Your brand conveys your company’s values and sets your business and its products or services apart from competitors. It helps potential and existing customers know what to expect from your brand and why they should choose it.
In a marketplace where customers have so many options, and it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate your services or products from the competition, a well-developed brand positioning strategy and diligent brand performance measurement are vital to business momentum and financial success.
Thanks to technological innovations, brand performance—which compares brand results against set goals and key performance metrics (KPIs)—is easier to measure and track than in the past. Below we review essential brand performance metrics and how you can measure and use them to grow your business.
Brand awareness
The first step to attracting a new customer is brand awareness—the degree to which your target audience can recognize your brand. Without it, potential customers don’t know your brand exists, and they don’t have any opinion of it when they see it. Typically, brand awareness is achieved by broad brand exposure within your target market(s). Marketers accomplish this through various methods, such as inbound, outbound, and channel marketing campaigns, and public relations.
There are three basic types of brand awareness.
- Top of mind awareness (TOMA) occurs when a specific product is first in a customer’s mind when thinking of a particular industry or category. When do you think of paper towels, which product brand pops into your mind first? Let’s say it’s Bounty. In this case, the Bounty brand has TOMA.
- Prompted brand awareness involves consumers recognizing a brand after having been shown some kind of stimulus.
- Spontaneous or unaided brand awareness is the ability to elicit a brand name from a consumer without any prompting.
How to measure brand awareness
One way marketers assess brand awareness is through surveys, but there’s a potential for response bias (untruthful or inaccurate answers). Thanks to digital marketing and marketing automation tools, objective data can be collected and analyzed to provide insight into brand awareness, including website traffic statistics, search volume tracking, PPCs (pay-per-clicks) as a result of paid search ads, and social listening. Social listening is where you use marketing automation tools to monitor items such as social media streams, conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags.
Below is a sample of the tools you can use to help obtain this data.
- SEMrush: Use SEMRush to research keywords, provide competitive data on SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay-per-click), track keyword strategies used by competitors, and much more.
- Sprout Social: Supporting the ability to efficiently plan, create, manage, and deliver social content and campaigns, Sprout Social offers rich social data and analytics.
- Hootsuite: Hootsuite features include scheduling content and posts, addressing incoming messages, and the ability to measure results across all social networks.
- HubSpot: From content management and SEO to ad tracking and social media management, HubSpot is a robust platform that supports different functionalities all in one place.
- Google Analytics: A free tool, Google Analytics helps you analyze website traffic data, check the performance of marketing content, and more.
- Ahrefs: An all-in-one SEO toolset, Ahrefs helps optimize your website for SEO, analyzes the competition, tracks your ranking progress, and discovers and analyzes top-performing content in your market niche.
Brand familiarity
Brand familiarity means the consumer is knowledgeable about your brand and has formed an opinion about it. The more a target audience or market is exposed to a brand over time, the more familiar the brand usually becomes. Potential customers form an opinion about what the brand stands for, what it offers and promises, and why they should consider it over competing brands.
How to measure the brand familiarity
Use inbound marketing metrics to determine the extent of your brand familiarity, in particular bounce rate and time on site.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the percentage of new website visitors that leave almost immediately with further interaction. Since bounce rates vary from industry to industry, know the average that applies to yours, then measure your actual bounce rate and strive to lower it. A lower bounce rate means new visitors spend more time on your website, becoming familiar with your brand and what you offer.
Time on site
Time on site is another useful metric that indicates building brand familiarity. The longer a visitor spends time actively interfacing with and browsing your website, the more familiar they will become with your brand. You can use tools to identify visitors’ on-site behavior as well as to highlight specific interests.
Brand consideration and purchase intent
We mentioned earlier that brand performance stages might map to the marketing funnel. At this point in the funnel, a potential customer is close to deciding to buy. Still, they’re comparing your product or service with a couple of competitors before moving to a purchase decision. If your brand performance is strong, it will be included in their consideration. For example, let’s say your brand is known for its lasting quality. If a competitor tries to sweeten the offer at this stage with a small discount, your brand power and the trust you’ve built with a potential buyer can outweigh what they may perceive as a “risk” associated with choosing a competitor, and that it isn’t worth it.
How to measure brand consideration and purchase intent
Website interactions
Now it’s time to review the marketing or brand funnel from the top where it’s broad, down to the later stages. Look at buyer website engagement, interactions with marketing assets such as videos and downloadable content, and even previous purchases to paint a picture and help you establish the probability of intent to purchase. Compare your findings to previous customers who traversed the funnel and made a purchase decision.
Click-through rate on calls to action
Also, measure how many website visitors click on a “buy now” or “contact” button for more information or to ask for assistance. Potential customers who take the time to do this are showing interest and consideration.
Purchase
After customers interact and react throughout the buyer journey, they arrive at a purchase decision in your favor. Determine the percentage that makes it to this stage to understand your level of success. For instance, if your industry’s average close rate is 15% and you’re coming in at 9%, take action. Analyze every touchpoint within every phase and determine the steps to improve brand performance and ultimately boost your conversion rate.
How to measure the purchase phase
This is pretty straightforward in some ways because you either make a sale and produce revenue, or you don’t. The key is to determine if and how your brand performance can be improved, and if the actions you take will boost your conversion rate. Either way, your conversion rate indicates how your brand performs relative to your business and financial goals. It’s always wise to evaluate brand performance against set goals and determine how to improve it.
Brand loyalty and advocacy
An essential brand performance metric, brand loyalty, and advocacy indicate if customers will make repeat purchases and recommend your brand to others. Why is this a valuable KPI? According to Brand Keys, a 5% increase in loyalty lifts lifetime profits per customer as much as 76%.
Sure, positive online reviews and 5-star ratings are important, but savvy consumers also look to those they trust for referrals and recommendations. Create meaningful loyalty and referral programs, and develop new ways your brand can reward customers and continue to foster a relationship. Ask how you can provide incentives for your customers to become brand evangelists that advocate for your brand. These are everyday people who purchase your product and tell others about it via social media, a YouTube channel, or a conversion at work.
How to measure brand advocacy and referrals
NPS score
Start with a simple single-question survey to determine your brand’s net promoter score (NPS). For example, ask: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely would you recommend our brand to a friend, family member, or colleague? Promoters score 9 to 10. Passives score 7 to 8. Detractors score 0 to 6. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters to reveal your NPS. The higher your brand’s score, the better.
Social mentions
Also, use tools to measure social mentions. We covered social listening earlier to monitor and report social media streams, conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags. Determine how many people are mentioning your brand and how they view it.
Next steps
Now you know what brand performance is and why it’s essential for business growth and competing in today’s fast-paced market. Yet measuring the stages of brand performance and then determining and implementing steps to improve it requires special skills and time. If you don’t have the available staff or staff with the appropriate expertise to create brand performance metrics for your company, product, or service, consider staff augmentation to meet your needs. Upwork enables you to hire top independent professionals with the confidence of using the world’s work marketplace
