How to Measure Your Brand’s Marketing Success

Your brand is finally looking exactly how you planned and designed. You know investing money in it makes sense, to grow awareness and support other areas of the marketing strategy. You’re confident when it’s working and when it’s not because you know your brand inside out. But never forget, we have to measure our results.

Number one: It helps us make decisions in the future.

Number two: It shows the purse-holders that this stuff is a worthy use of budget. Even if the ROI isn’t in pounds and pence.

And that means success metrics.

First things first: set your brand objectives:

• Grow awareness of the brand with brand building activities

• Help the team stay focused on shared goals, values and standards

• Reduce costs elsewhere

Now, we can get to the metrics.

Brand success metrics

How to measure brand advocacy

Advocacy from your customers means they not only bought your product; they actually want other people to benefit in the same way they did. It takes quite a lot for someone to take time out of their day to write a review or recommend you to a friend, so it’s brand magic when it happens.

Never go down the route of setting up fake reviews. A new “marketing technique” is to ask randoms through Fiverr or other freelance sites to make an order of the product and write a rather scripted review, they will then be reimbursed, able to keep the product and usually receive an extra payment. This is painfully obvious, the reviews are usually generic and most brands use 10+ people with the same instructions… Meaning practically the same review coming in.. All at five star. Eeek, don’t do it. Be honest with your customers.

Your metrics for brand advocacy are positive reviews, shares, positive mentions, employee engagement and NPS results.

How to measure action

Action, similarly to advocacy, is not a given. Just putting good products and content out there doesn’t guarantee anyone will interact with it.

Action requires visibility, consideration and essentially giving a shit. Much as we’d like to think our customers are hanging on our every word, they’re not. They’ve got to see what you do, pay attention to it and care enough to do something with it.

You’ve got to earn that.

You can measure action in likes, shares, link clicks, competition entries, app downloads, promoted product sales – positive reactions to what you’re putting into the world.

How to measure brand reach

People are keen on reach as a measurement because you get big numbers. But when you think more carefully about those big numbers, you’re forced to take them with a pinch of salt.

Impressions (for something you post on Twitter, for example) means the number of times your content hit a news feed.

So, impressions are the number of times a user could have seen your brand. It’s a good measurement of how well your social team/agency is accurately targeting content but it isn’t an overall strong measurement of actual brand power.

Views are another tricky metric. Depending on the platform – website, Facebook, YouTube – there will be a different take on what counts as a view.

The longer the view, the better, because the viewer sees more of your brand and your message. So what you consider a view is very important. Facebook in particular has faced a lot of scrutiny over its inflated video stats and not being honest with its clientele, so be careful not to over-report views.

For a 30-second video, you’d want to measure how many people saw a certain percentage – for example, 10,000 views of at least 50%.

Followers, which overlaps with advocacy, is a strong metric for reach because you have a community to organically spread your message. It’s tougher to achieve but valuable to measure.

Website ranking is another strong metric of the potential of the brand to achieve an action. It’s an indicator of a quality website and search engine ‘opinion’ of your site. Where you rank is crucial to how much organic traffic you’ll receive.

The way to view where your rank on Google with crucial search terms? If you’re organically ranking in position one or two, see this as having a store front on Bond Street... If you’re organically ranking in position three to six, this is the equivalent of being in the street behind Bond Street, receiving less footfall but still getting organic traffic... Anything after? The middle of a field in the Highlands.

How to measure brand equity

Overall brand equity, we can measure in awareness and sentiment. Equity means your share of the story: the space you take up in your market, in terms of reputation and effectiveness.

Metrics for brand equity include NPS, surveys, mentions, reviews, retention, brand searches. Basically: everything we’ve talked about as individual success metrics go in to your overall brand equity.

Your brand equity? It’s only the proof of your brand’s right to exist!

If you are currently looking for a website rebuild, PR or marketing services, we would love for you to get in touch. We don’t push heavy sales, we promise. If you just want a chat and need advice, do get in touch with us at Honest and we will help you out.

Written by Temi