How to Measure and Boost Your Brand Performance

Do you ever wonder how your brand is doing compared to your competitors? Are you hitting your branding and marketing milestones?

While many think that brands that make waves online and offline are great indicators, you probably have to dig deeper than popularity to see the real score. Skip the guesswork and learn how measuring brand performance can give you powerful insights into your branding and marketing strategy to bring you closer to your goals!

With a well-tracked brand performance, you get real-time data on the quality of the brand experience you offer and areas for improvement. Read on as we share insider tips from digital branding experts.

Brand performance metrics varies from one company to another. For starters, it relies heavily on your short-term and long-term goals.

Say, you decided to tag micro-influencers on TikTok to help promote your products. You would want to know if the marketing campaign impacted your audience. Did it gain you a positive ROI or return on investment? It answers the following questions:

• Was the branding effort worth it?
• Were you profitable?
• Did you reach your set goals?

These are just some information you can unravel when measuring brand performance. Other factors at play affect your brand performance, too, like your competitors, customer experience, brand image, and your brand’s reputation.

4 Factors That Influence Brand Performance

Brand Competitors

Brand competition happens when businesses offer similar products and services to the same target audience. That said, they also have shared goals—increased market share, revenue, strong brand authority, and brand loyalty. And in a landscape where the most adaptable yet authentic brands are valued more, the competition is steep. On the flip side, competition fosters innovation and creativity to outperform others. It ensures that potential customers get the best options they can offer.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is one of the pillars of brand success, yet it is also the hardest to perfect. Chalk it up to evolving consumer behavior, preference, and the endless amount of competitors, providing a positive customer experience is a tedious job. You’ll need all hands on deck—from sales and marketing to operations and logistics. When successfully done, though, customer experience can drive optimum brand performance.

Data shows that 80% of customers choose businesses that provide lasting and positive experiences. Deloitte backs this up by reporting that satisfied customers increase their spending by up to 140%, thereby raising their customer lifetime value. As customer loyalty goes up, they refer you to their friends and family. Suffice it to say that if you want to improve your brand performance, then optimizing the brand experience of your target audience is a sure way to get you to your goal.

Brand Image

It’s one thing to create and increase brand awareness, but it’s another to project a positive brand image or brand perception. When brand image successfully integrates your brand promise and brand performance, you can easily sway or influence your customers. Consequently, your brand stands out, encourages customer loyalty, and can become the brand authority in your industry. Brand Reputation As they say, “Happy employees make happy customers!” And to achieve both, you’ll need a positive brand reputation encompassing a broader spectrum than that of brand image. It refers to how your customers, internal team, and stakeholders perceive you.

Building a positive and strong brand reputation is far from easy, though. Even big brands took decades to achieve their position in the market. But with a consistent commitment to your brand purpose—the core reason your business exists—it is possible, whether you’re an emerging or established business. In effect, your brand’s reputation affects your overall brand performance and empowers brand loyalty.

Before we dive into how you can measure brand performance, it is essential to understand the importance of doing so in the first place.

Think of it as a compass that guides you as you navigate the intricate web of your industry. And with a well-informed strategy, you can eventually increase your brand equity.

Other benefits of measuring brand performance to keep in mind include:

• Track your revenue and return on investment.
• Keep a pulse on your customer’s opinion of your brand.
• Follow engagement across all marketing channels.
• Analyze the performance of your competitors.

Now that we are clear on the why, let’s move on to the how and what’s of a brand measurement system.

Measure Your Brand Performance In Four Steps

An effective brand measurement requires an all-encompassing system geared toward assessing four metrics: brand awareness, brand familiarity, brand advocacy, and purchase intent.

Step 1: Brand Awareness- Do People Know Your Brand?

Being present in multiple channels through your brand marketing efforts can help grow your reach and establish brand familiarity. But it also requires consistent monitoring to determine which channel brings the most success. For instance, a comparative analysis can be done on each channel to track periodic audience growth.

To measure brand awareness, you can run surveys, brand tracking data, or use digital tools to assess the following metrics:

• Social Media Engagement
• Online Mentions
• Paid Ads
• Organic Search
• Website Traffic
• Spontaneous Brand Awareness or Unaided Brand Awareness

An unaided brand awareness is when customers have high recall without prompts or marketing messages connected to your brand. Say asking someone what cafe brand they are most familiar with will most likely elicit Starbucks as a response. And this is the type of awareness strong brands have in common.

Step 2: Brand Sentiment- Is There a Meaningful Connection Between You and Your Customers?

Beyond evaluating brand awareness, identifying where your brand stands based on the emotional connection with your audience is vital. It gives a peek at what your buyers know about your brand story, brand purpose, and values—whether they are positive or negative.

If your customers are aligned and attuned with your core brand messaging, they are more likely to elicit positive feelings. However, if your brand mentions are full of complaints, that is your cue to re-evaluate your branding strategy and perhaps create personalized messages that resonate with your audience. This is why running brand sentiment or brand familiarity analysis regularly is key to keeping a pulse on your market. You can use brand monitoring tools to gather, segment, and analyze feedback or messages sourced online.

Step 3: Brand Advocacy- Do People Talk To Others About Your Brand?

In branding, a business achieves the ultimate level of familiarity when people hear about them organically. In short, are people voluntarily advocating for your brand to their friends and family?

While old-fashioned, word-of-mouth is not something to belittle as it is one of the most reliable ways to expand your loyal customer base and strengthen the brand perception. After all, organic referrals are a testament to the trust that you’ve built with your audience. Thus, it becomes easier to influence others and introduce new offerings.

In addition to your loyal customers, brand advocates can come from within the organization—your employees. Hence, it is vital to create a conducive work environment and culture that embodies your brand value. Brand advocates can also be social media influencers who are more than happy to leave a genuine review of your products and services without prompts just because they are satisfied customers.

And if they align with your branding, you can tap these brand advocates for partnership. Think influencer marketing. Keep in mind to properly vet brand advocates to ensure they resonate with your audience as well.

So, how do you measure brand advocacy? Here are some steps:

• Periodically track your brand advocacy’s audience reach growth.
• Quantify the number of organic shares or user-generated content (UGC) on social media and other platforms.
• Check if the number of authentic product/service reviews is increasing at a steady pace.
• Assess your net promoter score or NPS, a key indicator of how likely buyers will recommend your brand to others.
• Track your conversion rate or how many customers progress to the next step in the buyer’s journey.

Step 4: Purchase Intent- How Likely Will Customers Buy From You?

You are finally having more engagement with people talking about you. But despite promising marketing efforts, it’s not translating to more sales. If you can relate to this, you may have to check your purchase intent.

Purchase intent, as the term infers, is about how committed your customers are to avail of your products or services within a certain period after the first brand touchpoint. And understanding purchase intent is helpful as it indicates how effective your branding and marketing strategy is. It also gives powerful insights you can leverage when developing your products/services, planning your inventory, identifying your seasonality, refining your social media marketing plans, and qualifying your sales leads.

You can track purchase intent by running surveys on your potential customers. Your sales team can also give feedback on how long it takes to close a deal and what buyers struggle with when deciding. You can look at user behavior online to identify patterns or trends, too. For instance, check how long customers explore a page before clicking the purchase button.

There are dozens of global brands you can definitely look up to. But the bottom line is despite the success they have, they take extra steps and tons of trial and error to maintain peak brand performance at all times. Just take a look at Zalando and Samsung.

Zalando

Zalando is a Germany-based online platform that caters to thousands of fashion and lifestyle retailers worldwide. A big part of their branding is their commitment to inclusivity in fashion, where differences are acknowledged, represented, and celebrated. Their consistency in integrating the brand purpose in their branding and marketing messages, like their 2019 ‘Free to Be’ campaign, has made them a successful brand with over 35 million customers.

In an interview, Director of Marketing Johnny Ng shares, “The campaign features a diverse cast who differ in body shape, break with stereotypes or defy traditional gender roles…This freedom is what we want all our customers to feel.” Zalando’s end-to-end approach includes collecting feedback from customers and employees to assess its brand’s performance. As a result, they can make appropriate improvements internally and externally.

Samsung

Samsung made waves as one of the most successful Asian brands to hit the global market. And behind their continuing popularity is their devotion to innovating their brand’s products that improve the lives of others. Instead of solely focusing on cutting-edge technology, the brand integrates what people need and want within their products.

In short, they push the norm and encourage customers to engage with them. Over time, they accurately predict what products people may require a couple of years in advance. Thus, creating a balance between practicality, aesthetics, and advanced functions and effectively catering to the daily multitasking needs of people.

Just look at its #YouMake branding initiative, where customers take the reigns in choosing the design of their Samsung products. From bespoke refrigerators and washing machines to bespoke phones and accessories, you can choose how to express yourself. Moreover, Samsung offers a wide range of price points, making it a more accessible and inclusive brand to different audiences.

Brand performance is challenging to sustain, but it’s a worthy endeavor in increasing brand equity and attaining lasting brand success. It's no wonder businesses are on a mad dash to improve brand performance.

While having the best branding and marketing team can make a huge difference, a deep understanding of brand performance can give you great insights on the do's and don'ts that can boost your business. It keeps you in check by knowing what matters most to your customers, internal team, and stakeholders.

To recap, when measuring brand performance, you should be on the lookout for the following key performance indicators:

• Brand Awareness;
• Brand Sentiment or Brand Familiarization;
• Brand Advocacy, and;
• Purchase Intent.

So, are you ready to know how your brand is performing? Find out with the help of our digital brand experts.