Consumer behaviors are constantly changing. If they weren’t, society would have only a handful of companies to manage goods and services.
As people’s interests and expectations evolve, organizations must tailor their brand strategy to match the new customer requirements.
You can monitor your company’s performance using several key performance indicators (KPIs). KPIs help you measure brand strategy and create an effective business model.
Brand awareness
Brand awareness describes how much your customers remember and consider your brand. Here are the KPIs for brand awareness.
Spontaneous brand awareness
If you want to measure spontaneous brand awareness, ask unprompted questions. For instance, you can ask, “When you think about laptops, what brands come to mind?”
This line of questioning is open-response, so people will answer with what they think of first. This KPI is the percentage of people who mention your organization without prompting.
Top-of-mind brand awareness
Top-of-mind brand awareness gets measured in the same way as spontaneous. However, you only count the people that name your company first when unprompted.
Prompted brand awareness
Prompted brand awareness tests usually have multiple-choice answers that let respondents select the items they know. The percentage who recognize your business is your prompted brand awareness.
Sentiment and familiarity
Sentiment and familiarity consider how consumers feel about your brand. They indicate if people think about your company when they need a related product. Here are some KPIs related to this metric.
Brand lift
The brand lift KPI measures the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns by comparing the results pre- and post-distribution. Usually, tests for brand lift include control markets to prove that the increase in attention happens because of advertising.
You can perform a brand lift study by conducting continuous A/B testing using in-market respondents. That way, you can continually optimize your campaigns.
Salience
Brand salience describes how frequently buyers think about your brand in different buying scenarios. You can measure salience by showing respondents a randomized list of cues and asking what brands they associate with the prompts.
The statements used require extensive research to ensure they are relevant to the scenario. If you own a local diner, you might write, “somewhere to eat that feels like home.”
Brand trackers
Brand trackers perform longitudinal measurements of brand-specific KPIs. They are like ongoing surveys that you frequently update with new questions. To track consumer attitudes, ask questions about things like:
- Product availability
- Collection options
- Delivery
- Price sensitivity
Agile research solutions can help you collect information from statistically significant consumer data within a few hours. This option will save you from committing to a cadence.
Strength of brand assets
Brand assets include fonts, logos, shapes, colors, jingles, icons, and taglines. You want these to seem distinct from other brands while remaining attractive to the desired audience.
You can measure brand strategy in this way by asking respondents if they recognize your branding assets. See if they correctly identify them as belonging to your brand.
Web traffic
Web traffic depicts how many visitors you have to your brand’s site. It often corresponds with market share and brand awareness, so you want to maximize it. Here are the KPIs for web traffic.
Direct and referral traffic
An analytics program can show how much direct web traffic you have. Direct traffic includes people searching for your brand. Over time, you can track how much it grows. Also, check out the bounce rate to see how long people spend on your website.
Referral traffic considers traffic that comes from external sources. These include backlinks and guest posts. Check out the authority of these sources because referrals from penalized ones can decrease your search visibility.
Social listening
Social media platforms let consumers freely discuss and review brands. You can generate organic traffic from social media or pay influencers to promote it. Social listening software can help you identify significant areas of social data that can help popularize your brand.
Social listening tools involve language processing and artificial intelligence. They offer insights concerning consumer sentiments about you and your competitors. The gained information can help reveal why you have a spike in web traffic.
Share of voice (SOV) depicts how often people mention your brand. You can use SoV tracking to calculate how many mentions are of you and compare it to your competitors.
Share of search (SOS) illustrates how many times people search for your brand. SOS tracking tools find the keywords used to find your brand and the number of times people directly search for you. Then, they compare the results to your competitors.
Customer intent
Customer intent expresses whether consumers consider buying from your brand. The only KPI for this is purchase intent. You can measure it by asking if people think about your product when making purchases.
Generally, you measure this metric with longitudinal brand trackers, brand lift studies, or surveys. Usually, it has a positive correlation with sales. If it does not, your product might cost too much or have low availability.
Sales
Sales data is one of the most direct ways to measure brand strategy. It tells you whether people buy from your company. The KPIs for sales include:
- Sales value
- Sales volume
You can measure these KPIs by considering the cost of your products and the quantity sold. Most companies have immediate access to this data.
If you sell to a distributor, you likely use syndicated sales information and have delayed results. You can use customer intent to get an idea of your sales.
Advocacy
Advocacy KPIs measure if your customers would recommend your brand. You can use the net promoter score (NPS) to find this.
To calculate NPS, ask how likely people are to recommend you to a friend on a scale from 1-10. They are promoters if they score from 9-10. 7-8 is called passive, and 0-6 describes a detractor.
Next, you subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters. For example, a score of 15% promoters and 30% detractors would give you an NPS of -15%.
Summary – how to measure brand strategy
KPIs can determine your performance quantitatively to help you adjust your branding techniques. Anyone can make a brand these days, so you have to put in work to stand out.
Try to measure things like:
- Awareness
- Sentiment and familiarity
- Web traffic
- Customer intent
- Sales
- Advocacy
Using one KPI in each category will show you your brand’s success and help you optimize your marketing strategies.
Don’t fade into the background – start measuring your brand strategy today!
