Beyond Metrics: How Brand Tracking Drives Strategic Decision‑Making

Understanding brand tracking

Brand tracking is also known as brand awareness tracking because it measures consumer awareness in the market and your positioning within that market.

However, it goes beyond measuring brand awareness alone, considering factors like customer sentiment and perception. Brand tracking measures overall business performance based on customer perceptions, preferences, and opinions.

A brand tracking study can help businesses understand their customers and brainstorm ways to communicate their messages to their target audience more effectively.

With key metrics, brands can evaluate their foothold in the marketplace and adjust their business and brand strategy accordingly.

One of the easiest ways organizations can measure their brand health is through brand tracking surveys. This research can help you determine whether consumers in your target market are aware of your brand, how they feel about the brand, if your products are what they're searching for, and how you stack up against the competition.

Why is brand tracking important for businesses?

Brand tracking research can help you determine your overall business performance in a market. By tracking brand awareness and overall health with a brand awareness survey and measuring customer sentiment online, you can learn more about your business and how customers perceive it.

Here are a few of the benefits of brand tracking:

Enhances brand-building efforts

Brand tracking can help you build a successful business by ensuring brand consistency across channels and campaigns and measuring consumer perception to understand where your products or services fit within the market. You can identify your strengths and weaknesses to determine whether you have a healthy brand or should revisit your branding to position yourself strategically in the market.

Helps you compare your brand

With brand tracking, you can compare your brand to the competition and find new ways to stand out. By identifying competitors in the market and comparing similar metrics like perception, awareness, and preferred brand, you can determine what makes them successful and use this information to your advantage.

Allows you to identify weaknesses

Unfortunately, no brand is perfect. However, brand tracking research can help you identify weaknesses that impede your marketing efforts. Then, once you've identified those weaknesses, you can uncover ways to align your marketing campaigns with your overall business objectives.

Essential metrics for brand tracking

No single brand tracking metric tells you how healthy your brand is, especially when compared to the competition. Instead, you'll need to use a collection of metrics to understand consumer awareness, perceptions, and preferences.

A few metrics you can use to understand your brand's health in a marketplace include the following:

Brand preference

Brand preference measures the number of customers choosing your brand over the competition. You can measure brand preference using a survey questionnaire to learn more about your customers. If you find that consumers favor the competition, you can discover why and strategize ways to improve your business strategy.

Brand loyalty

Brand loyalty measures the likelihood a customer will continue to purchase products and services from your brand. Again, this can be measured through survey results by asking customers how likely they are to revisit your website or purchase a product from your business.

You can also measure brand loyalty by tracking your website sales metrics. For instance, you can learn how many customers made a purchase more than once within a specific time period.

Number of purchases

The number of sales you make can provide you with key insights into your positioning within the market. Of course, you won't know how many sales your competition receives, but you can determine the total number of sales in an industry or for a particular type of product using market research. Then, you can compare your sales to the total sales in an industry to determine your overall market share and brand health.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The NPS measures how likely consumers are to recommend your brand to family and friends. The higher the score, the more satisfied your customers are. A high NPS demonstrates high levels of customer loyalty and brand advocacy and an overall positive reputation in the market.

How to track your brand

Effectively tracking the metrics mentioned above can help you determine where you stand in the market.

There are several brand tracking methods you can use to understand your brand's health and positioning in the marketplace. It's best to use a variety of quantitative and qualitative metrics to get a complete understanding of your branding efforts.

Here are the best ways to track your brand:

Surveys

A brand awareness survey allows you to learn more about consumer perceptions. Instead of getting numerical data that you have to analyze without context, these surveys provide context directly from your customers.

A brand tracking survey can include questions about brand awareness, attitudes, preferences, and different aspects of the customer journey and their experiences with your business. Questions can be multiple-choice or open-ended. This allows customers to share their real thoughts with your business.

Social media analytics

Social media platforms enable you to track your brand by monitoring brand awareness metrics like reach and impressions for both organic and paid campaigns.

Reach is the number of unique users who see your content, while impressions are the number of times your ad is displayed. Both metrics provide visibility insights, but impressions don't necessarily tell you that users saw your posts or ads, so it's crucial to measure both.

Additionally, while follower count is often considered a vanity metric, it can help you track your brand's positioning in the market. For instance, you can determine market share by comparing how many followers your company has versus the competition.

Social listening tools

In addition to social media metrics, you can track your brand on social media using various social listening tools or engaging in manual brand monitoring. Tracking brand mentions across social networks will provide insight into how your customers feel about your company. Both happy and dissatisfied customers tend to post their experiences on social media, where they're most honest.

Using the brand mentions you've found, you can monitor sentiment to determine if customers have a positive, neutral, or negative perception of your brand.

Brand listening also gives you an opportunity to engage customers on a more personal level via social media. For instance, if you find a dissatisfied customer, you can work toward resolving their issues in a public way that helps show consumers how much you care about them.

Social listening tools can help you discover brand mentions across the web regardless of whether your brand uses specific platforms, allowing you to uncover new opportunities to engage with and delight customers.

Website analytics

Your website is another valuable tool for brand tracking. By measuring website traffic and acquisition from various channels, you can calculate conversion rates from different types of campaigns. You can also explore trends in your web traffic over time, especially after changes to your business or marketing strategy.

In addition, you can improve your brand's performance by learning about your customers' preferences through reviews. Your website can automatically collect reviews and feedback. By integrating your website with a robust email marketing platform, you can send out requests for reviews and have them automatically displayed on your website.

If you don't want such a public display of feedback, you can collect reviews at every touch point within your customer journey. For instance, you can collect reviews once a client receives their package or after their service inquiry is resolved.

Use brand tracking to improve business performance

Brand tracking studies can help you gauge your business performance by providing key insights into brand perception. Use the results from your brand health surveys to find new ways to satisfy customers and attract more business.

With Mailchimp, you can create a brand tracking study by creating surveys that help you learn more about your customers, their preferences, and their perceptions. Send your first survey today to measure your brand equity. Then, create personalized brand campaigns to grow your business. Sign up for Mailchimp.