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You’ll know the score by now: sales, website traffic, and social media shares. These are just some of the data you need to track for key insight into your company’s brand. With these, and a few other helpful stats, you’ll be able to check in with your brand to see how well it’s performing. What about brand metrics, though?
Brand metrics can give a very clear insight into brand health. However, there are few marketers and brand managers who actually check in with them. If you are part of the majority that fails to track metrics, it’s time to join the minority. Once you start following key brand metrics, you’ll understand your brand’s health a lot more.
Don’t start writing up any new job adverts for brand metric analysts just yet; you can easily incorporate this into your current brand marketing work without the need for a new team of experts.
Here are the most important brand metrics to start with and why.
Allow us to introduce you to the gang that makes up brand metrics. If you’re familiar with the Latana website (if you’re not, where have you been?!), you will already know the first 4 points. We may be biased about them, but they are metrics we believe in! So much so that we modeled our product around them.
Hear us out while we explain their importance.
Brand Awareness
We can split this into two categories. To start with, say hello to unaided brand awareness. This is by far the most valuable type of brand awareness as it gives a very strong impression of your brand. It shows that your brand is on people’s minds when they are thinking of your specific industry. And this is the ultimate goal, to be top of mind for your target audience without even having to put massive effort into promotion. For example, if you ask people what brands come to mind when they think about hamburgers and 78% of them say McDonalds, well, it means that McDonald’s are doing very well.
But there is a flip side.
This information can be hard to collect/deliver. A good brand tracker would be very helpful here.
The second category we can track is aided brand awareness.
This is the number one metric that EVERYBODY should track.
The recognition this offers us might not be as high as unaided brand awareness, but it is still a really good way to see and understand how your target audience perceives you. If you use this alongside the unaided brand awareness metric, you’ll be able to plan some very effective marketing campaigns indeed.
Aided brand awareness should also show you which target audiences could do with some extra nurturing from your side. If you keep check over a long timeframe, you’ll also see any spikes in awareness and which target audience initiated them.
Why is this important?
Well, brand awareness translated into revenue and growth. You want them for your company, don't you?
The world is ever-changing, and this can deeply affect and influence the current marketplace. By tracking both forms of brand awareness, you’ll be in a much better position to understand how these external factors are influencing your brand.
Brand Consideration
So, now you know that a lot of consumers are aware of your brand-great news! Don’t relax just yet though as we can’t stop there. After all, your brand may be well known, but that’s no guarantee that people will buy from you. It’s not even an indicator that all those people like you…
This is why brand consideration should be another of your tracked metrics. Even though you can get an idea of whether consumers like you from any negative media, it’s still worth taking a closer look at the data. To research brand consideration, we give a list of brands to survey participants and ask who would consider buying from them or using them. This data is what you can use to see if you need to refocus your brand campaigns slightly to give any of your target audiences an extra nudge towards the next step in the sales funnel.
Brand Associations
Brand awareness? Check. Brand Consideration? Check. Know what consumers actually think about your brand… Not quite yet.
By just tracking brand awareness and consideration, you won’t learn about the associations that consumers have of your brand and company. Things like what your target audience remembers about you and any beliefs that they may have over related attributes to your brand are useful to know. It could affect their reasoning when deciding which brand to buy over another. You can find this out by tracking brand associations. By changing any negative ones and ensuring they are all in line with your message and values, you will be able to build on brand identity.
This is important so let’s look at it further.
Brand associations provide a vital connection to a brand’s communication and differentiation strategy. Brands use associations to create value and present themselves with the right image for their target audience. Think Coca Cola as ‘classic’ and Apple as ‘simple’. If your target audience is not associating your brand with your intended identity, you have a problem. If they are linking you with negative associations, you have an even bigger problem.
Having information on brand associations is essential because it can help guide your campaigns. You will be able to form campaigns to focus on something more positive, such as the quality of your product or its affordable price point.
The above brand metrics are ones that you should already know quite well if you’re a regular at the Latana website. There are two other useful ones to know too.
Brand Loyalty
Attracting customer, great; retaining customers, even better! A large chunk of most brands’ profits come from loyal customers. Plus, it’s always loyal customers who go on to recommend brands to all their friends and family, so you need to get on their good side.
There are a few different ways to track loyalty, but the main ones are tracking its various elements: commitment, associations, trust, satisfaction, and repeat sales.
Purchase
Being able to track all of the above brand metrics is all well and good, but there’s one thing missing: knowing exactly how many people are actually buying from you.
If few people are buying your products or services, you are definitely doing something wrong-but what? To find out what you need to do to push them all the way down the sales funnel, you need to track the purchase metric. You’ll gain plenty of data that shows who is buying and how often, as well as how much they are spending. Take a look at the target audiences that are missing and think about how you can start sealing the deal with more sales.
So, let’s have one final recap of these metrics:
- Brand awareness, both aided and unaided, will help you see how well known your brand is.
- Brand consideration is the insight that shows how many consumers would consider using your services or buying your products.
- Brand associations let you know exactly what people think about you.
- Brand loyalty shows how often customers return to your products or services.
- Purchase gives you the ins and outs of who is buying what.
Once you start tracking all of the above brand metrics, you will be able to keep your finger on the pulse of your brand’s health. If things don’t look all that positive, there’s no need to stress too much as you will have all the data you need to see where necessary improvements can be made.
Are you ready to delve deeper into your brand’s metrics? Come and find out how we can help at Latana!
