Chasing business success means knowing what that success looks like. If you don’t understand the key metrics that can measure how your business is performing, you have no means of knowing whether you are doing well or, crucially, whether the decisions you’re taking are good ones. If you can measure your business’ and customers’ response to the choices you make, you can learn what you can do to help create success for your business and over time, tend towards the best outcomes.
Your bottom line isn’t always the best measure of success, especially for projects that aren’t intended to directly create sales. Brand building, customer satisfaction and revenue protection schemes don’t always show an immediate impact on your bottom line, but they’re still important investments for your business, and you need some way of assessing how they perform for you.
Enter Brand Tracking
A brand tracking agency can help you here. Brand tracking is a popular, and relatively new metric that helps you understand how your business is performing not financially, but in the minds of the customers that make up your market. Are your decisions making customers feel more loyal to your business and more likely to buy from it or driving people away? Are you strengthening your brand or undermining it?
What’s in a Brand?
Your brand is so much more than the branding you explicitly design for it. It’s more even than the messaging you pack your advertising with. Your brand is made up from every small interaction customers have with your business, from the complete experience of walking into a shop and buying something, to seeing an advert in a newspaper or next to a Facebook post, and everything in between.
What is Brand Tracking?
Brand tracking is a survey type conducted by market research companies that offers a health check for your brand. There are different variations on the test, but the foundation of a brand tracking exercise is to ask customers to rate your brand on the key qualities that define success in your industry, both in isolation and relative to your competitors. This gives you both an absolute read on what customers think of your brand, and also shows how you’re performing when ranked against the people you need to be better than!
More developed surveys might ask customers for more detail on why they’ve ranked businesses the way they have, or add in metrics like purchase intent or net promoter score to give more insight into the strength of your brand. If you’re thinking of pursuing brand tracking, you should talk with market research companies about what exactly they offer and make sure you’re getting results that give you the best possible information.
