Tracking your brand is important, right?
We should always listen to what our customers want, and make sure we understand the customer’s voice – making sure it drives all decision-making.
But at what point does it become just a big waste of money?
There are hundreds of brand tracking options available, and each one seems to have a different set of metrics and proprietary methodologies. Usually each comes with its own complex language to describe how it works and, more importantly, how to understand it.
Brand tracking surveys should be powerful and essential tools for every business. They should inform teams on how many customers are aware of the brand, its standing in the market and customer satisfaction, as well as provide an understanding of whether marketing campaigns are effective and providing the anticipated ROI.
But more often than not, these metrics leave you with more questions than answers. And those questions all start with “Okay, but why?”.
“Okay, but why are customers not satisfied now when they were six months ago?”
“Okay, but why don’t customers want to use our brand in the future?”
“Okay, but what has driven our increase in NPS, and how do we keep doing that?”
Brand tracking surveys churn out these numbers on a near-constant basis, leaving team members baffled, confused and unsure of what to do with the hundreds of PowerPoint slides filled with different numbers and charts – inevitably with more and more “Okay, but why?”, or even “Okay, but what do we do about it?”
I’m not here to say brand tracking is redundant. In fact, I strongly believe the exact opposite. I’m here to say stop wasting money on bad brand tracking.
Actually listening to what your customers think of you and your competitors is the key to success.
But there are several key things to consider when setting up brand tracking that will make sure it’s helpful to everyone in the business, especially those working on the frontline. Brand tracking cannot be a tool used by the marketing department to assess whether a campaign has resonated.
Make tracking work for you
Tracking is such a powerful tool. It should be something that the entire business can benefit from, and it has to be done in a way that allows for action to be taken as a result. Above all, it should allow companies to take action that isn’t just conducting more research to answer the “Okay, but why?”.
There are several key things that make brand tracking relevant and beneficial to the business:
1. Measure what matters to customers
While understanding the performance of an advertising campaign is important, one campaign will not provide clear insight into how your brand is performing. It will tell you how that individual campaign related to your brand performance, but customers care about more than your latest advertising. Understand what matters to customers and measure that.
This will help you make changes that directly impact your customers and target your time and resources to the elements that matter most to them.
2. Measure brands the way they are built
Similar to understanding what matters to your customers, it’s also important to understand how the brand was built. It was not built on marketing campaigns. It was built on brand promises, it’s propositions and values. This lets you monitor how closely your brand is in keeping with the promises it makes. Not keeping your promises is an easy way to lose customers.
3. Provide the entire business with clear insights they can do something with
There can’t be any jargon or complicated calculations behind the data, and the same metrics and methods should be used for all data points. This lets the entire business, beyond the marketing or insights department, buy into the tracking research and see value in the data it churns out.
A team that buys into insights is a team that will actually use and implement the insights in their everyday work. This is what can bring about real change.
4. Listen to your staff
Your staff’s insights into your business and its everyday workings are invaluable. Speak to them and listen to them.
We often see that staff anticipate a change in business performance before it’s seen in customer tracking or sales performance. Your staff are living and breathing your brand, so make sure you listen to what they have to say and what they experience.
Brand tracking is important to the business, so it’s even more important to get it right. Make sure you are getting the most from your insights budget and getting insights you can actually do something with, and not insights that leave you needing to understand more.
Clearly, we think we can improve your brand tracking. That’s why we’ve written about it.
Give us a shout to chat about how you can stop wasting money on bad brand tracking.
Get in touch
Written by Olivia Higson, Senior Researcher at Definition