You’ve spent countless hours putting together the FY’24 marketing strategy. You’ve brought on a new digital agency. You’ve revamped your messaging. And you’re gearing up to lunch one of your largest brand campaigns in company history. But how do you know if all of this work will yield the results you’re expecting?
This is where brand health metrics come in.
Brand tracking provides valuable insights into a company’s performance across various data points, such as campaigns and consumer attitudes toward the brand. According to Forrester, companies that invest in brand tracking have higher customer loyalty and retention rates. A similar study cited in Forbes revealed that effective brand tracking could boost revenue by enabling companies to understand their customers better and customize their messaging and products to meet their needs more effectively.
Measuring brand health should not be taken lightly.
What is Brand Health?
Brand health is a comprehensive evaluation of a brand’s performance, reputation, and consumer perception, reflecting its overall vitality and effectiveness in the market. It is a crucial metric for informing marketing and PR programs and driving business growth.
The role of brand health metrics in driving business growth cannot be overstated. A well-rounded understanding of these metrics allows you to make informed decisions that directly contribute to the expansion and success of your brand. In addition, you can adjust your marketing programs quickly by keeping a pulse on key brand health indicators.
Various technology research companies have emerged as the importance of monitoring brand health becomes increasingly evident. Some frontrunners in brand health tracking include Kantar, Nielsen, Ipsos, and Yougov, each offering unique tools and methodologies to measure brand health.
By partnering with these companies, you can understand your brand’s health comprehensively and confidently navigate the complexities of the modern business landscape.
Brand health insights can also help integrate and optimize your current marketing strategy.
Integrating Brand Health Metrics Into Your Marketing Strategy
Embarking on the path to integrate brand health metrics into your marketing strategy paves the way for better-informed decisions. To harness the power of these metrics, focus on selecting the right indicators for your business, establishing a robust measurement framework, and leveraging data to drive decision-making and optimize your marketing programs.
Selecting the right metrics for your business is the first step toward integrating brand health into your marketing strategy. Begin by identifying the specific aspects of your brand that hold the most value and relevance to your target audience. Consider metrics such as brand awareness, reputation, loyalty, and engagement as potential cornerstones of your measurement strategy.
By selecting the most suitable indicators, you can obtain a comprehensive and accurate picture of your brand’s health, providing the foundation for informed marketing decisions.
Brand Health Measurement Framework
Once you have identified the right metrics for your business, it is essential to establish a reliable measurement framework. This framework should encompass the goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) guiding your marketing efforts.
To ensure consistency and accuracy in your analysis, determine the methodologies, data sources, and tools employed to capture and analyze the data. A robust measurement framework will enable you to track your brand’s health over time and compare your performance against industry benchmarks and competitors.
With the appropriate metrics and a solid measurement framework, you can use the insights to inform decision-making. Analyze the data to uncover trends and patterns that reveal areas of strength, opportunities for improvement, and potential threats to your brand’s health. By actively monitoring your key brand health metrics, you can make data-driven decisions that address your target audience’s specific needs and preferences, fine-tune your marketing strategies, and allocate resources more effectively.
Using Surveys for Brand Health Research
One effective approach to assessing your brand’s health is primary research. The mentioned technology companies specialize in using primary research to measure brand health. This method facilitates a deeper understanding of your target audience by employing surveys, interviews, and focus groups. A brand health survey enables you to:
- Acquire customized insights: As primary research is designed specifically for your business objectives, it yields information tailored to your brand and its unique context.
- Verify secondary research: While secondary research depends on pre-existing data, primary research presents fresh viewpoints and up-to-date information. By executing primary research, you can confirm secondary research conclusions and ensure your strategies are based on present-day market conditions.
- Detect emerging trends: Primary research can reveal trends and patterns that might not be evident through secondary research alone.
Brand Health Monitoring of Owned & Earned Channels
A more detailed examination of brand health involves social brand monitoring of owned and earned media channels. Owned channels refer to your brand’s official social media profiles, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, while earned channels encompass user-generated content, such as mentions, reviews, and media coverage.
To monitor brand health through these channels, consider the following steps:
- Track sentiment: Utilize social listening tools to measure the sentiment surrounding your brand.
- Analyze engagement: Determine the level of engagement on your owned channels by examining metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and retweets. Higher engagement indicates a more active and invested audience, which can contribute to a stronger brand image.
- Track share of voice: Compare your brand’s presence within online conversations to your competitors.
- Identify influencers and advocates: Discover individuals with a substantial following and actively promote your brand.
- Observe trends: Keep an eye on the broader industry landscape and detect emerging trends or shifts in customer preferences.
Analyzing Company & Product Reviews for Brand Health Measurement
Review sites such as Glassdoor and Indeed offer crucial employee and candidate feedback. Analyzing and interpreting this data can uncover employees’ sentiments regarding company initiatives, workplace experiences, and senior management. Although the feedback is anonymous, it can provide a significant indication of your employee base’s brand health.
Furthermore, assessing the candidate’s experience is essential in brand health research. Are candidates unsatisfied with the interview process? Scrutinizing this information can aid your HR team in improving future candidate experiences. By engaging with both positive and negative feedback on these review sites, you can demonstrate prudence. Proactively addressing concerns and acknowledging praise can substantially influence an individual’s perception and attitude toward your brand, ultimately cultivating a more robust brand image.
Moreover, product review sites like G2 or Gartner Peer Reviews are also treasure troves of valuable information about your product. Analyzing reviews based on star ratings, job titles, and industry can give you the insight to adjust your marketing and sales strategies. Additionally, employing text analysis to comprehend the recurring themes that buyers have can help drive product innovation.
Using Sentiment Analysis to Measure Brand Health
Measuring sentiment uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyze text to classify the tone as positive, negative, or neutral. You likely already have access to text data from emails, customer support chat transcripts, and survey responses. Moreover, it is relatively simple to scrape public social media comments and company or product reviews.
Sentiment analysis empowers you to probe the rationale behind negative customer or employee perceptions of your brand, enabling you to pinpoint opportunities for enhancement and tackle underlying issues. Once you have captured and classified the data, you can dive deeper with text analysis, which can offer additional context into specific themes eliciting both positive and negative emotions. Text analysis, akin to sentiment analysis, concentrates on extracting prevalent themes from large text data sets.
To optimize the advantages of sentiment and text analysis, consider the following:
- Identify data sources: Ascertain the most valuable text data sources for your brand, including customer reviews, social media comments, or employee feedback.
- Use sentiment analysis tools: Employ sophisticated tools and software to conduct sentiment analysis on your accumulated data, assisting you in recognizing patterns and trends in the emotions expressed by your customers or employees.
- Execute text analysis: Supplement your sentiment analysis by carrying out text analysis to extract recurring themes and topics from your data. This will permit you to comprehend the factors contributing to positive or negative impressions of your brand.
- Generate actionable insights: Based on your sentiment and text analysis findings, identify areas for improvement and devise strategies to address them. This might entail refining product features, augmenting customer support, or bolstering employee engagement initiatives.
- Keep track of progress: Consistently monitor the impact of your actions on brand health by routinely conducting sentiment and text analysis. This will allow you to evaluate the efficacy of your strategies and make changes as needed.
Sentiment and text analysis serve as invaluable instruments for measuring brand health metrics. You don’t want to ignore this step.
Example Brand Health Metrics & KPIs
You can’t talk about measuring brand health without understanding the metrics and KPIs that go into it. Metrics and KPIs are the data points that you’ll use to determine your progress against objectives. For example, if one of your brand health goals is to increase awareness, the metrics and KPIs you’ll track against will include impressions, reach, and engagement rates.
Using NPS Score to measure brand health
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a useful metric for measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction. By surveying customers’ likelihood of recommending your brand to others, you can categorize them as promoters, passives, or detractors. Calculating your NPS enables you to gauge overall sentiment towards your brand and create strategies to enhance customer experience, increasing promoters and decreasing detractors.
Calculating NPS is easy. You send a survey asking customers to rate the likelihood of recommending your brand to someone else on a scale of 0 to 10. Divide the responses into three categories: Detractors (0-6), Passives (7-8), and Promoters (9-10). Subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters to get the NPS. A higher score denotes greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Uncovering Purchase Intent Using Survey & Search Data
Purchase intent represents the probability of a consumer buying your product or service. To assess purchase intent, you can use survey data or analyze search data to determine the frequency of relevant keywords and phrases. A higher purchase intent signals a healthier brand, reflecting positive consumer perceptions and willingness to engage with your offerings.
For example, if you are a shoe company, surveys can be used to measure consumer interest in buying your shoes. Alternatively, analyzing search data can reveal the frequency of people searching for “shoes” or “branded shoes.” Both methods provide insight into consumer purchase intent and give you an unfair advantage over your competitors in the market.
Unprompted Brand Recall
Unprompted brand recall evaluates consumers’ ability to remember your brand without cues or prompts. This metric is crucial for brand health, as it showcases the impact of your marketing efforts and the degree to which your brand connects with consumers. You can assess your brand’s effectiveness by surveying customers and comparing your brand’s top-of-mind awareness to competitors.
For example, if your survey reveals that many consumers spontaneously name your brand when asked which brands they associate with a certain product category, you know that your branding and marketing efforts are working.
You can also measure unprompted brand recall by conducting experiments in natural settings where people interact with each other. By observing how often people mention your brand in conversations, you can gain an understanding of how much impact your brand is having on consumers.
Share of Voice Analysis on Social Media & Search
Share of Voice (SOV) analysis assesses your brand’s presence and visibility across social media and search engines. Comparing your brand’s mentions and engagement to competitors allows you to gauge your relative market position and evaluate your marketing strategies. A higher SOV suggests a stronger brand presence, potentially leading to increased consumer awareness and a healthier brand.
For example, an SOV analysis can reveal how much of the conversation around a specific topic is driven by your brand versus competitors. It can also help you identify which channels and content types are most effective for driving engagement. SOV analysis can be further broken down into several categories, including market share, sentiment score, reach, engagement rate, and frequency of mentions on social media.
Using Web Analytics to Measure Brand Health
Web analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, can provide valuable insights into your brand’s health by tracking website traffic, user behavior, and engagement metrics. By examining these data points, you can identify patterns, trends, and areas of improvement for your online presence. Some key metrics to consider include:
- Website Traffic: Monitoring the number of visitors and page views can indicate the level of interest in your brand and help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
- Bounce Rate: A high bounce rate suggests that users leave your site without engaging, which may indicate poor user experience or unappealing content. Identifying and addressing the causes of a high bounce rate can improve your brand’s online presence and overall health.
- Time on Site and Pages per Session: These metrics reveal users’ engagement with your content. Longer time on site and more pages per session signify a positive user experience and can indicate a healthier brand.
- Conversion Rate: Tracking the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action (e.g., making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter) can help you assess the effectiveness of your website in driving conversions and contributing to your brand’s health.
Brand Health Measurement Platforms
Measuring brand health requires a diverse set of tools and resources. Analytics platforms, social media monitoring tools, and survey and research platforms can comprehensively understand your brand’s performance, reputation, and consumer perception.
Analytics tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and Mixpanel offer quantitative data on your brand’s performance across channels. They help you track website traffic, user behavior, conversion rates, and other essential metrics, contributing to your brand’s online presence and effectiveness.
Social media monitoring platforms like Talkwalker, Brandwatch, and Infegy provide insights into your brand’s performance on social media. Using these platforms for brand health monitoring can make tracking mentions, hashtags, and engagement rates easy.
Below is an example of the Talkwalker brand health dashboard.
Survey and research tools, including Qualtrics, and Typeform, capture qualitative data on consumer sentiment, preferences, and brand perception. Regular surveys allow you to measure brand reputation metrics like awareness, and loyalty, helping you identify areas for improvement and growth.
Visualizing Your Brand Health Research
Tracking and understanding your brand’s health is critical. It’s just as critical to present your insights quickly to busy executives who may not have the time to peruse detailed reports. This is why creating compelling visual representations of your brand health research is essential, ensuring that vital information is easily understood and quickly digestible.
Why You Should Build a Brand Health Dashboard
Creating a brand health dashboard for monitoring your brand’s performance is the key to an effective marketing strategy. A brand health social media dashboard tracks your brand’s performance across various channels and metrics. Having all this data in one place, you can understand how each element is performing and what’s working best.
A well-designed dashboard consolidates data from various sources, presenting it in an easily digestible format. It lets you track key metrics in real time, identify trends, and uncover potential issues before they escalate.
Integrating Data Sources for a Complete View of All Brand Initiatives
Integrating data from multiple sources is vital for a complete view of your brand’s health. This could encompass social media engagement, website analytics, customer feedback, sales performance, and other pertinent KPIs. Merging these data points allows you to discern correlations and causal relationships, helping you uncover areas for improvement and exploit growth opportunities. Moreover, consolidating data from diverse sources enables you to keep up with industry trends and adjust to evolving consumer preferences.
Brand Health Analysis Powered by Data Visualization
Tableau offers a data visualization solution for creating interactive, shareable dashboards. Its intuitive interface and strong analytical features enable the conversion of raw data into practical insights. Utilizing Tableau’s advanced functions, you can develop a tailored brand health dashboard that monitors crucial KPIs, reveals trends, and supports data-driven decision-making. Tableau also seamlessly integrates with various data sources, making it a suitable option for tracking brand performance across multiple channels.
Looker Studio is another data visualization platform that lets you create interactive, customizable dashboards. Its accessible interface and wide range of features equip you to analyze intricate data sets, recognize patterns, and discover insights to guide your marketing strategies. Looker Studio’s solid integration capabilities facilitate connections with diverse data sources, delivering a complete view of your brand’s health. This all-encompassing perspective aids in identifying growth opportunities, tackling challenges, and making informed decisions that boost your brand’s reputation and overall health.
Toyota: Brand Heath Tracking Study
Toyota’s success in maintaining production levels during the chip shortage was due to its updated inventory management system, which ensured a stockpile of essential chips. As a result, Toyota’s yearly U.S. vehicle sales outpaced GM’s for the first time. The Harris Brand Platform data showed that Toyota saw increases across all components of brand equity from the first quarter of 2021 to the final quarter. This growth in consideration, familiarity, trial, usage, and recommendation is impressive, indicating that more consumers are interested in purchasing a Toyota and are also satisfied enough to recommend it to others.
The Toyota case study illustrates how having the right tools to navigate unforeseen disruptions can greatly contribute to a brand’s ongoing success. Brands should learn from Toyota’s success and look for ways to mitigate potential snags from slowing their production processes to stay ahead of competitors. Overall, the Harris Brand Platform provides valuable real-time insights into consumer brand perceptions that can inform strategic decisions to move the needle.
This case study exemplifies the importance of brand health tracking to measure the impact of real-world challenges. The Harris Brand Platform provides continuous insights into consumer brand perceptions and tracks customer progression through the sales conversion funnel. By analyzing Toyota’s response to the semiconductor chip shortage, the case study demonstrates the benefits of strategic preparation in maintaining production levels and increasing consumer brand sentiment.