Maximize Competitiveness with Brand Health Monitoring Strategies
The fundamental way you stand out from the competition is simple – your audience must love you. If people have a positive view of your brand, they will naturally choose you over brands they don’t have much relationship with.
It’s human nature to stick with what we know and like. Brands can turn away what once was a very healthy, loyal customer base in a day. All it takes is for them to showcase values and turn away their customers. This may be done by supporting someone the public doesn’t agree with, releasing a shoddy product, or publicly demonstrating poor customer service.
Just as brand perception can tank in a day, it can also slowly die out over time. That’s why it’s so important to monitor your brand health.
What is Brand Health?
Brand health simply refers to how your brand is doing overall through the lens of your customer base. This means you look at customer perception, customer retention rates, brand awareness, and equity metrics.
- Customer perception: The overall opinion (positive, negative, or neutral) that customers have of your brand, products, and services.
- Customer retention and loyalty: how often customers return to you and are committed to shopping from your brand first.
- Brand awareness: How familiar your target audience is with your brand.
- Brand equity: how much your brand is financially valued.
Some brands will naturally find it easier to maintain positive brand health than others. Media companies, for example, typically keep approximately 84% of customers after signing up. Businesses in the hospitality industry, however, only see repeat business from an average of 55%.
Why is Brand Health Important for Your Competitiveness?
Brand health helps you understand how well your marketing, branding, and sales efforts are going. When you check your brand health, you consider everything.
Branding covers plenty of different elements. If you thought it was just your logo, think again. So, what is branding? It includes all this and more:
- Your logo and aesthetics
- Your tone of voice
- Your mission and values
- Your customer service approach
- The value you offer
- Your marketing methods
Your brand is you. Just as a person is full of nuances and is more than their face, your brand is more than your name and logo. You need to check how all elements of your brand are doing. If one area is sick, you must treat it before it can infect the others.
There are two reasons why you need to invest in brand health monitoring. One, as an Edelman report finds, 81% of customers will only buy from a brand if they trust it. Two, it’s how you can accurately compare yourself to your competitors.
Beating out your competition is more than just bringing in more revenue. A startup can bring in a massive wave of money, but if they don’t follow up with good branding and customer retention efforts, the wave could crash and never come back.
For long-term business health, you need to ensure that your customers continue to love you and then use their perceptions to guide your decisions.
There are many ways to do this, but monitoring your brand health is one of the easiest and most effective. After all, brand health can give you insight into every element of your business.
How to Monitor Brand Health: Top Strategies
The good news is that there are many different ways to monitor your brand health. These top strategies will work for every business, from B2B to B2C.
Use Social Listening
Most of the time, you’ll need to listen to social feeds for feedback. People will happily talk about brands they love (or hate) but don’t always consider writing a review.
You’ll need to use social media monitoring tools. With those built-in or third-party tools, you can start tracking brand mentions, relevant hashtags (remember to make your own), and keywords. You’ll see overall mentions and how mentions change over time. Use the insights you gain from here to understand what the public thinks about your brand.
Ask for Personal Brand Feedback
Not all businesses deal with crowds of faceless names and numbers. B2B businesses, for example, regularly take on big clients on a rolling basis. You owe it to your partners to skip the data analytics and go straight to the source. You can do this in several ways, but the best way to handle those VIP clients is by phone.
Of course, in today’s world, you’re actually better off with a video teleconference call. What is a teleconference call, you might ask, and how is it different than picking up the phone? Teleconferencing has long been the go-to for meetings, but it’s preferred today since you can use video calls with visual elements.
This way, you can schedule a one-on-one catch-up call. Do come with a series of questions to guide the meeting, but for the most part, let your client take the lead and outline what they enjoy about your partnership and what could be improved.
Get Customer Feedback
Look for reviews online and ask for them. When collecting customer satisfaction feedback, make sure to use questions like:
- How did you use our product?
- How did you feel about our service?
Asking prompting questions like this can help you understand why customers value your brand, and how your products are being used. Take that information and put it to work in R&D, marketing, and sales.
Use Surveys
Surveys are a great way to track brand health. There’s no limit to what your survey can include, but generally, it’s a good idea to use one of these options:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): A survey that asks how likely a customer is to recommend your brand.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): A survey asking customers to rank how satisfied they are with your brand between “very dissatisfied” to “very satisfied”.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): A survey that asks customers to rank how easy it is to use your business.
Creating a 1-10 weight score in your surveys can create your overall brand health score. An 80+ score, for example, is healthy, while scores under 50 indicate work is needed.
Organize Focus Groups
If you want the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, then you’re better off with a focus group. You can combine these groups to help you understand how new products come across, new brand messages, and more.
To get the most out of your focus groups, go in with a specific goal in mind. This may be how customers think about your new product idea. It could even be about how aware the general public is about your brand and what it does after a big branding campaign.
For best results, try to get people from as many diverse backgrounds as possible.
How to Improve Your Brand Health
Monitoring your brand health will help you understand where your brand identity and outreach efforts suffer. Here are a few examples:
Use Brand Health to Dictate Your Next Marketing Campaign
Monitoring how your customers see your brand is a powerful tool for designing your next marketing campaign. For example:
- If customer awareness rates are low then run a brand awareness campaign to get your name out there.
- If customer perception is low, then you can run a goodwill campaign.
You want to keep the conversation between you and your audience going. Listen to them, and use what you hear to create more meaningful conversations.
Be Specific About the New Customers You Target
This isn’t the only way to improve your brand health. You can also dive deep into understanding who your target audience is and use that information to advertise more meaningful to your ideal customer base. You can choose a top Zoominfo competitor, for example, to collect B2B leads and then compare those leads to your ideal customer profiles.
You will only want to invest efforts into brand awareness and marketing when the leads match.
This way, you can immediately appeal to people who are most likely to stay as clients, customers, or even subscribers. Know your audience and be more targeted with your efforts; you’ll see a leap in your brand health.
Showcase Your Values and Mission to Attract Your Key Demographic
Customers vote with their dollars, so putting your brand values front and center is important. If you run a vegan food subscription service, for example, then you want your commitment to the environment and animals to be front and center.
To do this, you’ll want to incorporate your brand values directly on your website, marketing channels, and social media profiles. This way, those who also value what you do will find you faster. Since your values align, they’ll also be more likely to buy from you.
After all, being king of a niche is better than being an everyman in the big, wide pool of customers.
To Wrap This Up
Monitoring your brand health can make your business so much more competitive. By monitoring how your customers perceive and value your brand, you can make adjustments to your message, values, and even branding to appeal more to them. Start tracking today, and use that information to direct your business. With these strategies, you can focus your efforts, grow your audience, and increase customer retention.
