A strong brand means SMBs will pay a premium for your offerings, stay loyal, and even spread the word. It can also lower your cost of customer acquisition. But how do you assess the strength of your brand among SMBs?
In this two-part series, we’ll explore brand tracking metrics, methodologies, and best practices.
Why Brand Tracking?
Brand tracking means continuously monitoring SMB perceptions of your brand to understand its strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities.
An effective brand tracker identifies which activities generate the highest return on investment – and where your efforts may be falling short – so you can optimize your budget and time. For example, a brand tracker can:
- Identify which initiatives – such as marketing or sales campaigns, or product launches – work well, so they can be enhanced.
- Assess programs that don’t work well, so they can be improved or discontinued.
- Highlight market opportunities or competitive threats.
- Allow you to track changes in brand sentiment, so you can take steps to protect or strengthen your market position.
Brand Tracking Metrics
A brand tracker can include some or all of these measures, tailored to your brand and category.
- Brand awareness: How familiar SMBs are with a brand and its offerings.
- Brand recall: How well SMBs remember a brand when prompted.
- Brand associations: The perceptions that SMBs develop about your brand, such as being high quality, convenient, or having great customer service.
- Brand consideration: The likelihood that an SMB will consider a given brand when making a purchase decision.
- Brand preference: The percentage of SMBs that prefer to buy your product over a competitive product or set of products. Two associated metrics are brand usage, the percentage of SMBs that use your brand’s product or service; and brand purchase, the percentage of SMBs that have purchased or used your offerings in the past.
- Brand loyalty: Also called purchase intent, this measures the likelihood of an SMB to continue to use or buy your offerings.
- Net promoter score (NPS): Basically, the percentage of customers who would recommend your brand to colleagues minus the percentage who wouldn’t. A high NPS is an indicator, although not a perfect predictor, of customer satisfaction and repurchase and referral propensity.
Bredin can help you understand each of these metrics and prioritize what is most important to monitor. Contact us to discuss creating a brand tracker that maximizes your marketing and sales ROI.
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