Brand tracking acts as a listener to a brand.
Listening to the customer is extremely important for a business aiming to become a brand. You need to identify what is important to your audience, collect data on these areas and make improvements as per the feedback. After all, it takes 0.05 seconds for visitors to form an opinion about your brand.
Gauging their attention for a longer duration requires you to step into their shoes and find out precisely what they’re looking for. Brand tracking tools fit right in here. They provide a channel to get what your consumer is trying to convey.
Use tools for brand tracking
Brands today focus on creating a unique identity and devise campaigns keeping this in mind.
It's not just about the product but about brand values and qualities. Here is when brand tracking also gets tricky, as it's so much more than knowing the number of visitors on your page.
Brand tracking is the process that measures the effects of brand-building campaigns on conversions. While there are many tools for brand tracking, you need to choose the ones that understand your target audience and how they respond to your brand messaging. You can do brand tracking in the following ways:
- Invest in tools that do sentiment analysis
- Do brand impact surveys at regular time intervals
- Conduct consumer research surveys
It is essential to take a holistic approach when monitoring the overall health of your brand. Collecting and analyzing data regularly helps the brand revamp existing branding strategies. For example, using a signature color improves brand recognition tremendously. Once you have this information, identify tools that help you monitor and enhance key assets of your brand identity.
Now that we know what brand tracking is and the type of tools/strategies to use let's look at how it helps businesses.
1. Stay ahead of your competitors
Brand tracking and monitoring your brand health also helps you keep an eye on your competitors’ brand health. The correct tracking tool will put your brand health metrics in perspective by looking at the market and ensuring you don’t miss out on any early warning signs.
Using Google is the most prominent way to avoid making common industry mistakes. Browse through Google’s web pages to know what your competitors are doing. The other way to track your competitors is to use brand-tracking software. How you measure and track brand awareness, brand preference and brand associations, you can do the same for your competitor brand.
Simple ways to analyze your competitor brand are:
- First and foremost, identify your competitors
- Create a competitor matrix
- Know your competitor’s target audience
- Focus on the KPI(Key Parameter Indicators)
- Know their strengths and weaknesses
It’s crucial to figure out the above points to choose the right brand tracking tool. The tools you select vary based on the target audience and the key parameters that drive your or your competitor’s brand. Have clarity on these fundamental aspects of your competitor brand to analyze them better.
2. Get real-time data
Brand tracking tools give you the data.
It’s what you do with that data that defines growth.
Speed and agility are key ingredients to gaining a competitive advantage. When you have brand tracking software with clean dashboards and reports features, you have instant access to real-time information on your brand. This means you have real-time data to act upon at the moment.
The data acts as a rear-view mirror. You know how your consumers perceive your brand from the recent-most post you may have posted. A specific metric may roar high one month only to find out it scores the lowest the next. In this dynamic digital nature of branding, new consumer needs, better technology, etc., keep rising, quickly letting your brand slip from your audience’s mind.
Use today’s data to build a stronger brand tomorrow. To really stand out, you need to use this data to step into your consumers’ shoes and continue solving their problems. Continue leading with this thought, and you’ll use the real-time consumer data well.
3. Accurately gauge audience perception of your brand
Use real-time data to gauge how your consumers perceive your brand accurately. Through this data, you can increase the consumer retention rate and find ways to increase profit and market share. Specific metrics of the brand tracking tool will show you the numbers. However, pay more attention to whether or not your brand conveys a single message to the audience that connects them in some way.
Sometimes, even if the number of comments is less, the quality and content of the comments will lead you in the right direction. For example, on a post X, the engagement rate is low. However, on further analysis, the comments suggest you create a positive effect on your audience. You need to use the right tool that reads into the sentiments of the text and draws patterns to reach conclusions.
Brand tracking helps you in the following ways:
- Identify new audiences
- Enhance your existing audience's size and perception
- Stop doing something that the audience dislikes
- Grow an initiative that received a positive audience response
One of the most potent powers you, as a brand has, is you get to shape your identity in a way that the audience reciprocates. Over time, if you keep using data properly to analyze the audience's response, you will likely create a strong brand identity with an increased audience.
4. Enables audience segmentation
Expanding your audience is certainly a great way to improve your brand. However, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a brand that considers all users as its audience. Thus, to identify your unique audiences, you need to track your brand. Only after you identify your target audience do you cater to their preferences.
Not all brand tracking tools help in audience segmentation; however, the quality ones allow the creation of custom target audiences. Custom audience segmentation lets you zoom in on the significant niches your brand cares about. When you know which marketing campaigns reflect your brand values, you can refine them and see how they’re being received by the consumers that matter.
Audience segmentation directly impacts generating more profit since you’ll know your audience better and come up with marketing campaigns or even new services. To make the best of audience segmentation, dig deeper into the KPIs you should track.
5. Know which campaigns work (and which don’t)
To grow your brand, you need to know which campaigns need improvement and which are gaining a good response. The parameters are bound to change depending on the type of campaign and the platform on which you run it. For example, if you run a paid ad campaign on Google Ads, you get to know the following:
- Number of clicks,
- Impressions
- The number of conversions, etc.
Suppose you’ve created a video campaign on Instagram. You know it’s a top-notch brand campaign if it connects to the audience emotionally. Such campaigns increase brand loyalty and trust. Yes, monitoring the number of clicks is important, but more important is whether the campaign helped improve brand associations.
Measuring the performance of campaigns in phases is an effective way to gauge the audience’s response accurately. Schedule an initial data wave to get a baseline. Shortly after, release another extensive brand awareness campaign and analyze how the audience reacts to both.
Ask yourself the following questions when analyzing data:
- Is my target audience increasing?
- Are the extensive brand campaigns performing as per my expectations?
- Are viewers responsive to the campaigns? (positive, negative both)
Such questions will prompt you to think about whether you need to improve your brand campaigns or if you’re going in the right direction.
Track the right brand performance KPIs for business growth
When you want to track your brand, you need more than just analyzing data from the platforms on which your campaigns run. The primary goal of using brand tracking software is to make better, more informed marketing decisions through insights. With tools offering features like creating custom target audiences, you can tailor your questions to your needs. Rest assured; you’ll have all the data you need for your brand to flourish.
However, ensure you invest in the right tracking tools. For example, if you want to grow your engagement rate, you need a tool that measures all key parameters that lead to good engagement and does not simply provide you with the result of a single metric. Be sure of the KPIs you want to track.
Think, identify, track and grow.
Author Bio:
Parita Pandya is an Engineer turned Writer. She usually finds herself writing for businesses. When she is not writing, she is either strumming her guitar or penning her thoughts down on paritapandya.com.
