If you use a Fitbit or the Activity app on your Apple Watch, you know the value of monitoring exercise and movement. For marketers, it’s equally important to assess the health of your brand. 

Brand health is a collection of measures that tells you how well the brand is doing – a total picture of brand success. If you put it off, you might miss important data and warning signs to keep the business on a healthy path.

 

Why now?

Profitability and prioritizing marketing spend are important to businesses, especially with recent inflation trends. With tight budgets, it’s tempting to simply maintain performance marketing and conversion efforts with existing customers and targets. 

Awareness marketing, focused on future demand, may have a lower immediate return on investment. It takes time and is often more expensive than converting current demand – but thriving brands keep a steady focus on the future. They seek to reach customers who don’t have a need for their product or service today but will in the future. In fact, the healthiest brands spend 60% of their overall budget on brand building and 40% on sales activation or conversion¹. 

This focus on brand building allows organizations to look at all potential consumers, and analyze how well they’re doing at driving awareness, consideration, and favorability. Done well, these marketing efforts create a pipeline of demand to maintain business growth and viability.

 

Aid your decision making

It’s impossible to make the most informed decisions about how to allocate marketing investment without knowing where the brand and business are currently situated. Matching current demand to immediate revenue while building future demand is a balancing act for every brand. 

A brand health dashboard can help guide resource allocation and measure progress over time.       

Metrics

Several metrics can help to benchmark your brand’s current health and marketing efforts. The challenge is aggregating the data points and understanding what they are telling you. 

To get started, identify where you have existing data. Website analytics, purchase data and social platforms are a good place to start. Identify the metrics that align with your business objectives and goals.

Here are a few metrics to measure current demand: 

• Ecommerce conversion rate and revenue
• Amazon conversion rate and revenue
• Performance marketing results or outcomes (Amazon ads, retargeting)
• Qualified leads

These metrics gauge future demand: 

• New site visitors
• Website traffic growth
• Database growth       
• Increase in brand search queries (Google, Bing, Amazon)
• Social following growth
• Social engagement
• Total reach (media impressions)
• Unique reach (media impressions)

 

Identify gaps 

Next, figure out where you need more information to understand consumer behavior and business trends. 

A good mix of qualitative and quantitative data is valuable. Consumer insight surveys can help measure and understand current brand sentiment. Customer service inquiries and social media comments are also good indicators of brand reputation. 

Regular brand tracking gathers quantitative data on awareness, favorability and intent to purchase. You might conduct a brand impact study to gain more knowledge about your current and future customer base. 

 

Frequency

We recommend a regular cadence for reviewing your brand’s health. Consider aligning the timing with key campaigns or initiatives. Gather benchmark data before a campaign to measure true return on investment.

 

Get started now

At KOSE, we work with clients to gather metrics and insights to gain a holistic view of brand performance and marketing investments. Take our advice and don’t wait. Dig into your own metrics to monitor your brand’s health. If you are interested in building a digital strategy that impacts your brand’s health, contact us today. 

 

¹Rethinking Brand for the Rise of Digital Commerce, WARC, 2021.