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Branding and rebranding can be tricky. There are several factors to consider. Then, when your brand is ready, you need to make sure it performs to your – and your customers’ – expectations. But how do you quantify your brand’s performance? What metrics best express how your brand is fulfilling its goals? The right metrics will give you a deeper understanding of how your brand is faring compared to your competitors and meeting customer needs. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at brand metrics, along with our list of the 10 metrics you need to monitor in order to track your brand performance.
Data is an important driver for numerous aspects of marketing. Brand metrics are quantifiable measures of brand performance and health. And you must keep monitoring these metrics to stay on top of trends, watch for indicators that you need to make changes, and learn how your competitors are faring.
Tracking these metrics allows you to measure the impact of your marketing strategies and campaigns. It can also provide feedback on your brand health and the effectiveness of your overall brand strategy. Simply launching your brand without tracking metrics puts you at a distinct disadvantage.
When you measure and track brand metrics, you have a quantifiable calculation of how your brand performs for your customers and against your competitors. Keeping tabs on brand metrics ensures that you can see when you are succeeding and catch any slight downward trends that may need to be acted on immediately, before they affect your brand health.
Brand metrics are also useful when you need ‘hard numbers’ to present to leadership. You can justify your spending on campaigns and demonstrate the value of your marketing team with a clear presentation of quantifiable data.
What should you look for in terms of brand metrics? The best metrics meet the requirements of the SMART framework. They should be strategic, market-driven, actionable, repeatable and account for all of the touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Let’s take a closer look at the SMART requirements:
Strategic
The metrics that you choose should be aligned with your organisation’s strategic objectives and goals. Without this alignment, the metric is meaningless.
Market-driven
The metric must be measured through the lens of the market. Internal company metrics should not be measured for brand performance data. You’re looking for external metrics that measure brand performance for customers and against competitors.
Actionable
Metrics must offer guidance for action. If no action is associated with the metric, it isn’t a valuable measure for your brand. In other words, if you measure a metric and you have no way to exert an impact on the metric if it changes, it’s not a good metric for brand performance.
Repeatable
A metric is only valuable if it is consistent and repeatable. This helps to create benchmarks and measure trends.
Touchpoints
Metrics should include all aspects and touchpoints of the customer experience. You need to understand how your customers are affected upon every interaction with your brand.
If a brand metric meets all of the SMART criteria, it’s a beneficial metric for you to track.
There are three categories of brand metrics: performance, perception and behaviour. Understanding the categories will give you an insight into the metrics that fall under each one. With that knowledge, you can choose a balanced group of metrics for measuring your brand performance.
How is your brand performing relative to your business goals? Performance metrics evaluate how customers feel and think about your brand and how your brand is performing financially.
Brand performance metrics are affected by your brand’s ability to retain existing customers and acquire new ones. They evaluate how your customers act on their perceptions of your brand. Do they return to purchase again? Do they become a loyal customer? Or are they subject to churn?
Financial metrics provide hard data about how your products and services are producing company revenue. How your customers feel about your brand has a direct impact on the financial metrics.
Measurements of performance include:
How do customers view your brand? Are they aware of you? Are you relevant to them? Understanding how your brand is perceived by your target market is another important metric.
According to recent research from Nielson, the need to drive brand awareness has never been more important. The perception of your brand directly affects how people feel about your brand and, therefore, how they think and act. Stronger perceptions influence purchasing behaviours. This adds value to your business.
Currently, brand perception is strongly influenced by social media. Your customers are looking for product reviews, brand interaction, feedback and other social interactions in order to make their purchasing decisions. Your social presence has an impact on your brand performance, awareness and consideration.
Your brand perceptions and associations eventually add up to your brand equity, which is the additional value your business achieves through having a recognisable name.
Measurements of perception include:
Although behaviour metrics can be used internally, you’ll remember that our SMART guidelines tell us that we must only consider market-driven metrics. These include customer experience and reinforcement of your brand value proposition.
There are several things that you can do to affect behaviour metrics. Improving your perceived authority and visibility within your industry will encourage your customers to pay attention to your brand, seek out your products and engage with your company.