According to a report by McKinsey & Co., brands with solid identities outperform their competitors by 73%. Although consumers jump from product to product at a flick of their wrists in the age of digitalization, brand relevance remains high, especially in categories that offer unlimited choices. Brand innovators are likely to grow up top-line four percentage points faster than those who don’t invest much in establishing high brand value. Data analytical tools are utilized to capture indicators that determine a company’s brand value, such as a buzz volume, user sentiments, etc., with up to 90% accuracy. Strong brands take full advantage of data science and agile ways to refine targeting and personalize consumer experience to ensure consistent brand delivery. Besides, tracking your brand is a vital tool for building your equity and quantifying brand-building campaigns’ effects on sales and conversions. 

Leveraging brand-building campaigns, marketing teams emphasize unique brand attributes to establish a relationship with the brand’s core audiences and build associations. Building a brand lead to long-term outcomes as customers prefer to align with brands with core values that align with their own. Learning what resonates with customers helps marketers understand which brand efforts work and how they impact sales while identifying what does not work.

Key Brand Tracking Metrics for Brand Tracking Study

Brand tracking studies primarily focus on financial metrics to determine the ROI of brand-building initiatives to measure the success of the brand. Some of the key metrics include:

Customer Retention 

Brands are prioritizing customer retention to know how well their business is performing at maintaining customers. Organizations look for customer metrics such as lifetime value and churn rate based on their industry or vertical. Marketers can know how many repeat businesses they are generating with the customer retention rate. 

Customer Retention Rate = ((NCE - NEW) / NCS)) X 100

NCE= Number of customers at end of time period

NEW=Number of new customers acquired during the period

NCS=Number of customers at the start of the period

The churn rate measures the percentage of customers that have stopped doing business. If the churn rate is above 5%-7%, the enterprises need to improve their marketing strategy to enhance customer satisfaction. 

Churn Rate= (NCES-NCEE)/NCES

NCES=Number of existing customers at the start of time period

NCEE=Number of existing customers at the end of the time period

• Repeat Purchase Ratio 

Also known as Loyal Customer Rate, RPR measures the percentage of customers that return to make purchases during a specific time period. The metric is a strong indicator of customer loyalty as well as individual behaviors. The digital team needs to look at the overall rate of repeat purchases to determine loyal customer rates.

Repeat Purchase Ratio=NRC/NTC

NRC=Number of returning customers in time period

NTC=Number of total customers in time period

• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime (CLV) value signifies how valuable a customer is to a company over the whole period of their relationship as opposed to just the first purchase. The metric helps marketers understand a reasonable cost per acquisition and increase the value of existing customers for driving growth. Customer Lifetime Value can be measured in different ways, such as 

• Identifying customer touchpoints that create value
• Integrating records for creating customer journey
• Measuring revenue at each touchpoint
• Adding together the overall lifetime value of customers

Other non-financial metrics include:

·         Brand Preference

When customers repeatedly opt for one brand over another due to its quality, value, or affinity, this is called their brand preference. Measuring brand preference is crucial for businesses to repeat sales and develop a strong reputation in the market. Methodologies to measure brand preferences are:

• Brand choice measures
• Survey questions
• Constant sum measures

·         Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is a critical metric determining how likely consumers are to continue their business with a brand. It can be determined by the consumers’ knowledge, perceptions, and experiences. The best way to assess customer affinity, trust, esteem, reliability, and identification is conducting surveys.

·         Brand Esteem 

Brand esteem or goodwill is customers’ respect or favorable sentiment towards a brand. Brands associated with quality, excellent services, or value, such as Apple, Mercedes Benz, Rolex, etc., are universally accepted as desirable. You can ask the respondents questions such as how positively you regard our brand or do you prefer our brand over competitors to measure brand esteem. 

·         Brand Awareness

If you want to convert your target audiences into loyal customers and brand advocates, marketers need to build strategies for brand awareness. Reasonably easy to measure, brand awareness is a trustworthy predictor of market share. But when it comes to measuring brand awareness, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Here are the ten tactics to measure brand awareness. 

• Launch an online brand awareness survey 
• Calculate your social media reach 
• Use competitive analysis tools such as google trends 
• Run brand tracking study quarterly or monthly 
• Analyse your performance with paid media 
• Keep tabs on referral links 
• Check statistics of your shared social media content  

How to Develop Successful Brand Tracking Platform?

You need to design a clear strategy to develop a successful brand tracking platform to measure the right brand health metric. Four essential steps to establish a brand tracking platform are as follows. 

• Define Brand Strategy 

Define the goals that you want to achieve with your brand tracking strategy. Common brand tracking goals include measuring the impact of specific marketing campaigns, analyzing the brand strength over time, identifying longitudinal trends, and so on. Besides, consider broader business goals such as enhancing the market perception of your business or increasing new or recurring sales. 

• Determine Brand Metrics

Brands are complex entities that involve different factors that need to be analyzed. Key brand metrics include awareness, perception, usage, purchase intent, preference, and advocacy. These metrics work together to identify consumer needs, perceptions, and loyalty. 

• Implement Brand Tracking Tools

Measure each brand metric utilizing brand tracking tools such as surveys, focus groups, social monitoring, sales channel monitoring, and real-time UX analytics. 

• Quantitative surveys offer insights into all the different brand metrics
• Live or virtual focus groups help gather actionable feedbacks
• Social monitoring help brands understand the customer better
• Monitoring user feedbacks over online platforms like Amazon enables the collection of insightful data
• Real-time UX analytics help brands improve their online presence and enhance user-experience

• Analyze Tracking Outcomes

Use advanced brand tracking tools to process the retrieved data from different sources methodically. Ensure the data collected is accurate, check for survey errors, compile raw data, assign values, and assess relevant connections and overarching narratives. Make use of statistical analysis for modeling quantitative data. At last, connect the performance of metrics to branding initiatives with the results spike or drops based on marketing promotions, emerging trends, etc. 

• Enhance Branding Strategies

Collecting insights is useless until you do not utilize them for improving your marketing efforts and branding strategies. What you learn from brand tracking can help you create essential marketing decisions such as where and how much to invest, which techniques to use for creating more brand awareness, etc.

How can Businesses Benefit from Brand Tracking Surveys? 

Executing a market research study regularly is the best way to track the performance of your business. Here are the five ways brand tracking surveys benefit businesses. 

• Meet Goals & Objectives

Successful brands are built on developing goals that are generally hard to accomplish. Therefore, it is crucial to define the desired achievements and identify actions necessary to meet the set objectives such as profitability, customer satisfaction, community awareness, retention of employees, and so on. Tracking progress and benchmarking continuously can help evaluate and compare the different areas of a business on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis.

• Benchmarking Data 

Benchmarks in market research are the measurements or data points that marketers compare to their score or industry scores. Generally, the first survey becomes a baseline to compare future brand survey studies against. With benchmarking, the marketers can see the areas where the organization has achieved growth or the areas that require improvement or determine employee satisfaction. 

• Identify Problems in Real-time.

When a company launches a new product, it receives both positive and negative feedback from consumers. With consistent customer satisfaction monitoring, the company can improve the value of products and services. Addressing the issue at an earlier stage can help to solve concerns or problems in real time. For instance, if you conduct a customer survey in December for the products launched in February, which received a lot of negative criticism, then taking any action after 8-9 months would be too late. Thus, continuous performance monitoring and tracking can help to prevent churn rates and influence purchasing decisions.

Conclusion 

Brands should consider three primary segments: current customers, former customers, and potential customers when it comes to tracking. While existing customers help optimize your brand-building efforts, former customers help identify new growth opportunities, and potential customers enable you to adjust your branding strategies.

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