Your brand is beautiful. You know investing money in it makes sense, to grow awareness and support other areas of the marketing strategy. You’ll feel when it’s working and when it’s not because you know your brand inside out.
But dude, we HAVE to measure our results. Number one: it helps us make decisions in the future. Number two: it shows the purse-holders that this stuff is a worthy use of budget. Even if the ROI isn’t in pounds and pence.
And that means success metrics.
First things first: set your brand objectives:
- Grow awareness of the brand with brand building activities
- Help the team stay focused on shared goals, values and standards
- Reduce costs elsewhere – for example PPC, where brand searches can cost far less than generic terms, and organic search, which costs nothing
Now, we can get to the – groan – metrics.
Brand success metrics
How to measure brand advocacy
Advocacy from your customers means they not only bought your product; they actually want other people to benefit in the same way they did. It takes quite a lot for someone to take time out of their day to write a review or recommend you to a friend, so it’s brand MAGIC when it happens.
Your metrics for brand advocacy are positive reviews, shares, positive mentions, employee engagement and NPS results.
How to measure action
Action, similarly to advocacy, is not a given. Just putting good products and content out there doesn’t guarantee anyone will interact with it.
Action requires visibility, consideration and giving a sh*t. Much as we’d like to think our customers are hanging on our every word, they’re not. They’ve got to see what you do, pay attention to it AND care enough to do something with it.
You’ve got to earn that.
You can measure action in likes, shares, link clicks, competition entries, app downloads, promoted product sales – positive reactions to what you’re putting into the world.
How to measure brand reach
People are keen on reach as a measurement because you get big numbers. But when you think more carefully about those big numbers, you’re forced to take them with a pinch of salt.
Impressions (for something you post on Twitter, for example) means the number of times your content hit a news feed. It doesn’t mean the owner of the feed saw your content.
So, impressions are the number of times a user could have seen your brand. It’s a good measurement of how well your social team is targeting content but it isn’t a good measurement of actual brand power.
Views are another tricky metric. Depending on the platform – website, Facebook, YouTube – there will be a different take on what counts as a view.
The longer the view, the better, because the viewer sees more of your brand and your message. So what you consider a view is very important. Facebook in particular has faced a lot of scrutiny over its inflated video stats, so be careful not to over-report views.
For a 30-second video, you’d want to measure how many people saw a certain percentage – for example, 10,000 views of at least 50%.
Followers, which overlaps with advocacy, is a strong metric for reach because you have a community to organically spread your message. It’s tougher to achieve but valuable to measure.
Website ranking is another metric of the potential of the brand to achieve an action. It’s an indicator of quality and search engine ‘opinion’.
How to measure brand equity
Overall brand equity, we can measure in awareness and sentiment. Equity means your share of the story: the space you take up in your market, in terms of reputation and effectiveness.
Metrics for brand equity include NPS, surveys, mentions, reviews, retention, brand searches. Basically: everything we’ve talked about as individual success metrics go in to your overall brand equity.
Your brand equity? It’s only the proof of your brand’s right to exist!
Next, read up on how to finesse your brand’s content strategy.
