Learn about the metrics to check, track, and analyse brand health

Brand Health. Relatively simple to decode what it should mean: the health of your brand. But this is too simplistic, of course. Brand Health is an umbrella term: a collection of measuring metrics that essentially analyse how much your branding contributes to achieving your business goals and aims. But who needs to measure this? The big fish or the tiny ones? Both. It applies equally to multinational brands and newly formed Instagram businesses; irrespective of the size of your company. 

There are various factors and metrics that offer an insight into the wellness of a brand’s health. Some examples are:

• Brand Awareness 
• Brand Reputation
• Brand Equity 
• Employee Engagement 
• Brand Positioning 
• Brand Delivery 
• Brand Strength 
• Brand Value 
• Net Promoter Score 
• Purchase Intent

Why is Brand Health important? 

Each factor comprising brand health is important in contributing to its accurate measuring and tracking. By looking at all these factors affecting brand health, you see a bigger picture of your strengths and weaknesses. For instance, your brand awareness might be great, but if you aren’t aware if it’s positive or negative awareness, you’re missing quite a lot of the picture here. 

So, what’s the health angle here? Well, it’s just a scale to work out if your brand is booming (healthy), the same as you started (thriving), or failing with lesser revenues and/or fewer leads (sick). If your brand is unhealthy or sick, the metrics you’re tracking and analysing can offer some insight on why this is happening and how to stop it. When it’s thriving, you can find how to keep going and what strengths you should focus on. And when it’s healthy, you can always look for improvements on how to be better. More importantly, it’s about having a complete understanding of your brand and how you can use this to your advantage. 

But what’s the difference between Brand Health and Brand Tracking?  To be more specific, Brand Health is a collection of measuring metrics used to assess how your brand is performing as compared to your business goals. Brand Tracking, on the other hand, keeps a tab on brand health over time, to see how things change; to analyse the highs and lows of your brand health metrics over a period of time.

What do you need to measure most to assess brand health? 

Brand Awareness

Brand awareness will tell you how familiar people / followers / consumers / customers are with the qualities and image of your brand. A healthy brand will have high brand awareness levels, and the buzz it generates will mostly be positive.

• Social media impressions: the total number of people who stumbled upon your social media post / message. 
• Social media engagement: the total number of interactions and engagement with your social media posts 
• The sentiment: the number of positive and negative mentions of your brand. 

Best way to measure this: Social Listening Tools 

Brand Reputation

Brand reputation measures how consumers view or “review” your brand. Consumers will trust a brand rocking a good reputation in the marketplace. And there’s no better way to build a positive brand reputation than by providing exquisite customer service. What does this mean exactly? Good customer service works like magic in brand reputation because customers appreciate helpful customer service, which then becomes a decisive factor in their buying / purchasing process. 

Use the same social listening tools to check for mentions and consumer reviews and tags. Monitoring your brand’s social media networks and spotting mentions about your brand can really help avert any social media crisis. By being quick in responding to your customers’ queries online, you ensure to boost your reputation and decline the churn rate. Happy clients stay loyal to a brand for much longer and are ready to spend more money. 

Brand Equity

Brand equity is all about: the customer is king! Understanding your customers’ demographics (target audience), their needs that you fulfil help you personalize your marketing message throughout all stages of the sales funnel. How your target audience related to your brand thereafter is your brand equity. 

Let’s understand brand equity and its relations with brand health. Heard of something called brand value? Brand equity is a higher term for that. It measures how your brand is perceived by your customers but also how much they want to willingly purchase what you offer, especially over other options. Their reviews increase the “value” of your brand. Basically, brand equity is the social value of the brand’s name plus recognition. Nike has a higher brand equity than Gucci even though Gucci is a luxury apparel brand.

Ways to track brand equity: 

• Surveys and focus groups
• Local store traffic
• Search volume for your brand and products
• Local media mentions
• Social mentions and reviews

There are various other contributing factors to assess brand health as mentioned above. Like: 

Employee engagement: the most different aspects of a brand health check. It tells you how passionate your employees are about their job in your organisation. It all comes down to leadership skills. Can you inspire people to stay committed to your organization? A high employee engagement results in higher ROI, higher work culture, higher employee satisfaction. 

How do you achieve high employee engagement? It all begins with the recruiting process! 

Brand positioning is another factor they play a key role in keeping a track of brand health. How effective is your marketing message? What are people saying about your brand (share of voice)? Why are people liking / disliking your brand? 

To articulate this better, a brand health check is a continuous process done on a regular basis to get ahead of competition and spot problems early on. To effectively build a strong brand, you also need social media monitoring tools which will save you a lot of time allowing you to focus on what’s really important: providing value to your clients / customers / followers to improve your brand reputation.