The onset of the internet and its furthering development within the realm of social media has made brand tracking as crucial as ever for creating an effective marketing strategy. The analytical data collected from brand tracking isn’t just a measurement for your brand’s overall well-being, but also provides pivotal information you can use to turn into something actionable.
Whether it’s discovering a new target audience or highlighting your comparative advantage, track key metrics for quantitative data and to make qualitative decisions. Keep reading to see which metrics to track to improve your marketing strategy.
Brand Tracking Metrics
1. Brand Awareness
Have you ever watched a sports event and noticed how much advertising there is? From the player’s jerseys to the screens surrounding the field, lots of companies sponsor events completely unrelated to the sport itself. One of the main reasons companies do this is to build their brand awareness.
This is the metric that lets you know who is conscious of your brand. Two specific factors of tracking awareness are aided awareness, which is when people recognize your brand when prompted, and unaided awareness, where people recall your brand without a prompt. The second is that bit more important as it indicates that your brand is top-of-mind for your target audience.
The implications of a customer’s ability to recognize or recall your brand cues how much your brand is placed into their daily lives. A very important KPI, brand awareness helps you understand what effect your marketing campaign is having on your target audience and also provides insight into where you can next take your campaign.
2. Brand Associations
When a customer sees an ad for your brand’s product or starts reading a post you’ve shared on social media, you want them to provide a positive perception of your brand. So, to track brand associations is to understand what your target audience thinks of you, good or bad, and if their perception changes over time.
For example, The Weinstein Company, despite its size, is consistently accompanied by negative thoughts considering its sexual abuse controversy. Such a blow to the company’s reputation has caused people to think twice before either working with the company or even watch its movies.
If your brand manages to become a giant conglomerate, think of the effect having negative brand association can have not only on your brand but other brands associated with you. Track brand association to make sure people think well of your brand and associate it with positive attributes. If or when things start to go sour, you’ll be on top of it and be able to change your strategy as needed.
3. Brand Consideration
If you started counting all the brands across different industries that are out there, you’d never reach the end. If you stuck to your brand’s own category of products or services, even then you still probably wouldn’t be able to tally them all up. With an excess of brands out there, that means people don’t purchase all of them – or even the ones they’re even aware of.
Measure brand consideration to see what the likelihood of someone buying from your brand is or if they might be actively avoiding your brand.
4. Brand Usage
When a customer has a positive experience with your brand’s product or service, the prospect of them purchasing from you again becomes higher. And more sales means more profit. Therefore, brand loyalty is a very worthwhile metric to track.
When you measure brand usage, ask questions like, “which brands does your audiences buy from?”, “how often they are buying from them?”, and “what their latest purchases were?”
Track and Make Comparisons
While tracking awareness, association, consideration, and usage for your own brand is important for improving your own marketing strategy, take it a step further and do the same for your competitors. Use a tool like Latana’s brand tracker to gather information about your brand and your competitors.
Data comparison is a useful method for your brand to see how it fares against others while also exposing gaps in the market your brand could possibly fill. Also, have the opportunity to learn from your competitors’ successes and mistakes and see what you can also do or avoid.
More than Just Metrics
The data and insights gained from brand tracking in undeniably crucial to any marketing campaign. But at the end of the day, it lets you get to know your audience better. And knowing your audience is what’s going to determine whether or not you can successfully market to them.
As a process, brand tracking is continuous and lets you watch your brand as it evolves over time. Keep up with tracking your brand’s awareness, association, consideration, and usage so you can make better decisions and have a lasting industry-leading brand.
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Interesting related article: “What is a Brand?”