While it may seem like the least fun side of marketing, performance tracking, data analysis, and campaign optimization are crucial steps for a successful campaign. These give you useful information on your brand’s success in the market and let you know when you’re going in the wrong direction.
But, in order to track your brand’s performance in an effective manner, you need to know which metrics to follow and analyze. In fact, measuring too many metrics, of little relevance, is quite a common mistake, even for bigger brands. In this article we discuss How Can Your Business Measure Brand Performance?
The correct metrics will provide insight into the brand’s performance and will help you make sure everything is moving towards the established goal.
Also, it’s important to understand that each brand is different, so the same measurement strategy may not work on two different brands. On the other hand, there are some high-level KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that matter for most campaigns and you shouldn’t ignore them.
So, if you’re interested in learning more about measuring brand performance and how to define KPIs for a specific campaign, have a look at our guide below.
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How to Identify the Metrics that Matter?
It’s easy to think a Facebook campaign was successful if your page gets more likes or the number of followers increases. However, if you look closely, you’ll notice that these are just numbers and they don’t tell you anything about the brand performance.
To understand if a brand is indeed performing well, you must understand what makes people purchase the product or services the brand represents. After all, the final goal of each campaign is an increase in revenue.
That’s why you need metrics to tell you about people’s engagement with the brand, brand’s popularity on the market, the emotions it creates in people, and more. The right metrics will tell you about what motivates people to make a purchase and how to improve your brand and campaigns to make sure your services or products are among the first considered.
So, let’s have a look at the things you want to know:
Brand Awareness
The metrics for this feature tell you how much your customers are aware of the brand and what it represents. Do they remember the brand and choose to return to it?
In order to learn this information, you’ll need to have a chat with the final customer. S/he is the only one who can provide accurate information, anything else is just assumptions. Now, you won’t have to talk with each customer, as this could take a lot of time and resources, rendering the activity useless.
There are tools that help marketers and data analysts put together polls or/and questionnaires to retrieve the right data from customers using email, social media, or any other channel.
Now, the metrics that help measure brand awareness are:
- Top of mind awareness – measures how well your brand ranks in the mind of customers
- Spontaneous awareness
- Prompted awareness
Use unprompted questions to measure the first two metrics (something like “Which brands do you think of when talking about sports cars?”). Now, the Top of Mind awareness is the percentage of people who mention your brand first (of the top of their mind) while spontaneous awareness is represented by the percentage of people who mention your brand, but not the first.
For prompted awareness, ask respondents to choose the brands they know from a list. Just as above, prompted awareness is represented by the percentage of people who recognize your brand (among others).
Keep in mind: Prompted awareness is the most important metric in this case because it can show how popular your brand is. If it’s low, you still have a lot of work to do in this department.
Social Media Metrics
Social media platforms are amazing for increasing brand awareness and engagement. Furthermore, they are gold mines for analyzing brand performance because here is where your real-life customers meet and chat, share impressions and express opinions.
So, the data they collect can easily give you an idea on several important KPIs, such as:
Engagement with the Brand
Every platform allows users to engage with the content by either reacting to a post or commenting on it. This shows engagement and tells you that people are interested and challenged. Furthermore, it’s easy to identify the content that doesn’t drive engagement and lets you know where to cut your losses and change direction.
Facebook and Twitter are particularly insightful when it comes to engagement, due to their detailed analytics platform that provides information on how each of your posts performed, engagement wise.
Brand Mentions
It’s a fantastic thing to have people chatting about your brand but it’s even better when you can chime in. Furthermore, mentions are a valuable metric that shows the brand is popular and in-demand. It also gives you the opportunity to understand customers’ wishes and desires in direct correlation with the brand.
The bad news is that most platforms won’t notify you about mentions. Sure, Facebook will tell you when someone tagged you and Instagram has hashtags, but these aren’t entirely accurate. That’s why specialists use third-party platforms (such as Netbase and Brand24) that help obtain the necessary metrics without spending hours digging through data.
Reach
This metric shows how far your brand has reached within and outside the target audience. It shows if the content you post is interesting enough to be shared with other people, thus creating a viral campaign and increasing brand awareness and popularity.
Facebook is great at providing this information, but you can also use third-party tools.
SEO Metrics
Search Engine Optimization is not something you do once, and you’re done with it. It’s actually a wonderful example of how the right metrics can help marketers improve site performance and drive better results.
The Google Analytics platform is a fantastic free tool to use in order to measure your site’s visibility and performance. Besides the regular metrics that show users’ interaction with the site, Analytics also provides information on goals reached, user retention, sales funnel efficiency and more.
Even the metrics for site performance are important because a more visible site means that the brand is in the spotlight as well. Metrics such as Bounce Rate or Avg. Time on Page show users’ interest towards the content that represents the brand.
Alexa & BuzzSumo
These two globally available platforms provide an accurate depiction of your site’s position on the web and power of influence.
While Alexa Ranking doesn’t say much about the performance of the brand, you can still use the metrics to understand its power and popularity among other brands. After all, your site’s position in Alexa is fueled by your visitors’ actions on the site.
BuzzSumo, on the other hand, tells you about the power of influence your content has. It does this by comparing both your site and social media activity with other similar brands, thus offering a bigger picture. You may even find out that your brand is an influencer, which is a game-changing feature!
Purchase Power
The sales volume and value are two metrics that let you know right away if your brand is performing well on the market. If the sales increase and people don’t drag around looking for a discount, it’s a clear sign that your services/products are in demand among the target audience.
However, before you celebrate the power of your brand, first make sure you know why the sales have gone up. This is important because there may be other contributing factors that have nothing to do with the brand (such as an improved distribution channel).
Wrap Up
The metrics mentioned above are useful in most cases since they try to capture the behavior of the target audience towards the brand. Of course, they can be adapted and fine-tuned to get accurate results and it’s highly recommended that you look for brand-specific metrics as well.
Find those features that help you stand out from the crowd and devise strategies to measure their effect on sales and awareness. Overall, it takes time, patience and a detail-oriented mind to pierce the meaning metrics provide, but once this happens, the data will drive you to the right path.
We hope this article abaout How Can Your Business Measure Brand Performance? has helped and be sure to drop your comments below.
Author Bio
Danielle Canstello is part of the content marketing team at Pyramid Analytics. They provide enterprise-level analytics and business intelligence software. In her spare time, she writes around the web to spread her knowledge of marketing, business intelligence, and analytics industries.