Ongoing brand tracking is vital for marketers to prove ROI and evaluate evolving customer perceptions and sentiments. Most businesses recognize the value of brand tracking. In fact, 77% of companies conduct brand tracking and have reported an average ROI of 7 times.
The challenge for most companies is understanding which elements to measure and how to collect reliable, measurable results.
To help get you started, we created this guide to walk through the basics of brand tracking.
Measure the critical elements of brand health to evaluate and improve your brand equity with custom brand tracking research.
Brand tracking is the process of measuring brand equity and health over time. It helps companies meet their customers’ unique needs and evaluate their brand strengths and weaknesses to adjust brand strategy.
Companies conduct brand tracking surveys to gather in-depth and measurable feedback they can compare over time. Brand tracking surveys provide insight into how customers view your brand and identify opportunities for improvement and growth.
Brand tracking studies allow marketers to answer critical questions, such as:
Successfully measuring brand health means paying attention to the metrics that matter, tracking them over time, and making sense of strengths and weaknesses to improve brand strategy.
Here are the five reasons why tracking your brand health is essential.
Tracking brand metrics over time provides insights into overall brand health. It measures how your brand is perceived and its strengths and weaknesses. It also provides signals if it’s time to adjust your brand strategy.
Brand tracking is useful for tracking key metrics throughout the product lifecycle to evaluate the impact of the launch or initiative on their brand and to identify and adapt to any negative reactions.
Brand tracking tools allow you to measure important brand metrics and help you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns and overall brand presence.
By identifying competitors and comparing key metrics, customer loyalty, customers’ preferred brand, and what drives them to continue purchasing from one brand over another, companies can better understand their position against the competition.
With access to a wealth of historical data, you can quickly identify signs of decreased brand awareness, perceived brand quality, and customer loyalty. Then you can develop strategies to help boost brand recognition and make your company top of mind for potential and returning customers.
Learn why brand health measurement is critical — and how to get started.
There are a few different ways to create and conduct a brand tracking survey, depending on what insights you want to gather and the resources you have available.
Below are a few key considerations for building your brand survey to track your health and performance.
When deploying a brand tracking survey, it’s vital to include questions that assess all aspects of brand health as well as the customer lifecycle. As your brand is felt throughout the whole customer journey, failure to holistically measure all aspects of your brand results in a partial view of brand health. This causes gaps in your understanding of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses can lead to unaddressed problems that turn customers away.
Here are some common questions businesses ask to evaluate their brand health at different stages of the customer experience.
Custom brand tracking surveys help to segment an audience and pull specific information on one group’s perception of your brand. For example, a custom survey for 18- to 24-year-olds can ask questions that uncover how younger buyers interact with your brand.
While custom surveys can provide specific answers to companies’ hardest-hitting questions, they require investments of time and money, along with an experienced survey designer to get the questions right.
A standardized survey can reach a wide and varying audience to gather multiple perspectives on your biggest brand health questions. However, generalized brand tracking surveys do not track elements specific to the brand and can miss valuable details that can be gathered through a custom survey.
Learn how companies can get the most out of their brand tracking by first addressing these 5 elements.
Making the decision to focus on a product brand or your overall brand depends on the specific information you hope to gather.
Product brand tracking can help identify where budget dollars or resources are most effectively being used to promote the offering, narrowing in on the product’s unique strengths and areas that need to improve.
Overall brand tracking provides an opportunity to delve deeper into specific aspects of your company’s brand performance, such as awareness of the brand and customer insights on how the brand can be improved. It is also useful for measuring the overall brand health after a rebrand or acquisition to study any changes in customer perception of the company after the transition has occurred.
To determine the right participants to target for your brand tracking surveys, you need to identify:
In addition, if there is specific information you want to gather, segment your audience accordingly. For example, if you want to evaluate the brand of a product you intend to market to millennial users, consider limiting the survey to 27- to 42-year-olds.
Once you have identified your audience, send an initial message to buyers asking for their participation, then send a follow-up reminder to encourage more feedback.
Discover how businesses are tracking and leveraging brand health insights.
Determining how often to deploy brand tracking surveys depends on what’s being measured, how customers use the brand, and how brand sentiment may change throughout the year.
Most companies (82%) conduct brand tracking studies twice a year to capture changes in the market. However, research could be run monthly or quarterly for rapidly growing companies, new market entrants, or companies undergoing a merger or acquisition.
Monthly or quarterly tracking may be most effective for measuring the deployment of an advertising campaign or other timed event to assess the baseline before, during, and after the campaign. This frequent tracking measures the impact of the campaign’s effectiveness and can help identify adjustments that can improve the rest of the initiative.
Annual or bi-annual tracking can measure changes in customer use or sentiment to determine whether product usage is steady across the year; if usage tends to spike at certain times of the year; or the product tends to be used seasonally, quarterly, or monthly.
Find out the optimal timeline for your brand tracker survey with this post
To ensure you are gathering the right data the first step of brand tracking is to build clear goals that align with your company’s needs. Some common business goals include promoting new products or services, increasing new or recurring sales, and enhancing a company's public image or press profile.
There are six key metrics that capture the full picture of brand health. These six metrics mirror the marketing funnel and collectively work together to identify current buyers' satisfaction, loyalty, and feelings of the brand, and prospective buyers' awareness of and need for the product.
Your survey should include questions that address all six key metrics to gain a holistic view of your brand health.
Awareness, the extent to which buyers are familiar with the distinctive qualities of a brand, is key to staying top-of-mind with buyers.
Brand awareness is measured by two factors:
Brand perception measures current and potential customers' perception of an business and how its evaluation compares to other brands in the market Brand perception also helps identify gaps in an company’s offerings and determines how customers perceive the quality of the offerings and their expectations for use.
Prior usage data gives brands a look at customers who have previously purchased their products. Measuring prior usage provides insight into who their customers are, how often they purchase and use their product, and what other products they use from competitors.
Brand preference evaluates customers’ attachment to or preference for specific brands. High brand preference drives repeat sales and increases customer loyalty.
Future purchase consideration measures how likely customers are to make a brand purchase in the near future.
NPS measures customers’ willingness to recommend your brand and products to others. A high NPS signals high levels of loyalty, driving up the brand’s value and improving public perception.
Discover how to identify and measure key brand health metrics.
To get started analyzing your brand tracking results, there are two critical steps: preparing and examining the data.
To ensure that the data collection was performed correctly and without bias you will need to validate, convert, and clean your data.
Steps to take:
Study your brand tracking results to connect metric performance with strategic initiatives, activities, or institutional strengths and weaknesses.
Key questions to ask:
Brand tracking should drive actionable insights, and continual brand tracking can improve the quality of findings. That’s why it’s important to gather updated customer feedback that reflects both internal changes you have made and external elements that are impacting customers’ perception of your brand.
Before you run a new survey:
Discover how Wayfair leveraged their brand tracker survey to increase brand awareness by 52% over four years.
Once you have the results from your brand tracking questions, it’s time to put those insights to work.
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