well and what requires improvement. Popular brands have established a strong brand identity by fostering awareness and more loyal customers. 77% of marketing leaders believe branding promotes sustained growth. To become a strong brand, you must understand how this powerful tool can be leveraged in your favor.
Why consider tracking your brand?
Effective brand tracking allows you to identify factors that positively impact your sales cycle. Using the data derived, you can predict the potential threats and opportunities. Optimizing your overall marketing strategy is another key highlight of brand tracking.
It is equally useful whether you are starting up or have successfully established your brand voice. Brand tracking helps you gather customer-centric data, including their feedback. Such details give you a better idea of what your target audience thinks of your brand and its products/services, how they benefitted, and what challenges (if any) need attention.
You can also benefit from this approach by testing strategies, watching out for competitors and what they are up to, and performing a comparative analysis. These enable you to determine your strengths and uncover new opportunities. When you continuously track your brand, it allows you to assess its performance over some time. The good thing about real-time tracking is the scope to flag issues before they become a problem.
With the booming tech landscape, customer engagement with your brand can happen across various channels. When you integrate the right brand tracking tools, you can assimilate data with KPIs relevant to brand awareness and preference among a target audience. The key significance of brand tracking is to identify trends and acquire data-driven insights that uncover potential threats and opportunities in the market.
Use cases of brand tracking
Let’s look at the top three use cases of brand tracking
Understanding your brand’s performance
You can utilize metrics to track shifts in customer perceptions and evaluate the ongoing trends that can impact your brand’s performance. This approach lets you tweak your marketing strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
Finding out your potential threats and opportunities
Brand tracking brings you closer to analyzing changes in customer preferences and awareness. You will tap into the competitive brands that can impact your performance and growth. Once you have these details in place, you can proactively address the roadblocks, make the most of the new opportunities, and protect your brand reputation.
Optimizing your marketing efforts
Since brand tracking provides data-driven insights, it optimizes marketing strategy and allocates budgets accordingly. It makes the marketing activities behind brand growth clear. You can allocate your resources to the initiatives likely to create a large impact and move the audience.
The Metrics for Measuring Brand Tracking
Measuring your brand health with a tracking tool is a way to understand the commercial value of your brand while recording changes and optimizing your strategy. While doing so, you can decide on a timeline for tracking performance efficiency. If you are running a few ad campaigns, it’s a good idea to have more frequent analyses.
You need to measure your brand regularly. This will make it clear the metrics that work best for you over time, enabling you to identify the scope for improvement. However, if you’re launching new advertising campaigns more regularly than this, it’s a good idea to increase the frequency of metric analysis. This allows you to see how they’re contributing to your brand.
Brand awareness
It’s a perfect KPI to measure how many customers know your brand and its offerings. The brand awareness metric is also a reflection of your brand’s marketing efforts toward connecting with your audience. When you can foster awareness, it wins audience trust and ultimately, boosts the sales cycle.
Brand recall
This metric stems from the lasting impression of your brand among your target customers. When that happens, they can remember your brand when prompted or when they think about a specific pain point. With the help of brand recall, you can understand the depth of your brand positioning and the efficacy with which the brand message is retained in the audience. It promotes greater awareness and holds the potential to influence purchase decisions.
Brand consideration
The B2B landscape is highly competitive. Your customers will probably check several options before purchase decision. Keeping tabs on brand consideration will help you assess how potential customers perceive your brand. It also offers the benefit of crafting marketing strategies to increase the chance of being considered for purchase.
Brand preference
There are so many brands in the market and more than one could be offering similar solutions or products as your brand. Your target customers may be weighing these competitors as potential options. Brand preference offers clarity on the chance of them choosing your brand. It gives you an idea about the competitor’s position and your brand. Brand preference also sheds light on the factors that can influence customers’ purchase decisions.
Brand loyalty
To think of it, brand loyalty is the ultimate goal for every brand. If there is brand loyalty, customers are likely to keep choosing your solution or product. The brand loyalty metric gives you an idea of the probability of customers to continue purchasing from your brand. If it is strong, the chances of customers returning for purchase is quite high. This metric is perfect for eliminating doubts about whether a client is there for the long haul or only temporarily. Moreover, you can receive an estimate of the proportion of customers likely to purchase again from you.
Brand associations
As customers continue to choose your brand, they may form opinions and create a perception about what you stand for. The brand associate metric helps you see whether the brand image in the market aligns with how you want to portray it. However, the targets should be achievable, allowing you to measure what makes you unique. Ensure that your strong points are highlighted and if not, there is time to make that change. It’s all about conveying the uniqueness of your brand and letting the customers know your values. A way to execute this could be to measure associations through open-text feedback, which gives you an accurate picture of how your audience feels about the brand and what connects them. You can dive deep into the negative and positive associations and then work on having more positives.
Brand usage
Your brand is out there and you have a fairly decent number of customers. But how do you calculate their dependency on your brand? This metric will give you a clear picture of how often customers buy your products or services. You can add questionnaires or surveys on your website or purchase page to track user frequency.
Best practices for brand tracking
Although brand tracking may seem like a complicated marketing activity, it is worth your time and effort. This step-by-step guide will help you develop a complete brand tracking report.
1. Define your goals
Setting clear objectives is the starting point for a smooth brand-tracking experience. Focus on improving your brand identity or calculating the ROI from a particular campaign. The idea is to utilize these goals as a roadmap for choosing the right metrics. Your KPI must align with the business objectives and help attain the desired results.
2. Select Your Brand Tracker
Once you have identified your objectives, the next step is to pick the methodology you’ll go by. You may supplement the brand tracking studies with questionnaires, interviews, and digital analytics to collect relevant data. Different KPIs will require different brand tracking tools, thereby providing relevant data. While making the selection, verify whether it supplies the information to calculate these metrics.
3. Collect and Analyze Data
Assessing your brand performance data is a key benefit of implementing tracking. Use the tools that align with your brand to process and download data. As you conduct the analysis, stay tuned to the trends and patterns you observe in the information. You may be surprised to stumble upon some valuable insights.
4. Monitor Continuously and Adapt
Tracking brand performance with metrics is futile if you miss adapting. You can easily accomplish this by setting up automated tools for collecting real-time data. It’s advisable to review these metrics and understand the emerging trends or shifts in customer behavior. The findings revealed in the data can serve as a guide for developing new strategies. But you must be willing to adjust your approach as and when needed.
5. Report Findings and Take Action
And we come to the final step of brand tracking— report what you learned and implement insights-driven actions. To make the most of this step, focus on creating clear, concise reports highlighting metrics and trends. Create a visually appealing report by adding elements, such as charts and graphs for a quick overview of complex data. These insights will drive your next strategic action plan. Don’t forget to measure the impact of these actions on your brand’s overall performance.
Summing up
Branding is all about making an impact on your target audience. This requires tracking how your brand is performing every now and then. Utilize the right metric for getting clarity on how popular your brand is and how often customers purchase. Such details are important to help you understand brand positioning. The insights gained from brand tracking will guide you to making data-driven decisions that optimize your marketing efforts and allocate your budgets more effectively. By understanding which marketing activities drive the most significant improvements in brand performance, you can focus your resources on the most impactful initiatives, ensuring the best possible return on investment.
