When it comes to our health, we know prevention is better than cure. So we monitor everyday things ourselves, like weight and exercise, and attend recommended medical check-ups periodically.
Regularly servicing your car and dealing with any ‘strange noises’ immediately is far more convenient – and less expensive – than a big, unexpected repair.
Why would you only be reactive with the health of your brand?
Measuring and tracking your brand’s health over time is a proactive way to stay agile among swiftly changing expectations of clients and prospects. Brand health research tells you how other people experience your brand and tracks any fluctuations over time.
Measuring and tracking brand health answers this key question: How well does your brand promise match the real life experiences of your clients, employees and suppliers? A company in fine fettle has happy customers that have consistently positive experiences with your brand. As a result, your company strengthens its place in the market.
What is brand health tracking?
Brand health tracking uses market research methodologies to measure specific metrics that keep your brand in its best health. Insights from your brand health surveys are a sturdy foundation for your brand strategy development decisions.
Brand health surveys are designed to find out what people really think about your brand, getting inside their heads to discover:
- Brand awareness: How quickly do your clients and prospects recall your brand? How familiar are they with your brand’s attributes and their benefits? What share of voice do you currently have?
- Brand equity: How is your brand’s value perceived by your target audiences? Basically – a measure of your reputation and how much client trust you’ve earned.
- Purchase intent: How likely is your audience to buy from you?
- Brand loyalty: How likely are your clients to buy again and recommend you to others?
A brand health survey takes the temperature of your brand at one point in time. But these measurements aren’t static. It’s essential to build a brand health tracker into your overall research strategy. You need to keep taking snapshots of your brand’s health over time in order to keep it in good condition by addressing issues as soon as they arise.
What are the benefits of brand health tracking?
The overarching benefit of brand health tracking is being able to use your deeper understanding of your audience to get ahead of the competition. Brand health research insights help you evaluate the connections you have with your target audience – and not just company to company, but with the individual personas in your buying teams. You’ll see any red flags immediately and get a benchmark of where you sit in your market.
Brand health surveys evidence the effectiveness of completed advertising campaigns and inform strategic decisions about the direction of your marketing strategy – including where you’ll see most ROI for your marketing budget. Brand health monitoring over time helps you develop a strong brand, improve brand equity, and nurture true brand advocates from your pool of delighted clients.
What metrics are used in brand health tracking?
A whole host of different metrics can be included in your brand health tracker. NewtonX brand health tracking uses the right combination of metrics, based on your specific needs, to give you a precise picture of your brand. Not all of the available metrics will be applicable to your business. It’s important to select the brand health measurements that will reveal the most about your brand positioning. This might include:
- Net Promoter Score: NPS is based on one simple question, ‘How likely are you to recommend your brand to someone else?’ The results are a measure of your clients’ loyalty. It’s a widely used metric, so it’s very useful to get a wide view of the competitive landscape.
- Employee net promoter score: ENPS measures employee loyalty in the same way, one question: ‘How likely are you to recommend this company as a good place to work?’
- Message testing: Focus your resources on messaging and campaigns with the strongest ROI by understanding how you resonate with your different audience segments.
- Customer Satisfaction Score: ‘How happy are you with your experience/purchase with your brand?’
- Share of voice: Using the abundance of social media metrics out there to measure what ‘share of voice’ you have online. How much are you talked about/with in comparison to your competitors?
- Brand sentiment: This metric measures your reputation. Do they feel positive, negative or neutral about your brand?
- Brand recall: Can they recall your brand name in an unaided or aided context? How quickly do you spring to the front of their mind when considering a product or service you provide?
- Purchase intent: This is a straightforward survey, asking ‘how likely are you to buy from this brand?’, where respondents choose on a scale of ‘not likely’ to ‘very likely’.
- Brand strength:(Purchase intent + Net Promoter Score) x 100 = brand strength score
- Brand equity: (Brand strength x unprompted recall) x 100 = brand equity score
- Concept testing: Defines the perfect product-market fit before investment in full production.
Measuring brand health
The quantitative data gathered using these different measuring tools is analyzed into actionable results. This tells you what clients and prospects are thinking. To get into their motivations and reasonings, partnering with a brand research agency means that your brand health monitoring will also include qualitative methodologies to investigate the ‘why’.
By focusing on each area of your brand’s health you can see where your strengths lie and where improvements are needed. This competitive intelligence helps make key strategic decisions across your business, like:
- Do prospects know you exist? How do clients and prospects see your brand?
- How do people experience your brand? How does it connect with their expectations and workplace?
- Why do people buy your brand and not the competition’s?
- Why do people love your brand?
- How well do your communications connect to your target audience?
- Where do people stumble on their path to purchase? What obstructions are there in your sales funnel?
Decision quality data that answers these questions helps you direct exactly where resources need to go to strengthen your brand, drive growth with your marketing and secure your position at the top of your industry.
Why brand health may decline
There are several reasons why your brand’s health may be faltering. If you’re not monitoring brand health, it’s easy to dip into decline without noticing. It becomes a much more serious problem the further down the curve you fall. It’s not always easy to pinpoint exactly why your brand’s health is failing – you’ll find the answer in brand health research insights.
There are some common reasons why a brand’s health becomes a cause for concern:
- You’re out-of-step with the rest of the market, or the market itself is on its last legs.
- You’re not embracing new customers, or have an offering that’s stuck in the past.
- Your brand identity and promise hasn’t evolved to connect with a new generation of clients.
- People can’t find you. Your brand isn’t where it needs to be, it doesn’t have a strong presence in the relevant channels.
- You’ve expanded too quickly, or too far into new markets and lost your brand identity in the process.
- Where’s the excitement gone? Your advertising’s flat, for employees and/or clients and prospects.
- Your lack of brand health maintenance reveals general signs of exhaustion. It needs a long weekend away to recharge its batteries and return with new ideas!
A NewtonX brand health tracker is how you revitalize your ailing brand. Don’t wait for complete heart failure. Use brand tracker research to diagnose the problem with reliable quant-qual evidence. After you’ve got this detailed, honest look at where you are, you can see the prognosis and plan your recovery. Your brand health tracker insights help you identify the main issues, so you can prioritize them and get a structured strategy in place to resolve them in a timely manner. By embedding a brand health tracker into your overall research strategy you can maintain a proactive, nip-it-in-the-bud approach to your brand’s health going forward.
