Jun 27, 2024
To foster awareness and engagement and drive brand advocacy, companies need to focus on brand health in a holistic way—combining a diverse measurement approach with data integration and visualization. Stakeholders with the complete data story can quickly deliver impactful insights and inform key decisions to optimize brand strategy and activations over time and increase brand loyalty.
A holistic understanding of brand health starts with a diverse measurement approach, through which you collect information from various audience perspectives and associated data sources. This includes qualitative and quantitative measures—first-party surveys, social listening, and campaign performance metrics across owned, earned, and paid channels.
First-party surveys provide insights into overall brand perceptions. Surveying sample populations among target audience segments allows brands to answer questions around awareness and favorability compared with key industry competitors and discover what might lead prospective customers to move toward a brand. Surveys also help you gauge how well current customers understand what your brand stands for and how likely they are to recommend or switch to another brand. A deeper understanding of brand perception through first-party surveys helps uncover opportunities to adjust brand messaging and touchpoint tactics.
Social listening is another important aspect of measurement, helping you keep a pulse on broader conversations around your brand, key competitors, and industry niche. Tracking conversation size, sentiment, and share of voice among competitors can inform how and when to adjust messaging in the marketplace. Brands that monitor industry conversation can identify issues that pose a risk and require crisis response or positive happenings that present opportunities to be part of a social moment. Social listening also helps brands gauge how well audiences are consuming and amplifying key messaging and identify opportunities to build trust and appreciation with consumers.
While surveys and social listening tend to be more qualitative in nature, performance metrics provide a more quantitative view of brand health through direct measurement of touchpoints and customer experiences. In paid and earned channels, measurements around impressions and reach gauge whether marketing efforts are getting in front of the right people in the right places to broaden awareness. Interaction metrics in paid and owned channels identify messages that resonate most with audiences and are most effective in driving the user behaviors that marketing efforts seek to cultivate.
Data integration and visualization also help create a holistic understanding of a brand. Data integration breaks down siloes, bringing together data from all aspects of brand measurement into one place and enabling visibility into data relationships. Visualization then exposes patterns and trends among the data, allowing quick analysis and insight.
Together and when curated the right way, data integration and visualization support decision making across the campaign ecosystem. Combined learnings from multiple aspects of a campaign inform strategic and tactical optimizations, and regularly refreshed dashboards empower you to monitor ongoing performance holistically and optimize decisions for the greatest impact.
The ability to quickly tell the story of your brand’s health enables you to inform key strategy and optimization decisions. Through a holistic view of brand health, you can quickly assess what people are saying or feeling about your brand and how these align with the desired conversation and feelings that marketing efforts seek to drive. Similarly, this holistic view can show you whether brand messaging efforts are reaching the right audiences, fostering desired behaviors, and building emotional loyalty and advocacy with prospects and customers to drive participation.
By bringing all aspects of brand health into one view, marketing strategists and tacticians can explore what’s driving brand perceptions and customer behaviors, identify which efforts are working hardest or not working, and use those insights to refine campaigns and broader strategic efforts. Through data integration and dashboard visualization, you can monitor the impacts of those refinements. This creates a feedback loop for continuous improvement of targeting, content and creative assets, and channel mix, which enables you to successfully optimize your brand health over time.
A holistic view of audience reach, brand perceptions, and customer interactions is vital to understanding overall brand health and to telling the story of how your brand connects with target audiences. Without this complete picture, data and insights remain siloed and marketing teams may be missing key relationships between customer touchpoints and messaging. Bringing a diverse set of measures together into one holistic view breaks down these silos, letting your brand take action to increase loyalty and ultimately succeed.
