Brand Tracking Study is the method used by market researchers to monitor and observe the health of the Brand. It helps analyse how your customers feel about your brand, its products, and its services. It also helps assess which marketing efforts worked best for the company and which didn’t.
Brand tracking study involves gathering feedback from the customers and analysing the insights. It helps gauge brand awareness and brand perception. Thus, offering you the opportunity to improve your brand performance in tune with the customer’s demand and needs.
Step 1 : Design your Brand Tracker
Select an omnichannel Survey Software with an in-built survey analytics software to support your research and the entire process – designing the questionnaire, distributing the survey, and analysing the data.
An omnichannel survey software will help you conduct surveys across channels like online, social media, email, phone, email and offline to gather more information.
Your platform should be flexible and easy to use. It should allow you to make changes in the questions, if required, without any complications.
Step 2 : Decide what KPIs or metrics to Track?
Brand Tracking Study allows you to learn about the value of your brand in the market and to track changes in the trend to optimize your efforts to meet the new changes.
The metrics you decide to track must align with the goal of your business. The study should collect the data required by your company to make decisions to improve the brand performance. Understand the objectives of your company to determine the metrics you want to track.
Few key metrics you can track using your survey software while conducting a Brand Tracking Study are:
Awareness:
It tells you how many of your customers can recall or recognize the name or logo of your brand. There are three ways Awareness is measured.
- Top-of-Mind: It implies the first brand that consumers can recall in response to a product category.
- Spontaneous: It indicates the likelihood of recalling a brand after the first one has been named, in association with a product category.
- Aided: It involves showing brand logo or name to the consumers to help them recognize the brand
Usage:
This involves tracking the purchase behaviour and preference of a customer. It tracks how much a customer spends on a brand which impacts directly on company profits and revenue.
Frequency of usage, total spending in the brand (product category), etc. are measured in this metric category.
Purchase Intent:
It studies the likelihood of a customer buying a product from the brand in the future. The metric also measures the likelihood of customers switching to the competitor’s business.
Brand Perception:
It informs you about the quality and attributes that customers associate with your brand. It indicates what customers feel about the brand and what they think the brand represents.
Step 3 : Decide when you should conduct the brand tracking surveys?
The aim of a Brand Tracking Study is to show how the impact of your brand in the market has changed across different campaigns and over time.
Conducting brand tracking once will give you a glimpse of where your brand stands in the competition. Running the study regularly will give you deeper insights into how your brand’s performance and changes in customer’s behaviour are influencing the brand’s impact.
If regular brand tracking is not possible for your company you can conduct it quarterly or annually. However, if you can run brand tracking studies regularly you should consider a few factors. Use your survey software to prepare your brand tracking study promptly anytime you believe a study needs to be conducted.
- Frequency of market change: Notice if the new products are launched frequently due to aggressive competitors and new technology. You may need to run brand tracking more often when it requires constant monitoring over market change.
- New Competitors: New competitors in your industry require immediate brand tracking to help examine your campaigns and help guide your business decisions.
- Competition in Product Category: Product categories with a high competition where companies are constantly launching new products require regular tracking. It can help the brand keep up with the trend and figure out ways to perform better than competitors.
- Ad Campaigns: You may want to run brand tracking studies before and after you launch a new campaign. It will help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing effort and its impact on customers.
Step 4 : Focus on who you should Track?
Current Customers are the best option to conduct your brand tracking study. Current customers are those who engage with your brand regularly. You can also study your potential customers along with your current customers. However, make sure that the audience includes a wide range of demographics.
Use your online survey tool to segment the audience based on shared demographics. This way you can learn how your brand and marketing efforts impact different segments. As a result, the study will become a guide about how you can target different groups.
Step 5: Interpret Brand Tracking Study
Before you begin your brand tracking study, establish core metrics if you want to measure the changes.
Brand tracking measures stay the same over a period of time. However, it is better to examine the metrics regularly to evaluate the reliability of the metrics. The metrics may reveal stable outcomes in the brand association. But, it may just be unable to recognize the macro shifts in the market.
Run your data and compare them regularly using your survey software to notice any subtle changes you may have otherwise missed.
It is not easy to define what a “good enough” level is for a particular metric. It depends on the product category and the industry you are competing in. The benchmark for the level of “good enough” varies across industries.
The aim of running a Brand Tracking Study is to identify what influences your customer’s behaviour and intent. The survey software you use will help you in developing and running the survey with ease. It helps analyse and report the brand tracking data in a way that is easy to interpret.
