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When I speak to marketing leaders about brand health and how to improve a brand’s visibility, I emphasize the point that every business is a living entity. And, in order to thrive and ensure sustained growth, it is imperative to track brand health.
Just like with living beings, internal and external injuries can do tremendous damage. Left untreated, the disorders affecting your brand will result in dysfunction and may even kill your brand altogether — hence the necessity to measure brand health.
Now, assessing brand health is both art and science, with a bit of alchemy. It requires skill, much 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 injuring your brand, how can you possibly improve it? To get you started off on the right foot, here are five metrics or traits you can rely on to determine your brand health.
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 that is designed to measure how aware people are of your brand, if they connect with it and how ready they are to recommend it to others.
The question that’s typically asked to gauge 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 obtain will reveal:
- Who your loyal customers are.
- How prepared people are to promote your brand via word of mouth.
- The likelihood of your competitors successfully poaching your client base.
- The number of dissatisfied customers who may damage your brand reputation.
You can use a series of follow-up questions in order to better understand the results you obtained.
2. Brand reputation
Brand reputation is so important that once damaged it can be very hard to recover. That’s why companies often resolve to drastic solutions such as changing their names in order to stay in business.
Think of companies such as Facebook which had to rebrand to Meta, Weight Watchers which opted for the acronym WW, and McAfee which changed to Intel Security.
Thankfully, 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 troubling situations before they go viral and create insurmountable problems. This is definitely a brand health metric you don’t want to overlook.
Related: These 4 Elements Are Key to Branding Your Business
3. Share of voice
Word of mouth (WOM) is undoubtedly a brand’s best marketing tool. Actually, WOM accounts for 13% of consumer sales, or $6 trillion of yearly consumer spending.
This is thanks to the fact that people are more likely to have confidence in companies that their friends or family endorse. And with 92% of people trusting recommendations from friends, it’s not hard to see why WOM generates five times more sales than paid media.
This brings us to the share of voice: 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 across the web looking for places where your brand is mentioned when discussions are being held about the best service providers in your niche or industry. They aggregate data and calculate your brand’s perceived position according to consumers.
4. Purchase intent
A business is deemed healthy if it has a steady revenue stream and a loyal customer base. Consequently, brands are always looking for ways to increase both of these avenues. Purchase intent is the trait that tells you the probability of people buying from you after they have come to know of your products and or service offering.
Much like with NPS, a simple question is posed: From what you know about the company [X], what is the chance 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 took the survey.
Related: Customer Intent Has Changed. Have You?
5. Unprompted brand recall
If I said “toothpaste,” what’s the brand that comes to mind? What about if I said “soda,” or “social media?” There’s definitely a brand that you thought of. This is what’s known as an unprompted brand recall and it has fascinating psychological implications.
But how can you measure unprompted brand recall? Again, we use a question: Think of industry [X], what’s the first company that comes to mind?
Aggregate the number of respondents who mentioned your brand and divide this figure by the sum of people who participated in the questionnaire and then multiply by 100 to obtain a percentage.
Benefits of constant brand health assessments
Making the effort to invest in consistent brand analysis is one of the fastest ways to discover weaknesses and pinpoint strengths.
Imagine getting into an accident and suffering trauma that results in you hemorrhaging internally, but you chose to avoid going to the emergency room. What do you think will happen? It’ll 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’s a lot that can injure your brand, and you cannot tell what sort of damage you’re suffering without brand health assessments.
On the other side, such evaluations can inform you about what you’re doing right and what business strategies appear to be working in your favor. And in a data-obsessed world, what you discover can help you successfully plan your next course of action.
With the world economy starting to pick up after the global downturn caused by Covid-19, now is a good time to carry out a thorough brand health analysis.