How To Use Brand Tracking To Improve Your Marketing Strategy

What is brand tracking, and how can measuring the metrics improve your marketing strategy?  

To answer this question, we take a step back.  What we know is ‘information is power’, and that’s why tapping into ‘Big Data’ and using personalized data is an obsession of businesses today.  Mining the data provides feedback on consumers and customers and their preferences. Businesses need the information to provide a better product or service and to reach out to new audiences to grow their business.

Brand Tracking is focused on learning about the brand’s reputation and, more importantly, what consumers think of it at any given time. Therefore it’s a continuous process.  When it comes to improving your marketing strategy, brand tracking is fundamental to creating effective campaigns that will help you reach your overall aim.

How do successful brands know how to communicate with their audience even when their likes and dislikes evolve? One trick is to use brand tracking software to do the legwork, so to speak, i.e., track the following essential metrics.

Brand Awareness

You need to know how familiar is your target audience with your brand.

If you asked a consumer if they recognized your brand, what is the likelihood they would say yes?

Or, when a customer is asked a general question about the type of products or services your brand offers, would they associate it with your brand name?

Examples Of Brands Doing It Well

A couple of brands with the ultimate level of brand awareness among consumers are ChapStick and Band-Aid. The brand’s name is now the generic term for a type of product.  Reaching this level of brand awareness is the pinnacle, and tracking brand awareness can help your business reach the same level.

Another brand tracking software use is collecting and analyzing measurements from marketing campaigns.  The results will empower your marketers to deliver more personalized marketing campaigns for your business.  The data can also improve your products and services. As consumers’ needs and wants evolve, so do your company offerings, so they continue to buy from you.

Brand Associations

Brand association is the emotional bond a customer has with your brand, whether it’s negative or positive. Pretty important, right? Sometimes being recognizable isn’t always a good thing, though.

Marketing Flop

Maybe you had a disastrous marketing attempt, like when the fast-food chain, Wendy’s, had a tweet battle that escalated into the company responding with a Pepe the Frog meme.

After a flurry of criticism and alarming support from the Alt-Right, Wendy’s quickly removed the tweet. With social media, reputations are made and broken in the blink of an eye, so it’s better to err on the side of caution and not to be associated with say a controversial ideological movement.

Avoid extreme situations like Wendy’s failure by gaining knowledge about what your target audience thinks of you and if it changes over time. Make sure you have a positive brand association by tracking your marketing campaigns and determining if they’re giving the right message.

Brand Consideration

There are lots of brands out there that offer the same type of service or product. Think of food brands. There are entire aisles at the grocery store dedicated to just cereals or refrigerators full of similar beverages.

Customers face the challenge of picking one brand over another constantly. See what contributes to their decision-making process by tracking brand consideration. Gauge where a customer’s brand loyalty is and whether or not they would buy from your brand.

The information you gather around brand consideration is also helpful for seeing how your brand compares to the competition. If they wouldn’t consider buying from your brand, then which is their preferred choice?

Brand Usage

While measuring brand consideration, also gain more information about brand usage. This is the next step in the funnel and an essential one.

Discover not only how often your target audience purchases from your brand but see which other brands they buy from, how often they buy from them, and what their latest purchase was. Also, evaluate audience satisfaction and see how favorably they think of your brand.

Track To Stand Out And Improve

Brand tracking specific KPIs is vital in understanding your own brand and target audience in a way that will help you grow. It also allows you to compare your brand with the competition.

Better marketing strategies also come from researching competitors: learn from their mistakes or see what they’re doing well that might be worth implementing. More importantly, determine what you can do to stand out from them.

Summary

Ultimately, brand tracking is fundamental in the age of big data.  Using brand tracking software to do the monotonous tasks of data capture and mining allows your team to work smarter with the feedback and work on the business’s offerings, pre, and post-sales and of course the marketing.