What is Brand Tracking, and How to Do It

 

The most popular brands possess superior brand recognition and awareness compared to their competitors, allowing them to command premium prices and cultivate a more satisfied and loyal customer base.

According to McKinsey, robust B2B brands achieve higher EBIT margins than other brands, outperforming them by as much as 20%. Evaluating your brand through brand tracking provides insights beyond its financial value, enabling you to monitor socio-cultural shifts and optimize your brand identity strategy.

What is Brand Tracking and How Does it Work?

Brand monitoring is a longitudinal study that examines brand awareness and attitudes over a specific period. It encompasses customer perceptions, behavioral patterns, market position, and future growth potential.

Regularly assessing your brand allows you to monitor crucial indicators and identify the driving forces behind improvements. While many businesses conduct brand monitoring studies quarterly, it is advisable to increase the frequency when running frequent advertising campaigns. This ensures timely evaluation of their impact on your brand.

Brand monitoring can be defined as the continuous evaluation of brand-building activities against essential metrics such as awareness and reputation. Utilizing trackers enables businesses to gain a deeper understanding of brand health and make well-informed decisions. This, in turn, boosts sales, enhances returns on marketing investments, and secures market share.

Getting Started with a Brand Tracker

Conventional brand monitoring projects can be highly demanding. However, once you identify the elements to track and the optimal approach for reaching your target audience, conducting these studies becomes more manageable. Moreover, advancements in marketing technology tools have simplified brand metric monitoring, report compilation, and long-term visualizations, requiring minimal manual effort.

1. Set clear brand tracking goals

Before initiating a brand monitoring study, it is crucial to establish distinct objectives. What are the primary goals of the study? For example, you may aim to track the overall state of your brand and evaluate the success of specific marketing campaigns. Clearly defined objectives focus your study and ensure the gathered insights are relevant and valuable to your business targets.

2. Identify your customer base

Identify the target demographic for your brand tracking project. This should encompass the consumer group most relevant to your brand and marketing objectives. It may consist of existing customers, potential clients, and even competitors' patrons. Be precise and refer to your existing B2B buyer personas. This precision enables more efficient study design and yields more accurate insights.

3. Select key metrics and KPIs to measure

After defining your goals and target audience, choose the metrics that align best with your objectives. As explained in the following sections, there are various crucial brand monitoring metrics to choose from. Depending on your goals, you can focus on a select few vital metrics or track multiple key variables. Regardless, all metrics must be consistently measured over a defined period.

4. Utilize martech tools for survey implementation

The survey should include questions that determine your preferred brand monitoring metrics, as well as any other data relevant to your objectives. Design the questionnaire or survey as concise as possible to reduce respondent fatigue and ensure high-quality data collection. Tools like customer experience management platforms (CXMs) make it easier to create and distribute surveys that elicit the desired responses.

5. Uncover insights through data analysis

Depending on your goals, data can be collected periodically (e.g., monthly or quarterly) or through an annual study. After gathering the data, analyze it to uncover patterns, trends, and findings that will guide your marketing strategies and enhance your brand. Martech solutions with advanced analytics capabilities can provide dashboards, reports, and other tools. Additionally, AI-augmented software can even produce natural language insights.

6. Engage in regular monitoring and update your strategy

Tracking a brand is an ongoing process that demands continuous monitoring and adaptation. Utilize the insights gained from data collection and analysis to enhance marketing strategies and make data-driven decisions. It is also recommended to regularly review and amend research findings to ensure their ongoing relevance to business goals. Martech tools eliminate the need to start from scratch and offer reusable templates for a streamlined ongoing process.

Brand impact is often regarded as an unquantifiable phenomenon, making it difficult to measure. However, successful brands go beyond mere customer goodwill and are able to distill the value of their brand identity into tangible metrics. These metrics serve as indicators of a company's success as a brand, and include the following:

1. Preference: This metric measures the number of customers who would choose your brand's product over a comparable product from a competing brand.

2. Loyalty: Loyalty evaluates the likelihood of a customer purchasing your product or other product variants from your brand. One way to measure loyalty is through the brand net promoter score or bNPS, which gauges the client's inclination to recommend the brand to others.

3. Awareness: Brand awareness refers to the speed and ease with which customers recognize your brand. It can be categorized into aided awareness, where buyers recognize the brand when prompted, such as with a logo, and unaided awareness.

4. Associations: This metric encapsulates a customer's experiences, emotions, and connections with your brand. It goes beyond being solely positive or negative and helps to sharpen your brand identity, ensuring alignment with buyer perceptions.

5. Channel recall: Including these metrics in brand monitoring studies can help assess the relevance and impact of brand communications, as well as their ability to cut through generic messaging clutter. It aids in determining the extent to which campaigns influence brand health and whether specific media channels foster greater exposure.

6. Market share: Market share serves as a strong indicator of your performance relative to competitors. Unlike metrics like brand awareness, which can increase uniformly, market share growth signifies a decline in numbers for your competitors.

Understanding the potential challenges associated with brand tracking is crucial. While brand monitoring is an important marketing tool, it does come with its own set of obstacles. The data being investigated can be influenced by survey biases, such as social desirability bias or response bias. Mitigating these biases requires creating straightforward and impartial survey questions that are unbiased towards your brand.

Furthermore, unsatisfactory data quality can hinder the generation of actionable insights. Employing data validation methods, such as data cleansing and authentication, enables you to identify and rectify any oversights or discrepancies in your brand tracking datasets.

To combat survey fatigue, it is important to keep the questionnaire concise and focused. Additionally, leveraging survey logic, such as skip patterns and branching, enhances the customization and engagement of the survey experience.

Most marketing technology tools come equipped with logic templates that facilitate these functionalities. For example, respondents can be directed to question number 4 if they choose option 'a', and to the next question if they choose option 'b'.

In conclusion, leveraging marketing technology (Martech) is crucial for driving brand tracking success. To inspire your tracking efforts, here are a few examples of brand-tracking questions:

1. Which businesses come to mind when you think about <product category>?

2. Which adjectives best define a <product type> that you wouldn't purchase?

3. Which of these products have you purchased within the past X years? (Followed by a listing of rivals)

4. How inclined are you to purchase the brands listed below in the future? (Followed by a listing of rivals)

5. What is the probability that you will suggest brand X to your peers?

Brand initiatives yield long-term impacts, unlike short-term campaigns. This makes brand tracking an essential capability in the toolkit of B2B marketers. Modern technologies, such as text analytics integrated into Customer Experience Management (CXM), facilitate the capture and quantification of brand sentiment.

By allowing clients to provide verbatim feedback without prompting, these technologies enable a clear understanding of their true feelings. With the help of appropriate Martech applications, you can analyze and categorize these comments based on themes, topicality, and sentiment, thus discovering the most relevant and actionable insights for your brand.