Brand tracking best practices for your brand’s health

Customers expect quality experiences, consistent engagement, and shared values with reliable companies. According to Edelman, 81% of consumers say they must trust a brand before spending money on a product or service. 

Maintaining your brand’s relevance to your customers requires constant brand tracking to keep it relevant. Learn how effective brand tracking best practices can improve customer loyalty, help your business thrive, and give you an edge over competitors.

What is Brand Health?

Brand health refers to a set of metrics measuring how people perceive your brand, goods and services, public reputation, and communications. You can use it to discover your brand’s popularity with its customers and how they enjoy your brand.

It also includes insights into the effectiveness of your brand, such as: 

• Impact of your brand on your business growth
• Reliability of your brand
• Your brand’s connection with its customers
• The strength of your brand compared to your competitors

You can use brand tracking studies to help you gain insights into whether your brand is flourishing or failing with its intended audience. Brand tracking techniques provide insight into any issues with your brand before they potentially harm public perception of your business and let you see where you stand compared to competitors. 

Why is Brand Tracking So Important?

Brand tracking helps you identify any noticeable changes to your brand’s online reputation and awareness. It also enables you to create better products and services by providing valuable feedback on your brand.

If you have satisfied customers, they become brand advocates and loyal social media followers. Your brand awareness increases as they recommend your business to others and respond to social media posts with positive comments. 

On the other hand, unhappy customers may publish negative reviews online and unfollow you on your brand’s social media accounts. Problems with your online reputation may give your brand exposure through notoriety but hurt your business in the process.

What Types of Brand Tracking Studies Can Marketers Conduct? 

Getting started on brand tracking requires using several metrics and tracking them over time through a marketing dashboard. These metrics work together to understand your customer’s satisfaction, loyalty and need for your brand. Brand tracking studies you can use include: 

• Brand Awareness. Brand awareness study measures the customers’ familiarity with your brand’s unique characteristics. It assesses their recognition of your brand from online advertising and word-of-mouth marketing. 
• Brand Perception. This study measures how customers think and feel about your brand compared to other brands and companies. A brand perception study can help you determine any weaknesses with your products and your customers’ expectations of them.
• Brand Usage. This study metric provides a glimpse into customers who have bought your goods and services. Data on brand usage can help identify which factors lead to loyal customers who continue to buy from your business.
• Purchase Intent. The results from a study on purchase intent can gauge the likelihood that people will buy from you within a certain period, such as 6 or 12 months. 
• Brand Preference. A brand preference study assesses how likely a customer is to continue buying your services and products. 
• Brand Advocacy. This study metric measures customer loyalty, which can boost your brand’s value and enhance its perception among consumers.

What is a Brand Tracking Survey?

A brand tracking survey includes questions focused on key metrics that help a brand determine its performance and ways to improve its products and services. Tracking your brand regularly with surveys can give you insights into any shifts in your customers’ perceptions of your brand so that you can react quickly.
For instance, a brand tracking study can help you determine the effectiveness of a new marketing campaign by comparing purchase intent and brand usage. The customer responses can provide insight into how to keep reaching your audience in future campaigns. Tracking your brand allows you to more deeply understand the impact of your strategies and actions over time. 

Is Brand Tracking Qualitative or Quantitative?

A mix of quantitative and qualitative questions within your brand tracking tools will help you understand your brand performance accurately. For example, you can measure customer referrals and satisfaction via a Net Promoter Score (NPS) on a scale of 0-10 to discover if customers are likely to recommend your business. A comparison of the average ratings of the NPS scores will show you how people feel about your brand.

Qualitative questions in brand studies can help you see common themes in your customers’ responses and feedback. These questions can help uncover their values, beliefs, and purchasing decision rationale. It is helpful to categorize the responses into different categories to quantify the percentage of consumers who mention common themes in their responses.  

How is Brand Tracking Done?

A comprehensive brand tracking initiative requires several brand tracking tools. The following brand tracking methods can help gain insight into your metrics:

• Customer Research Surveys. Companies can glean insights into brand awareness with surveys. A combination of qualitative and quantitative questions can provide a holistic view of all your metrics. 
• Focus Groups. In a live or virtual setting, a moderator can ask open-ended questions to a panel of participants. This method can help you receive actionable feedback from your target audience. 
• Social Monitoring. Tracking mentions, keywords, and hashtags relevant to your brand on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter can help you better understand how customers are talking about your brand. If someone mentions you and your products in a comment, other people will likely see it and buy from you. 
• Sales Channel Monitoring. Reviews on platforms like Amazon are essential tools for collecting data on brand tracking metrics. They can give you insight into whether your products are useful or helpful to people.

Improve Your Brand’s Health With Measured

Measured makes it easier for companies to understand their business metrics and track their brand health. Our platform is a powerful tool that major brands like Unilever and Brilliant Earth use to focus on brand tracking research, testing, and insights into their brand to improve growth.

Find out how to get on the right track with your customers and boost your company’s performance. Schedule a demo today with Measured to learn about our customizable dashboard and how you can use it for brand tracking.