Brands go through ups and downs during their lifetime. Monitoring your brand’s health helps you maintain the ups and minimise the downs by identifying areas of your business that need improvement, and helping you understand how your brand is positioned relative to other brands in the market.
What is brand health?
The term brand health refers to the overall perception of a brand. Brand health measures how well your brand is performing in the market compared to its competitors, how it is perceived by people, notably customers, and what value it can bring them. It can also be used to identify opportunities for improvement.
Having a healthy brand means that all your marketing activities are working well and you see a positive ROI (return on investment).
Why is brand health important?
Brand health is an important indicator for long-term business results. However, brand health is not just about how you are doing from a financial perspective (though that is important). It is also about how well your product or service is performing in relation to what people expect it to do, and how satisfied customers are with their experience using your product or service.
Brand health identifies your company’s strengths and weaknesses and shows you whether you should focus your efforts on increasing brand awareness, improving your reputation, or creating marketing campaigns to target the right audiences.
It ultimately answers the following questions:
- Do consumers recognize your brand?
- Does your brand have positive associations?
- Is it easy to find information about your brand?
- Are there any negative stories about your brand circulating online?
When done right, brand health measurement can be used as a competitive advantage in many ways. You can:
- Develop insight into your customer’s pain points, preferences and expectations with your product or service.
- Uncover opportunities for innovation by understanding how consumers think about themselves as well as your competitors (i.e., what they value).
- Prioritise investments in resources such as marketing campaigns, new products or service development projects based on insights gained from monitoring data over time.
How do you monitor and measure brand health?
Brand health can be assessed using various methods, but the most common are:
Surveys, focus groups, and customer reviews are great ways to receive direct feedback and conduct an in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis. However, they are often dependent on people’s willingness to participate in the data collection process.
Social listening, on the other hand, can help you understand your customers’ behaviour by collecting and analysing available data. Briefly defined, social listening is the process of monitoring conversations on social media. It includes tracking the company’s own digital channels (website and social media accounts) as well as brand mentions by users on social media. You can then analyse the data and use it as a baseline for further analysis.
The data collection and processing can be done manually, but an online reputation management tool will make this process much easier and more efficient, especially if the brand in question is a large organisation.
Brand health metrics
When it comes to brand health, there are no established metrics that you should monitor and measure. The metrics you choose will depend on your organisational goals.
For example, let us look at the four most common metrics that can help you measure your brand’s health:
1. Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is the extent to which consumers are aware of your brand and recognize your brand name, logo, or product. You should know how your brand is perceived by the public, and how much they know about it.
Through social listening, brand awareness can be measured by calculating the volume of mentions and the potential reach of your digital channels, as well as the share of voice (SOV).
💡 Share of voice (SOV) is a metric that measures how often your brand or product is mentioned in a given period. It is calculated by taking the percentage of mentions of a particular brand versus all other brands in the same category and then dividing it by the total number of mentions for all brands in that category. For example, if there are 100 total mentions in a month of the keyword “beauty blender” and your brand’s product was mentioned 10 times, then your SOV would be 10%.
Brand awareness shows you how you fare against your competitors and helps you evaluate the efficacy of your marketing efforts. However, brand awareness stats should be taken with a grain of salt given that many people who might know your brand might not post about it on social media. Still, it is very important to assess the awareness of those who are active on social media.
2. Brand Reputation
Knowing how many people are aware of your brand is important. But knowing what they are actually saying about it is even more important. Brand reputation is a measure of how a brand is perceived by those who know it. It is about the emotional connection between a brand and its customers, and it is usually measured by tracking the volume of mentions and sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative).
Positive brand reputation occurs when customers have a strong attachment to a product or service that they feel is better than other options in its category. Having a positive brand reputation can help you maintain existing customers and attract new ones.
Negative brand reputation occurs when there is low customer satisfaction with your product or service. For example, your product often displays issues or your company has poor customer service.
Neutral brand reputation occurs when no one has strong feelings about whether they like or dislike your products or services. If this describes your business, it may mean that you are doing just fine—but it could also mean that you need to work on getting people excited about what you do!
3. Brand Positioning
Brand positioning is all about associationsand how your brand is positioned in the market when compared to its competitors. Associations are what people think when they hear your company name, and they are based on past experiences with you or others like you.
Brand positioning can be measured mainly through qualitative analysis of online mentions involving your brand and its products or services. Social listening tools are good at identifying conversation themes around your brand and opinion leaders (aka influencers). However, to stay on top of everything, you have to constantly follow conversations, observe online behaviour, and have enough market knowledge to be able to understand the slang and jargon used to talk about your brand.
Ask yourself:
- Do people perceive your product as being more expensive or less expensive than similar products from other brands?
- Do they understand your brand messaging?
- Do they associate your brand with the image you are trying to project?
4. Brand loyalty
Are customers loyal to your brand? Do they buy from you over and over again? Or do they only buy from you when there’s no other option available?
Brand loyalty is defined as a consumer’s repeated purchase of a product or a service. Acquiring new customers is important, but retaining customers and ensuring their loyalty is a lot more cost-effective. Loyal customers are the ones most likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family, so it is important to keep them satisfied.
One way to measure brand loyalty is through the use of customer satisfaction surveys. These surveys can be conducted in-person or online, and they allow you to get feedback from customers about how they feel about your product or service.
Another way to measure brand loyalty is through social media listening tools. You can set up dashboards and receive alerts when there is a mention of your brand name so that you can see people’s praises or complaints online. This information will help you determine if your customers are happy with their experience with your business and whether they will purchase again or not.
Conclusion
You should leverage social listening to monitor your brand’s health and understand consumer behaviour, product preferences, and market trends. Learn how your brand is positioned relative to other brands in the market, and start making informed decisions about how to position yourself going forward.
How can we help?
We believe that brand health is one of the most important factors in determining business success. A Data Pro teams consist of multilingual analysts equipped with the cultural knowledge and technical skills necessary to sort through large amounts of data and identify repetitive patterns and emerging trends. We can analyse the performance of your brand in comparison with your competitors’ brands, and help you get a sense of what consumers think about your brand.
