Measuring brand strength in real time
How strong is your brand?
Measuring a brand might seem difficult but there are some great ways to get real time metrics for your brand marketing effectiveness.
The challenge with measuring brand effectiveness is that you are attempting to quantify people’s personal gut feeling, and that’s tough to put into numbers. But feelings translate into behaviours, which we can track.
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. (William Bruce Cameron)
Ask the right questions
You are basically looking to measure how much they trust your brand, use it, recommend it, or enjoy it, which is why a lot of brand measurement relies on survey data. One route is to subscribe to external market research companies already operating in your industry. They are a great way to secure impartial survey data from a large and relevant audience. However, 3rd party market research does require a healthy budget and the scale of it means that it can only be done quarterly so it may not give you the feedback you want frequently enough to change your marketing activities.
I got into reviewing brand measurement because I needed more data at least monthly so I could channel my advertising spend to the right audience. The ideal solution is to combine surveys with online data you can gather in real-time.
Track offline behaviour online
Another aspect to consider is that a lot of brand marketing is offline, particularly in the mortgage broking sector where lenders and networks still love a round-table for B2B marketing and the compliance requirements of the mortgage advice process with borrowers has sustained a long-lived face-to-face culture for B2C interaction and referrals. This does not mean though that you can’t channel some of that audience to also engage digitally so you can track their opinions.
How to report on brand marketing effectiveness
The metrics for assessing the strength of a brand generally sit in 6 categories. It helps if you have a working understanding of the basic site reporting numbers on Google Analytics (GA), and it helps to report on your impact on social media. A full narrative of each is underneath the table.
If you’re approaching brand measurement for the first time, I’d recommend establishing firstly what you can measure then secondly what marketing you could do to influence that metric. I’ve put in a few suggestions but they really are exhaustive.
Here are some ways you can track each of the six brand measures and glean where to focus your marketing efforts.
| Metric | Where we can get it from | How can we influence it? |
| Brand Awareness | Social media – new follower count Direct web traffic Referral traffic incl. advocacy Earned media (free) mentions 3rd party survey | Social growth campaigns Advertising Partnership promotions Backlinking and content strategy Influencers Marketing buzz PR |
| Brand Frequency | Client frequency i.e. average times each user uses you per year (a great one to grow with just marketing!) 3rd party survey recall of marcoms Social media – Engagement score Social media – Share of voice Survey – WHEN did you last hear of us? | Impactful email campaigns Message-rich telephone and rep calls High quality regular social posting Social media forum interaction Ask for referrals |
| Brand Familiarity | New – exiting – time lapsed client counts Time on site | Client retention communications Engaging website with clear journeys |
| Brand Favourability | Post-completion survey 3rd party survey – willingness to recommend ‘NPS’ Social likes/shares/comments Unsubscribes | Delight all customers Encourage recommendations Highly relevant sharable social posts |
| Brand Preference | Image score – brand offer Image score – user experience Bounce rate | Good value product Competitive criteria range or niche Great customer service Great accessibility in person Great online transaction experience Engaging website with clear journeys |
| Brand Demand | Own sales levels 3rd party survey – who have you placed business with? | Competitive proposition Easier to find than competition Easier to use than competition Better online reputation via all of the above High brand trust |
- Brand Awareness (salience)
This is how much your brand is thought about when a customer is in a buying situation. You can get this from:
- Social media new follower count. Your direct web traffic is also a reflection of brand awareness as it shows how many people are typing your URL straight in or clicking on a bookmark they have saved.
- Referral traffic including traffic from advocacy (that’s other people referring to you online including your own staff). You can increase brand awareness here as well incidentally with a great backlinking strategy of highly relevant content.
- Earned media mentions (people freely mentioning you) are also a good count of brand awareness.
- A 3rd party survey. For lenders they ask brokers which brands they have some impression of & placed with in the last 12 months. Broker market research asks consumers which mortgage advisors they have considered.
- Brand Frequency
This is a measure of “how often you have heard of…” and can be assessed via:
- Your own client data – the average time gaps between each time they contact you.
- 3rd party survey asking your audience for their recall of any of you marketing coms, F2F meetings, telephone calls or adverts.
- Social media engagement score. This gives you a count of people interacting with your brand. Facebook, Twitter and Linked in can give you those metrics for your business pages or your social management tool such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite will collate them for you.
- Share of voice score on social media. This is keyword frequency counting via your social media reporting which shows how much of the conversation around your specified key topics can be attributed to you.
- Your own post-completion survey – WHEN did you hear of us?
- Brand Familiarity
This is simply a quantifiable measure of how familiar people may be with your brand on average. You can keep a fair idea of this from your:
- Client count – literally everyone on your books; it’s a measure of your market share.
- How much time on average people spend on your site. (Available from GA)
- Brand Favourability
How likely are you to recommend… ? Score this brand metric via:
- Your own post-completion survey. If you aren’t already doing a customer survey after mortgage completion, you really should prioritise establishing robust and very easy way for all clients to give this feedback because it yields the most informative data for your business. You can create your own one via SurveyMonkey (subscription fees apply) and email it out straight after offer or completion, or you can employ a service like Feefo and TrustPilot who report back to you your monthly star ratings.
- 3rd party survey. ‘Which … are you most likely to recommend? They can get you the unprompted response in which the respondent plucks their favourite out of the sky. They can also scale your audience’s willingness to recommend your brand and all competitors’ brands from a list.
- Social likes/shares/comments are also a measure of your brand’s favourability in people’s eyes. Again, Facebook, Twitter and Linked in can give you those metrics for your business pages or your social management tool will collate them for you.
- Brand preference
This one asks – which brand do you prefer?
- 3rd party survey can allocate you image scores by asking respondents to rate your brand offer with questions like ‘rate the pricing of…’ and the user experience you offer with questions like: ‘rate the brand’s ease of use, staff contact, efficient case communications’.
- Bounce rate. Available via Google Analytics, your bounce rate can also indicate how much people enjoy your brand by measuring how long they want to engage.
- Brand demand
This one is normally measured by asking ‘when did you last purchase from…?’ which gives you a result of how many people are using you and how often. It is slightly different from brand frequency which is how often they have heard of you.
- 3rd party survey asking which providers they have used/placed business with and also asking which providers they would recommend.
- For lenders – a ratio comparing business referred from any one sourcing system versus the search data about the criteria you provide. This will show how much market share you are taking.
- Your own client data about sales.
After that, why not create a monthly report of these factors and see how you perform over time? Take a leaf from Google Analytics and mark on your grid the start date of each new campaign or marketing strategy you start so when you do see a change in marketing effectiveness, you can track which change you made which may have caused it.
Good luck. Keep thinking bigger!
Brightbird Marketing 