Being able to know and understand the mind of the consumer is the ultimate goal for any brand. Knowing what your customers think of you, how they feel about your brand, and whether your marketing efforts are working the way you intended are all questions that every brand would like to have answered. And that’s where brand tracking comes in.
Brand tracking is an essential tool because it allows brands to measure their brand’s overall health, changes in brand perception, impacts of marketing campaigns, and the ROI of their overall marketing efforts while identifying trends, strengths and weaknesses, and opportunities.
Let’s look at all of these concepts in a little bit more detail to see how you can utilize brand tracking for your own brand and the benefits you can gain from it. At the end of the day, without the feedback of your consumers, you would have no chance of optimizing your brand to serve them better and to grow in the market.
But before we dive into that, let’s look at what brand tracking is.
What is brand tracking?
Brand tracking is a method of gathering and analyzing data to determine your brand’s health and performance over time, following 6 key metrics: Awareness, Impression, Prior Usage, Preference, Purchase Intent, Net Promoter Score (NPS)®
By regularly collecting data on these 6 key metrics, you can see how your brand performs in the marketplace, how you compare against your competitors, or whether your marketing efforts are yielding the results you want.
Having that kind of real-world data about your brand’s performance is a critical tool in determining how to adjust or enhance your marketing strategies, and ultimately your overall brand strategy, to give your brand the best chance to succeed in the marketplace.
How is brand tracking done?
Brand trackers mostly consist of various types of surveys to get opinions from consumers.
The surveys can be designed in the form of online questionnaires or in-person focus groups, but the end-goal is the same: get insight into what your consumers think and feel about your brand.
The costs would ultimately vary between the different mediums, but so would the type of consumer. Therefore it is an important factor to consider in determining which type of consumer you need to target through which medium.
In-person focus groups would require more manpower and a lot of organization to facilitate, whereas an online survey on Facebook, for example, would require much less investment, time, and effort. Both of these would be important for brands to pursue to get a better data set to work with when analyzing and basing future brand and marketing strategies.
Why is brand tracking so important?
A big part of a brand’s success is its ability to gain consumers’ trust and loyalty and either set trends for them to follow or to adapt to their needs and the needs of the marketplace.
The only way to adapt to the needs of your customers is to have a clear idea of what they think of you, what they need from you, why they prefer you or your competitors, and what needs they have that are not being fulfilled.
Measuring brand health
Brand tracking will help you determine your overall brand health and how well your brand is performing over time, compared to past performance.
This is important for the same reason that you would regularly go for a check-up at your doctor or local hospital. You won’t undergo in-depth investigations, but rather just a general check to see if there are anything abnormal or slight changes in your overall health, which would then indicate a bigger problem.
Brand tracking is essentially the same thing. Once a change in the expected results is detected, a more in-depth analysis would be ordered to find the exact nature of the problem and remedied as soon as possible.
Measuring changes in brand perception
Brand perception is an important factor in any brand’s success, and you want to maintain a positive brand image at all times.
Brand tracking can help to identify changes in how customers perceive your brand, whether positive or negative and identify the need for further analysis to determine the exact nature of the problem.
Measuring the impact of a marketing campaign
While brands invest immense amounts of money on marketing campaigns to sell products or create brand awareness, determining the success and impact of those campaigns is equally important.
Brand tracking can help measure the success and impact of a particular marketing campaign and identify areas of improvement to be incorporated in future efforts.
You can also check out my article on why experiential marketing is so powerful for businesses, specifically the section on “how the success of experiential marketing can be measured?”
Measuring ROI of your overall marketing efforts
Brand tracking is also a powerful tool in measuring the return on investment of a brand’s overall marketing efforts. This relates to the 6 key metrics I mentioned earlier, which is a direct result of your overall marketing efforts.
This can also be particularly useful to help fine-tune your overall marketing efforts to maximize your ROI and spend more on areas that yield the best results while working on better strategies for other areas that are lagging.
Identify trends
Brand tracking also helps you to identify trends, whether positive or negative.
Being able to identify a negative trend early on can make a huge difference in how easy it would be to rectify the issues and move on or not. Trends tend to develop over time, and leaving a negative trend to worsen could be detrimental to a brand and very expensive to rectify once it has been left for too long.
In the same breath, identifying positive trends can be greatly beneficial for identifying the areas to invest more in the short term to boost or kick-start your brand growth.
Identify brand strengths & weaknesses
Brand tracking also helps identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace or within a certain area/niche.
Knowing where your brand is underperforming and over-performing is extremely valuable data in determining how to adjust your marketing strategy or particular marketing campaigns to optimize your brand’s performance.
Identify brand opportunities
Brand tracking and in-depth analysis of the data can give you the best indication of your brand’s short or long-term opportunities.
Identifying short-term opportunities can be very useful for brands to invest in and created quick short-terms gains on competitors, which could ultimately boost the brand long term.
Identifying long-term opportunities is equally important for brands to invest in and form part of your overall long term brand strategy.
Conclusion
With an important and effective tool like brand tracking, if done correctly, it is no wonder that brands are spending vast amounts of time, effort, and money on brand trackers to get insight into their consumers’ minds.
Feel free to reach out to me if you are interested in setting up a brand tracker or brand tracking system for your brand and we can discuss all the options in more detail.
