In today’s digital age, no enterprise can afford to wait for months for a brand survey that informs them about the health of the brand. Even a few weeks between surveys can result in the loss of existing and potential customers, and business opportunities that could have been profitable.
Organizations are coming to the realization that monitoring brand health throughout the year, is the only way to properly track their performance, and how their consumers are responding to their marketing and sales strategies.
And even though data privacy is becoming increasingly important, consumers are constantly offering a steady stream of data of their own accord. Consumers take to social platforms and to reveal their interests, purchases, positive reviews and pain points. You can easily gauge their brand awareness, brand perception and brand usage, by simply listening to them and carrying out your analysis with efficiency.
In this article we will take a deep-dive into brand tracking, and understand its importance, the challenges faced by enterprises, and how to overcome them.
To put it simply, brand tracking is the continual monitoring of brand health over time. It helps to understand how your brand is performing, what is the perception of your brand among your target customers, and how they react to the brand messaging.
Other than just consumer data, it can enable you to track competitors, compare performance across markets, identify new business opportunities and potential customers.
Tracking can also aid in pinpointing shortcomings of strategies, where effectiveness can be enhanced.
Traditional brand tracking, due to the lack of the right tools, was often susceptible to restrictive data, inadequate sample sizes, and lacked real-time insights. Now you can depend on cutting-edge technology that leverages automation, and offers accurate tracking and high-quality insights to base decisions on.
These are some key metrics you need to keep track of while conducting your brand building efforts.
For building an effective marketing strategy and elevating your brand equity, tracking brand health has become a crucial element. It is at the heart of being able to justify time and money being invested into your brand marketing campaigns.
The following are a few ways that the tracking solutions can deliver more than just insights into your brand health and benefit your marketing strategy development.
Now let’s look at what brand measurement is aimed at, and how you can use the data.
Brand tracking studies are conducted to gauge the efficacy of brand campaigns. The studies look into brand building campaigns, based on the impact of the initiative on both the business and the consumer.
Studies that are aimed at analyzing business impact, mostly focus on the brand’s financial metrics such as sales, profits, customer retention, market shares and price premiums. These help to determine ROI and keep building the brand.
Brand tracking studies aimed at consumer impact, look into consumer intentions molded by brand campaigns. Here, metrics such as brand perception, association and loyalty, become important. To access this data for analysis, marketing teams would typically tap into customer research surveys, or brand impact surveys, and intelligence gathered by survey-based tracker tools.
The intelligence gathered through this data analysis offers value in various ways.
You may find unexpected data points pointing you towards a new customer segment that you were unaware that your brand caters to. Now you can optimize your marketing strategies to gain new consumers in said segment.
Identifying the section of your audience with the highest brand awareness and brand preference metrics, can help you position your brand better through targeted campaigns and sales activities.
Data can help you understand your strongest set of consumers, who have regular interactions with your brand, and how to serve them better. Similarly, you can identify your weakest audience, and target brand campaigns to increase conversions from that segment.
Market research studies are integral to efficiently tracking your brand performance and customer engagement. With social media platforms pervading the online market ecosystem, they have also proven to be a valuable source of brand data.
Due to the continuous influx of social data, brands have been feeling that social listening can completely replace Primary Research and other market research studies. Even at Course5, our brand tracking studies would closely resemble primary research. But we have inferred from our experience managing large-scale market research studies, that social data needs to be integrated into the broader research program. Our latest brand equity measurement models now account for social media metrics.
No matter the contribution social data makes to total brand data gathered, it’s not a one-stop-shop. We have illustrated below, how social listening contributes to a percentage of market research activities, collecting insights for a complete view of your brand health metrics.
Social data used for brand measurement studies include all texts, audio clips, visuals, animations, videos, emojis, memes – basically any kind of mention about your or competitor brands. This data could be gathered from a wide variety of digital forums including social media, consumer forums, review websites, blogs, intranets, and others.
A robust analytics platform can sift through your Social Listening data using AI, ML, and NLG technologies; and offer curated insights that can aid your brand development. The following are some of the critical insights you can gather from your brand’s awareness, experience and perception metrics-
During the insight gathering process, the social data can be interpreted in different ways.
Accurate interpretation of social data offers crucial insights, but there are concerns around the reliability of social data. It is only when you recognize the pitfalls that you can find ways to circumvent them and find value in the data.
The following are some challenges associated to leveraging social media intelligence for brand equity measurement and brand building initiatives.
As we move to a highly regulated social data environment, privacy compliance is becoming more of an imperative than an ethical best practice, even though social data used for brand tracking is often publicly expressed and freely available.
Factors like social desirability often impact social media conversations and people may not always say what they mean or truly think. But a combination of Linguistics, NLP, and contextual constructs can enable advanced algorithms to interpret data correctly and draw fairly accurate inferences.
Target Population Level: Social data is not representative of the people who are not online. Also considering the limitations of publicly available data, complete demographic representation may be difficult. This factor needs to be acknowledged while using social data insights for strategic decisions.
Individual Level: Unobtrusive (and legal) tracking of social conversations means that all data points for one individual might not be available. More granular studies using other methods can be used when detailed analysis of individual behavior or sentiment is required.
Course5 helped a US-based multinational technology company develop an end-to-end brand analytics platform for enhancing their brand management program, by integrating social media data at different stages of the program.
The client needed a solution that would collate data from disparate sources like social media aggregators, blogs, forums, and review sites; internal systems like CRM and Salesforce; and third-party data from social media sources.
We delivered the platform and collected insights using quantitative, qualitative, and advanced analytical methodologies, helping to drive business strategies on a near real-time basis. We also set up a feature for customizable insights as per “user role”, so that end users could monitor and track the metrics of their interest on their respective homepages.
Course5 developed and deployed the advanced brand measurement program across two phases, and achieved the desired objective.
Following the successful development of the platform, Course5 was able to ensure that the deployment was quick, and the client was receiving relevant business insights from their brand data analysis. The following is an example of how the client can easily view their purchase consideration factors for the US market, through a simple dashboard.
Course5 Intelligence offers a comprehensive approach to brand measurement and facilitates the seamless integration of multiple data sources such as primary research and social media intelligence.
Our proprietary ‘Brand Potential 360 Model’ covers consumer and brand metrics to offer unique insights market conditions, consumer behavior and your brand health. Experience near real-time insights, with easy to understand data visualizations on customized dashboards.
Get in touch with us and experience a seamless transition from brand data to brand value.
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