The Guide to Brand Health Tracking
Savannah Trotter • 16 Feb 2021
Anytime you feel physically or mentally unwell you seek out the expertise of a trusted practitioner. But what happens when your brand's vitals start to flatline?
Maybe your sales have taken a dip, or perhaps your social engagement has stagnated. While it’s easy to blame a combination of outside factors, from current events to natural ebbs and flows, wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure?
That’s where brand health tracking comes into play.
What is Brand Health Tracking?
Brand health tracking gathers and analyzes consumer data to give you a 10,00ft view of your brand's performance. Think of it as your way to measure the ROI of your branding efforts.
You can use brand tracking to benchmark key indicators like brand awareness, perception, loyalty, and more to understand how consumers interact with your products, their overall sentiments towards your company, and your brand experience.
Benefits of Brand Health Tracking
Discover ways to Drive Revenue
Find out how KPIs like brand awareness, perception, loyalty, and preference impact sales and what you can do to increase revenue.
Unlock New Avenues of Growth
Gain perspective on your brand’s strengths and weaknesses as seen by the market to discover new growth opportunities and areas of improvement.
Align Your Messaging
Use key insights on brand perception, engagement, and purchase intent to identify your ideal customer and market to them effectively.
When it comes down to it, your organization's most valuable asset is your brand. So, you can’t just leave its health up to chance. A consumer's perception of your brand can be the difference between instant trust and skepticism or strong engagement and disinterest. If your brand is unhealthy, it could actively damage your organization.
Even if your sales are trending upward and you’ve effectively captured your audience, tracking brand health allows you to see what truly matters to your audience from a 10,000ft view. This gives you space to clearly identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. And in uncertain or volatile times, tracking your brand's health gives you the power of agility, allowing you to gauge the market and adjust when needed.
Brand Tracking Methods - Not Your Average Check-Up
There are a few ways to gather insights into your brand, but today we are going to center our methodology on collecting data through consumer surveys and existing customer feedback.
This approach allows you to hear from a sample representative of your target audience, and directly see how specific consumer segments react to your brand. Not only can this provide you with quantitative data, but through open-ended survey questions you can utilize Natural Language Processing (NLP) to reveal common themes and sentiments.
Brand Tracking Metrics
When it comes to brand tracking there are a wide array of metrics you can measure, some of the most popular include:
Brand Awareness
A consumer's ability to recognize your brand. Questions could include: “Which of the following brands have you heard of?” or “How did you hear about [BRAND]?”
Brand Purchase
This identifies previous and existing customers. Questions might include: “Have you purchased a [BRAND] product?” or “How did you purchase [PRODUCT] from [BRAND]?”
Brand Usage
This metric determines how often a customer has purchased and used your product. Questions could include: “How often do you use [BRAND]?” or “Which of these brands do you use regularly?”
Brand Perception
A consumer's overall perception of a brand, including its quality, performance, customer support, aesthetic, etc. For these types of questions, we generally use a Likert scale to see how much consumers agree with statements like: “This brand is relevant to me” or “This brand has earned a strong reputation.”
Brand Preference
The degree to which a consumer will choose your brand over the competitors. Similarly, we can utilize a Likert scale to assess how much consumers agree with statements like: “[BRAND] stands out from its competitors” or “I am strongly committed to [BRAND].”
Brand Loyalty
The likelihood of customers continuing to purchase your products and engage with your brand. Yet again, we use a Likert scale to find out how much consumers agree with statements like: “I am likely to purchase from [BRAND] again” or “I plan to buy from [BRAND] again in the future.”
Net Promoter Score
The probability that a customer will recommend your product or brand. This question is simply: “On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend [BRAND] to your friends and family?”
Run the Numbers
Once the data has been collected from your study, it’s time to analyze the results.
How did your target audience respond to your survey? Did they have positive or negative things to say about your brand or products? Do you have a high or low NPS? Keep an eye out for criticisms or compliments that are repeated often- these can give you crucial insight as well.
From here, you can dig even deeper to understand how different consumer segments react to your brand and what they find important. Similarly, filter the data by variables that matter to you to compare and contrast how different audiences feel about your brand and messaging.
Keep Checking the Pulse
After you’ve completed your first brand health tracking study it becomes simpler to replicate the process to keep a pulse on your market. It’s important to measure the feelings of your target audience often over time to see how your product launches, advertisements, events, or messaging can change public perceptions.
Many different factors may affect how often you should run your brand tracking research. If, for example, you simply want to monitor the impacts of your brand-building efforts, quarterly tracking is a common choice. Conversely, monthly tracking may be best if you’re measuring the influence of a new marketing campaign. When current events create uncertainty or volatility in the market (like COVID-19), it can be helpful to track your brand's health on a weekly or monthly basis. This level of frequency gives you data in real-time, allowing you to optimize as you go.
Brand Tracking with SightX
If you’re ready to measure, track and benchmark your brand performance we’ve got the tools to make it simple.
The SightX platform is the next generation of market research tools: a single unified solution for consumer engagement, understanding, advanced analysis, and reporting.
But, SightX isn’t just great tech. Our Research Services team knows all of the best practices, along with some pro tips and tricks for getting the best data out of your surveys and experiments.
Reach out to our team to get started today!
