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When speaking with marketing leaders about brand health and how to improve brand visibility, I emphasize the point that every business is a living entity. And to thrive and ensure sustainable growth, it is imperative to follow the health of the brand.
As with living things, internal and external injuries can cause enormous damage. If left untreated, the conditions affecting your brand will lead to dysfunction and can even kill your brand altogether – hence the need to measure brand health.
Now, assessing brand health is both art and science, with a bit of alchemy. It takes skill just like a doctor to diagnose the problems, isolate the diseased parts and come up with viable solutions to heal your brand.
If you don’t know what’s harming your brand, how can you possibly improve it? To get you started, here are five metrics or traits you can rely on to determine the health of your brand.
Related: Branding Is More Than An Accessory: It’s The Foundation Of Any Business
1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Net Promoter Score is a metric designed to measure how aware people are of your brand, whether they connect with it, and how ready they are to recommend it to others.
The question most commonly asked to measure NPS is: On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a family member, friend or colleague?
The results you get will reveal:
- Who your loyal customers are.
- How prepared people are to promote your brand through word of mouth.
- The chance that your competitors will successfully strip your customer base.
- The number of dissatisfied customers that could damage your brand reputation.
You can use a series of follow-up questions to better understand the results obtained.
2. Brand Reputation
Brand reputation is so important that once damaged brand reputation is very difficult to restore. That’s why companies often decide to take drastic solutions, such as changing their name to stay in business.
Think of companies like Facebook that had to rebrand to Meta, Weight Watchers that chose the acronym WW and McAfee that changed to Intel Security.
Fortunately, social listening tools like Brandwatch and Awario can help you monitor, manage, and measure your brand reputation. They also allow you to get ahead of tricky situations before they go viral and cause insurmountable problems. This is definitely one brand health metric you don’t want to overlook.
Related: These 4 Elements Are Key To Branding Your Business
3. Part of the Voice
Word of mouth (WOM) is undoubtedly a brand’s best marketing tool. WOM is actually responsible for 13% of consumer turnoveror $6 trillion in annual consumer spending.
This is due to the fact that people are more likely to trust companies that their friends or family endorse. And with 92% of people who trust recommendations from friendsit is not difficult to understand why WOM generates five times more turnover than paid media.
This brings us to the vote share: the metric that informs you what people think of your brand and its position in the hierarchy of preferred companies in your industry.
But how do you calculate or evaluate the share of voice? By simply using the same social listening tools you used to measure brand reputation.
These intuitive resources crawl the web looking for places where your brand is mentioned when discussions are held about the best service providers in your niche or industry. They aggregate data and calculate the perceived position of your brand according to consumers.
4. Purchase intent
A business is considered healthy if it has a steady revenue stream and a loyal customer base. That’s why brands are always looking for ways to increase both possibilities. Buying intent is the characteristic that indicates how likely it is that people will buy from you after learning about your products and/or service offerings.
As with NPS, a simple question is asked: From what you know about the company [X]what is the probability that you would buy from them?
To get your purchase intent score, simply divide the collective number of the happiest respondents by the total number of people who completed the survey.
Related: Customer intent has changed. Do you have?
5. Unsolicited Brand Reminder
When I say “toothpaste,” what brand comes to mind? What if I say “soda” or “social media”? There is definitely a brand that you have thought of. This is what is known as an unsolicited brand recall and it has fascinating psychological implications.
But how do you measure unsolicited brand recall? We use another question: Think of the industry [X]what is the first company that comes to your mind?
Add up the number of respondents who mentioned your brand and divide this figure by the sum of the people who participated in the questionnaire, then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
Benefits of Constant Brand Health Reviews
Making the effort to invest in consistent brand analysis is one of the fastest ways to spot weaknesses and pinpoint strengths.
Imagine you have an accident and suffer a trauma that causes internal bleeding, but you have chosen not to go to the emergency room. What do you think will happen? It will only be a matter of time before that internal bleeding causes serious complications — if not death.
Related: Why Zero-Party Data Is the New Secret Weapon for Brands
There is a lot that can harm your brand, and you can’t tell what kind of harm you are suffering without brand health assessments.
On the other hand, such evaluations can inform you about what you are doing well and which business strategies seem to be working in your favor. And in a data-obsessed world, what you discover can help you plan your next action.
With the global economy starting to pick up after the global downturn caused by Covid-19, now is a good time to conduct a thorough brand health analysis.
