Why you must measure the health of your brand

Alex Jordan explains how to go about measuring the health of your brand; determining whether it is going up, down, or nowhere at all.

Companies spend millions each year on marketing and growing their brands. They use a variety of channels such as social media, billboards, radio and an assortment of digital channels to activate their brand in the hope of creating brand identity and generating loyalty with their customers.

The hardest aspect in doing all of this work is that it is difficult to measure how your brand is actually growing and/or perceived by the market. If you spend $10,000 on your latest campaign, then:

1. How do you attribute that to sales?

2. How do you know the messaging and content you have put out resonates with the consumer and is growing your brand in conjunction with sales?

The answer to this is actually simple. You put in a process to measure it.

Brand health

First we need to understand what brand health and sentiment analysis is.

Brand health is the digital health of your brand – for example, is your brand growing or declining online?

Sentiment analysis feeds into this because although it may look like your brand is being spoken about, searched, mentioned, and written about more online, this may not necessarily be a good thing. Your brand could be growing in terms of “brand health” but when cross referenced with sentiment analysis it may show this is all negative publicity – therefore not growing your end sales and instead inhibiting them.

There are multiple ways to measure both brand health and sentiment, and infinite formulas that you can compute to get the right fit. Below are some basic ways for you to measure whether your brand is going up, down, or nowhere at all.

1. Your own website analytics. You should always start with your own website analytics when wanting to look at how your brand is growing. Look at where your traffic, leads, and sales are coming from. Between 80-90 percent of all organic traffic landing on your homepage is brand related. So looking at the growth of this particular acquisition channel year on year, and monthly, will give you an indication on how your brand is performing. The other acquisition channel to consider is ‘direct’. If this metric is also going up, again this is positive as this involves people who know you well enough or have been to your website and have chosen to go back for a reason.

2. Keyword scraping tools. Keyword scraping tools like Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends are also useful to measure brand health. You can list all the terms related to your brand and measure how this has performed over time.

3. Google My Business. Google My Business has now become such a big product in search that it actually has some pretty useful insights reporting directly. One such insight is you can download search traffic to your company profile that is classed as both ‘direct’ and ‘discovery’. ‘Direct’ being your company’s brand related terms and ‘discovery’ being non-brand terms (for example, if you are Dominos, a direct search would be ‘Dominos pizza’ or ‘Dominos’ and a discovery search would be ‘pizza shops near me’. Measuring the growth of direct searches will let you know if more people are looking for you and you alone.

4. Social Listening.  Social listening tools scrape Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and Twitter and tell you how many times you have been mentioned. Doing this regularly lets you begin to measure growth. Social listening tools are great for measuring what kind of terms and sentences your brand is being mentioned with; it will tell you the most common phrases, words and sentences your brand has been associated with across each platform.

Finding the formula

To get a full and complete picture of your brand health you can use formulas that give each measuring tool a mathematical weighting and spits out a percentage against the average mean. This is more complex and harder to do for business owners as it requires API and dashboarding skills.

Why is all this important?

The cheapest and easiest way to acquire a customer is through someone who wants the product because they want your brand. Think Louis Vuitton; customers don’t want a bag otherwise they would get a cheaper bag elsewhere that does a similar job. They want a Louis Vuitton bag. This is an example of a strictly brand based acquisition. Therefore growing your brand health and brand sentiment is inevitably important, and it is impossible to manage that growth effectively if you can’t measure it. Measuring brand health in this way also gives you visibility on finding out what works and what doesn’t. If you push a big PR campaign and you see both sales and brand health spike, you know this was successful for ROI but also long-term branding. You can develop a ‘test and learn’ methodology to not only your online marketing efforts, but also your offline.

Alex Jordan is a digital and data specialist. Email: jordanoptimisation.co.nz