Brand Tracking

in #steempress5 years ago

Hi everybody,


Courtesy of Google

What is Brand Tracking

Brand tracking is a method of continuously measuring the health status of a brand, both in terms of its consumers’ usage and what they think about it. Brand tracking can also be referred to as the marketing efforts used to quantify the effects of brand building campaigns on sales and conversions.

Brand tracking allows a company to keep track of how it is doing in the marketplace relative to a set of pre-defined points of differentiation. These points are different for every brand, as every brand stresses different aspects and appeals to different consumers. Through regular tracking, it is possible to see how badly or well a company is doing relative to previous performance; more detailed methodologies may also suggest reasons for these changes. Opinion on a brand is usually divided into overall brand warmth/love, brand momentum and attributes associated with that brand.

What Brand Tracking Aims To Achieve

  • Creating a well known and loved brand is a priority for any marketer or business owner.If one of your priorities is to create a real desire for your product or service, then brand tracking can help.
  • Do you have dreams to create a brand that is instantly recognised by its logo, shape or colour? For example: Apple’s iconic branding? Or maybe you want to design a brand that has a reputation for high quality and premium products like Waitrose? Apple and Waitrose are examples of exceptional branding, consistently well executed; and they both come from a deeply rooted marketing strategy with the goal to offer products and services to meet their target consumer’s needs and wants.
  • Research shows that great brands have existed by keeping track of what their customers are saying about their products; redesigning their strategy based on these information and hence, they offer better products and services. This is definitely obvious.
  • Brand tracking is important as it helps to establish the performance of a brand, discover strengths and weaknesses, understand a brand’s place in the market compared to competition, and align the brand’s strategy more closely with the expectations of the brand’s existing and potential future customers. Regularly tracking consumers preferences, and always thinking of ways to make your brand even better, will help you to satisfy, retain and gain more customers.

Courtesy of Google
  • Tracking your brand is essential in building a strong marketing strategy and growing your business to develop into a top market brand. Observant marketers know that the most valuable source of information about their brand, are the feedbacks they get from their target consumers.
  • With direct to consumer brand tracking, it is easier than ever to reveal, analyse, and test findings to uncover the ‘why’ behind results and dig deep into the drivers of consumer emotions by asking them questions.
  • Brand tracking goes beyond tracking clicks and online data (which is often hampered by ad blockers, complex tracking, expired cookies, bot traffic etc.) to provide essential insights from verifiably real people, on how they use your brand and what they think and feel about the experience.
  • Brand tracking gives you the opportunity to dig deep into the most intricate of details, helping you to identify where you are losing customers along the way, and why.

What you should have in mind when you are to carry out Brand Tracking

First off, there is no point doing brand tracking until you have a clear target segment and an agreed brand positioning. Tracking should be done once a year. This will help to assess the state of the brand and guide your approach for the incoming year. Unless you have more than one planning cycle each year, a single comprehensive survey will suffice.

Timing is essential. Tracking should be carried out in a manner that you have six to eight weeks to get the data back in time for a yearly brand strategy session. That session should take place about a month before your finance department does the budgets. Use your tracking to take charge and control your finance personnel on how to set your sales target and marketing spend for each year..

You will need a research agency to recruit your sample and execute the survey for you. A good research partner is essential but do not let a market researcher design the tracking survey for you. I am yet to meet any researcher who understands the ‘whys’ of brand tracking, all the seem to be informed about is  just the ‘hows’. Work backwards from your strategy and design the survey your way. Once you get this done,  then feel free to bring in the agency to help draft and execute it.

When you track a brand, you are really only looking for awareness and then, if a respondent is aware, how strongly they associate your brand with the things you want them to associate with it and, equally crucially, the things that you don’t. Bad brand tracking is easy to spot because it only measures the good stuff. Decent tracking usually has eight to ten attributes and about half of them are negative ones.

Ask your consumers to rate your brand on the attributes of your brand and then rate a competitor against the same list. Ask for preference and Net Promoter data too. Then correlate these two variables with the attributes to get unspoken importance ratings in a more efficient and accurate manner.

Always get things done yourself, if you are to achieve maximum efficiency in reports.Use the tracking in a two day annual brand planning meeting. Day one is just a review of what you have learned from the data. There is not enough of that in marketing. Day two, come up with the strategy based on the insights. Take a good look at the tracking and decide what you want the scores to look like the following year. Try and focus on just one or two objectives – as too many strategic objectives only make you look naïve and vunerable.

The amazing thing about tracking is that it’s a cycle that never ends and, once you start using tracking to inform brand strategy, you never want it to stop. The ultimate goal of brand tracking is to help marketers understand which brand efforts are working and how they have impacted sales, as well as identifying the efforts that are not, and how they can be optimized to perform better.  Learning what resonates with your customers can lead to long term growth and continued customer loyalty.

I therefore suggest that every entrepreneur who has not implemented the habit of brand tracking and must have gone through this write up should reconsider and give it a trial.. It works well. Trust me on this.. Happy trying.. Cheers!



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