Measure and Track Your Brand Health
This article is part of a series about the core services Cheek Marketing & Insights offers. In it, we provide some basic details about the challenges we solve, the techniques we might use, and the general results you can expect. Since every situation is different, please get in touch if this sparks your interest. We’ll discuss your circumstances, and how we can help.
Why You Need to Measure Your Brand Health
Brand health is a catch-all term for a collection of factors that influence a business’ ability to meet its goals. There are many attributes we could track. For example: brand awareness, brand preference, and brand reputation. Think of it like the vital signs, blood tests, and other measures a doctor checks when you go for a physical exam.
Brand metrics are rarely business goals in themselves. But taken together, brand measures often suggest ways to drive bottom line objectives like sales, market share, and profit. For that reason, many successful brands measure and track their brand health over time.
Our Brand Tracking Process
This is an overview of how we measure brand health:
Choose Key Metrics
Choosing what metrics to track is key to the rest of the process. Some choices are universal, but some will likely depend on your industry, business model, etc. Following is a list of some common metrics:
- Awareness: are consumers aware your brand exists and offers the products and services they desire?
- Sentiment: how positive or negative do they feel about your brand?
- Associations: what qualities or things do consumers associate with your brand?
- Consideration: are you among the brands they are thinking about buying?
- Knowledge: do consumers know key information about your brand and products?
- Preference: do they prefer your products?
- Loyalty: how likely are customers to buy again?
- Sharing: how likely are they to discuss or recommend your product to others?
Plan and Conduct Research
With a list of metrics to test, we must choose methods to test them, and create survey questionnaires, discussion guides, analytics queries, etc.
The first consideration in choosing research methods is what will most effectively measure the brand KPI’s in question. Some general tools at our disposal include: online surveys, focus groups, interviews, syndicated brand tracking platforms, and social analytics platforms. Each of these has strengths and weaknesses, depending on the type of information sought.
The second consideration is what scale is needed, and what resources are available. We are consumer research experts, experienced in using enterprise-level tools like YouGov and Infegy on behalf of major brands. However, that may not be right for your growing brand. So we offer solutions at smaller, lower-cost scale as well. Either way, we stand by the quality and utility of the data we gather.
Finally, we consider scope. Setting your own brand health baseline and tracking changes is immensely helpful. However, it is possible to measure the same attributes about your competitors as well. This has the added effect of giving you competitive benchmarks, so many brands choose to do so.
After creating a research plan and all necessary materials, we field all studies, analyze the data, and package the results into a concise report.
Implement an Action Plan
Knowledge is worthless without action. So once we have established a baseline for your brand health, the next step is to make and implement recommendations. We will create an action plan that will drive brand health improvements in line with your business goals and marketing strategy. Then we’ll work with your employees to implement the changes, or coordinate our own team of marketing specialists. Finally, we will setup long-term monitoring and reporting of your brand health.
With Cheek Marketing & Insights, you can turn understanding of your brand health into marketing strategy that gets results. If you want to learn more, let’s talk!