What about these words makes them unique: Coca-Cola, Apple, McDonald’s, Gucci, and Ikea? There’s nothing particularly striking about the words themselves. What makes them special is the associations they evoke and how we feel about them. We see a brand name and instantly associate it with colors, logos, flavors, products, reputations, memories, positive (or negative) feelings, and more. That’s the power of branding.
These brands invested time and money to build a unique set of associations in the minds of their market. That investment pays off over a few seconds when a consumer decides to buy a brand’s product instead of a competitor’s. At least, that’s what marketers hope will happen.
But hope isn’t enough. You need concrete brand metrics to understand how effective your marketing strategies are. Without data, there’s no way of knowing how well a strategy works in the real world.
In this article, you will learn:
- What are brand metrics?
- The difference between brand metrics and KPIs.
- The benefits of tracking and analyzing brand metrics.
- The ten brand metrics you should measure for brand strategy success.
What are Brand Metrics and KPIs?
Brand metrics are quantifiable indicators of a brand’s performance and the effectiveness of brand marketing strategies. Brand metrics are useful because they allow you to evaluate past performance and use that information to course correct or plan future campaigns. You can also use metrics to see how your brand compares to competitors.
Other uses of brand metrics include:
- Demonstrating the effectiveness of a strategy to business leaders
- Identifying underserved market segments
- Reaching out to the right audience in the most effective way
Metrics start with data. You collect data from various sources and analyze it to extract useful information. It’s worth emphasizing the word “useful” here. Metrics are only useful if they help you to make impactful decisions. It’s easy to become sidetracked by worthless metrics. If that happens, you’ll waste marketing dollars moving a needle that has no impact on brand performance or business revenue. In this article, we’re laser-focused on metrics that most businesses will find useful.
Metrics vs. KPIs
You might wonder whether brand metrics and branding KPIs (key performance indicators) are the same. The terms are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t identical. A brand metric is a measurement of brand health. A brand KPI is a metric or combination of metrics used to gauge progress toward critical branding objectives and goals. Whether a metric counts as a KPI depends on what your business is trying to achieve.
For example, imagine your business wants to increase conversion rates on a landing page by 30%. Lots of numbers bear on that goal, including page visitor numbers, bounce rates, time spent on the page, number of conversions, and so on.
None of these are KPIs because they don’t give you enough information to decide whether you achieved the objective. In fact, you might end up focusing on the wrong thing. You could invest in boosting the page traffic metric, but it doesn’t follow that conversion rates will increase too. In fact, they are just as likely to go down! The KPI in this scenario is the conversion rate calculated from visitor numbers and conversion numbers—that’s the number you want to see increasing.
Let’s explore ten brand health metrics that brands frequently use to determine the effectiveness of their brand marketing strategies.
1. Brand Awareness
You likely recognize Gucci and the other brands we mentioned at the beginning of this article. Most people worldwide recognize them—that’s why they’re worth billions of dollars. Brand awareness is a measure of the degree to which consumers recognize a brand and the products associated with it. Gucci has certainly set the bar and gained it’s own catchphrase in the process.
Consumers tend to trust familiar brands more, so brand awareness strongly correlates with sales. People buy from familiar brands, provided there are no overriding negative associations.
A brand that enjoys high brand awareness also has a degree of protection from new competitors. Building brand awareness takes time and money, and that gives established brands a momentum that market entrants may struggle to overcome.
You can measure brand awareness with:
- Surveys of the target consumer groups
- Social listening tools
- Search volume for brand keywords
- Earned media metrics
2. Brand Engagement
Brand engagement measures direct contact between consumers and your brand’s touchpoints, including websites, eCommerce stores, physical locations, social media, advertising, sales teams, customer support teams, and so on. The greater the number of interactions, the higher the engagement.
Brand engagement is a sign of a healthy relationship between your brand and its customers. Businesses work to increase brand engagement because engaged customers buy more products more often, show greater brand loyalty, and develop enhanced brand awareness.
Brand engagement also strengthens your brand relative to less engaging competitors. Brand engagement is particularly important when you launch new products and enter new markets.
Brand engagement is derived from metrics that include:
- Website traffic
- Social media engagement
- Web backlinks
- Visits to physical locations
- Purchases and subscriptions
- Content and advertising reach
3. Brand Sentiment
Brand sentiment measures how consumers feel about your brand and products. The metrics we’ve looked at so far measure awareness and engagement. Brand sentiment analysis helps to put those metrics in context, helping businesses to discern whether attitudes lean positive or negative.
You can measure sentiment at varying specificities. At a high level, a brand might be interested in the feelings people have for the brand itself. But you can also zoom in to assess sentiment for products, marketing strategies, and events.
Sentiment can turn on a dime if a brand acts in ways loyal and engaged consumers dislike, so it’s vital to monitor sentiment and respond proactively to shifting attitudes.
You can measure brand sentiment with:
- Customer reviews
- Focus groups
- Social media sentiment analysis
- Willingness to recommend surveys
- Brand sentiment analysis tools such as Repustate, Critical Mention, and Brandwatch
4. Top-of-Mind Awareness
Top-of-mind awareness (TOMA) measures whether your brand is first to come to a consumer’s mind when asked about a product category or industry. For example, which brands pop into your head in response to the words “flatpack furniture store” or “smartphone manufacturer?” It might not be Ikea and Apple or Samsung, but there’s a good chance it is because these brands are top-of-mind for many American consumers.
TOMA is the flipside of brand awareness. Brand awareness measures consumers’ awareness of your products and services when prompted with your brand. Top-of-mind measures their likelihood to identify your brand when prompted with a product or service. TOMA is important because consumers are more likely to buy from brands they recall easily when faced with a purchase decision.
TOMA is usually measured with market surveys. Marketers prompt consumers from a given market segment with a product category and calculate a percentage from the number who respond with the relevant brand.
5. Brand Association
Brand associations are consumers’ connections between your brand and concepts, emotions, events, and activities. For example, Phillipe Patek may evoke associations with luxury, high-end fashion, and innovation in mechanical engineering. Ikea may evoke associations with practicality, convenience, and value.
Associations aren’t quantitative metrics. They are qualitative relationships. But associations can be used to measure the positivity or negativity of consumers’ conception of your brand. Analyzing brand associations and their emotional valence helps marketers to develop and target branding strategies.
Brand strategies often seek to establish new associations or to challenge existing assumptions. Tools like brand templating platforms and brand asset management software help you to consistently generate the desired associations across many different touchpoints.
6. Purchase Intent
Purchase intent, also known as purchase intention, measures the likelihood that consumers will buy your products over a period of time. It is based on the number of consumers at a phase in their customer journey where buying is a real possibility, as opposed to customers who have recognized a need or started a search but who are not ready to buy.
Many factors impact purchase intent, including seasonality, brand awareness, sentiment, engagement, and more. Understanding purchase intent allows you to focus marketing resources where they are most effective. To take an exaggerated example, there’s little point in spending to advertise outdoor grills in January when purchase intent is likely to be low.
Purchase intent is a complex metric with multiple variables. It is usually measured by analyzing historical sales and marketing data and by conducting consumer surveys.
7. Brand Loyalty
Brand loyalty measures a consumer’s willingness to buy repeatedly from your brand over a long period. Brand loyalty is obviously good for sales and marketing budgets: retaining customers is much less expensive than attracting new customers. But it’s also a key brand health metric.
Healthy brands generate loyal customers who keep coming back for more. A brand that can’t generate loyalty experiences high customer churn. They need to constantly fill the marketing funnel with new prospects. That works for some business models, but maintaining long-term relationships with loyal customers is a key objective of many companies.
You can use changes in brand loyalty to assess the success of your brand’s strategies and customer experience. A decrease in brand loyalty indicates trouble on the horizon and should prompt you to investigate and mitigate the cause of customer dissatisfaction.
Brand loyalty is usually established by measuring customer retention rates, negative churn, repeat purchases, and customer lifetime value.
8. Net Promoter Score
Net promoter scores (NPS) measure how likely customers are to recommend your brand to friends and colleagues. It’s one of the simpler brand KPIs, but it captures important information about your brand’s health.
NPS is determined by a single-question survey, which asks customers how likely they are to recommend your brand on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is “not at all likely” and ten is “extremely likely.” Promoters rate the company 9-10, passives rate 7-8, and detractors rate 6 or less. Your NPS score is the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
NPS is valued because it correlates with a brand’s long-term health—businesses with high scores do better over the long term. It’s also a useful indicator of brand marketing success. A positive change in NPS signals that a brand marketing strategy is at least somewhat successful.
9. Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) measures the revenue your brand can expect to receive from the typical customer. It’s often used alongside average revenue and average profit and compared to customer acquisition costs to determine the cost-effectiveness of marketing and sales strategies.
In the context of branding, CLV offers some of the same insights as brand loyalty. All else being equal, growing CLV indicates that your customers are happy with a brand. Marketers can segment their customers to find out which groups are underperforming and develop brand strategies to target those groups.
CLV is calculated using analytics data from sales platforms. CLV is:
Average Order Value × Average Transactions Per Period × Average Customer Retention Period
10. Social Media and Website Metrics
For many companies, the majority of customer interactions happen online. It’s essential you pay close attention to a wide range of metrics that reflect the success of your online branding efforts. To close this article, let’s look at a few key online brand health metrics you should be focused on.
- Website traffic measures the number of visitors a brand’s websites and landing pages receive.
- Conversion rates measure the number of visitors who convert relative to the total number of visitors.
- Inbound links measure the number of times external sites have linked to your landing pages and content.
- Traffic sources reveal where visitors who engage with your site come from, whether that’s search ads, display ads, social media, or third-party sites.
- Bounce rates measure how quickly visitors leave your web pages without taking further action.
- Average session duration tracks how long visitors spend on your site.
Use Brand Metrics to Plan Branding Strategies
We’ve explored what brand metrics are and suggested ten metrics you should track. But collecting metrics is only the first step. The next step is to use the data you’ve gathered to prioritize and plan your brand marketing strategies. Some of the ways brand metrics can help you to build effective brand strategies include:
- Understanding the health of your brand and how brand strategies impact it.
- Identifying opportunities for innovation and improvement.
- Assessing the effectiveness of current brand strategies.
- Modifying underperforming strategies to appeal to valuable customers.
Consistent brand identity and messaging are key to improving your brand’s metrics. Marq offers a range of tools to help you measure brand performance, simplify brand strategy implementation, and maintain consistency across your brand’s touchpoints.
To learn more about how Marq can help you to build consistent and measurable brand experiences, schedule a 1:1 with our team.
