Your brand's health is determined by reviewing several key metrics that help you learn more about your impact in the marketplace. Let's take a look at a few of the most important brand health metrics.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness is a measurement of how familiar consumers are with a particular brand, including its products and services. Are consumers familiar with your brand logo, key messaging, and other aspects associated with your visual identity?
High brand awareness can lead to increased customer trust, preference, and sales. There are several ways to measure your brand awareness, including qualitative and quantitative metrics. Some popular methods include surveys, website analytics, social media monitoring, search volume data for branded keywords, media coverage, and market share analysis.
Brand reputation
Brand reputation is how a brand is perceived by its target audience, stakeholders, and the general public in terms of quality, trustworthiness, and credibility. Brands with a good reputation deliver on their promises and keep their customers happy. A positive brand reputation leads to increased customer loyalty, higher sales, and overall business success.
Some of the best methods for measuring your brand reputation include surveys, interviews, online reviews, social media monitoring, and media coverage. If you're looking for a quantitative metric, you can also find your net promoter score (NPS).
Brand preference
Does your target market prefer your products and services over the competition? Brand preference measures the extent to which consumers favor a particular brand over another when making a decision. An example of this would be someone preferring Colgate over Crest toothpaste. Both are leading brands, but you can't always control consumer preference.
When consumers have a strong brand preference, your business can expect higher customer loyalty, increased market share, and sustainable growth because it keeps your existing customers coming back for more.
You can measure brand preference with surveys, focus groups, conjoint analysis, market share analysis, share of voice, and sales data.
Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty is similar to brand preference. What makes them different is that brand loyalty is a measurement of which customers consistently shop with your brand instead of the competition because they have a stronger emotional attachment to it.
Building strong brand loyalty leads to higher customer retention rates, higher lifetime values, and a more sustainable competitive advantage.
You can measure brand loyalty with metrics like repeat purchase rate, customer retention rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate, and surveys.
Tips for measuring and maintaining your brand's health
Every business should measure brand health because it encompasses so many different metrics that affect bottom lines and overall business success. Here are some of the best ways to measure and maintain your brand's health, even in the most competitive marketplaces.
Conduct competitor analysis
Learning about your competitors can help you determine your own brand health. A healthy brand isn't necessarily more successful or better than the competition, but it should have positioning within the market that makes them unique. Conducting a competitor analysis can help you learn more about your competition and the overall market and find new ways to set yourself apart.
You can also use benchmarks to compare your brand to its competitors and use the data you gather to measure your performance over time.
Use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods
Quantitative and qualitative brand health metrics can give more details about your brand and how it's perceived by customers. For instance, you can have a high net promoter score that measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand, giving you a single metric.
However, this metric doesn't tell you anything else about your brand perception or the marketplace as a whole. In other words, a high net promoter score doesn't necessarily mean you have high brand awareness since it only measures existing customers.
You can also use user-generated content like testimonials, reviews, and social media posts to determine how customers perceive your brand.
Social media listening can help you learn more about your brand perception. Customers talk about your business online, so it's crucial to find out what they're saying and whether it's positive or negative. Many marketing and social media tools allow you to track mentions, hashtags, and keywords associated with your brand.
Once you find brand mentions, you can begin tracking them and ranking them or organizing them into positive or negative mentions you can use to learn more about what your customers think of your business and its products and services.
Empower your business decisions with brand health metrics
Brand health metrics not only tell you how your business performs among the competition, but they can also teach you about how your customers feel about and perceive your brand and give you key insights into your reputation and the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp's all-in-one marketing suite can help you measure brand health and learn more about brand reputation, loyalty, perception, and much more. Create surveys or measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Try Mailchimp today.