Top 10 Questions Asked About Brand Tracking Everything you’ve always wanted to know about brand tracking. Table of Contents Introduction Top 10 Questions What is brand tracking? What are the main benefits of brand tracking? What types of segmentation does brand tracking allow? What are customer audience characteristics? What are the standard KPIs for brand tracking? What are some other important KPIs for brand tracking? What is a margin of error, and how is it calculated? Why bother with MRP-based brand tracking? How do you deal with open-ended questions in brand tracking? Why is a dashboard so important in brand tracking? What Makes Latana Different? Conclusion What’s Next? 1 . 2 . 3. 4 . 5. 6. 7 . 8. 9. 10. P a r t 1 P a r t 2 P a r t 3 P a r t 4 P a r t 5 Introduction PA RT 1 / In spite of its growing popularity, brand tracking is still a relatively new concept to many in the world of digital marketing. Therefore, it makes sense that people are interested in finding out more about this incredibly useful solution. To make the world of brand tracking more accessible, this ebook will take a look at the top 10 questions asked about brand tracking and provide detailed answers. We hope that by educating the public on what brand tracking is and why it’s important, we’ll be able to help more brands succeed. From the basics, like “What is brand tracking?”, to the more complicated questions, like “What is MRP, and why do you use it?” — you’ll find a wealth of information here. So, sit back, relax, and get ready to become a brand tracking expert. 10 Top Questions PA RT 2 / What is Brand Tracking? Q U ESTIO N 01 QUESTI ON 1 / What is brand tracking? Brand tracking is the continuous monitoring of your brand’s health over a period of time. In essence, it provides you with a means to understand how your target audiences feel about your brand and respond to your brand messaging. The data that advanced brand tracking software supplies is invaluable to building a strong brand marketing strategy, and it uniquely equips brand managers to succeed. But brand tracking provides more than just data on target audiences’ response to your brand — it also allows you to compare your brand performance across markets, track the competition, identify new audiences or areas to focus on, and even zone in on ones that aren’t working out. Brand tracking software makes it possible for you to define your niche target audiences and collect accurate data — such as how consumers are responding to your brand messaging. This data can be then further segmented by specific audience attributes to find more nuanced insights, which helps brand managers refine future brand marketing communications. Additionally, brand tracking makes it easy to track core KPIs such as brand awareness, brand perception, brand consideration, brand associations, brand usage, and more. This data helps brand managers to understand how target audiences feel about their brand — their general knowledge, preferences, and use habits. When you use a tool designed to track your brand’s overall health and performance, you’ll be able to better understand your brand equity, identity, and performance. And with this data, you can plan and execute better, more effective brand campaigns to increase brand loyalty. August 2020 August 2020 September 2020 Delta Competitors Brand B Brand C Brand D Brand E Brand A 15 20 25 30 35% 10 5 0 Brand A Brand B Brand C Brand D Brand E Aided Awareness August – September 2020 USA General population Gender All Responses Male Female Education All Responses High Medium Low Age All Responses 18 – 25 26 – 35 36 – 45 46 – 55 56 – 65 Persona: Jane Save Cancel Brand A Brand E Brand D Brand B Brand C What are the main benefits of brand tracking? Q U ESTIO N 02 QUESTI ON 2 / What are the main benefits of brand tracking? Brand tracking provides numerous benefits, but for the sake of brevity, we’ll list the top five here. 1. Provides Reliable Data for an Abstract Activity As countless brand managers will testify, accurately tracking the impact of brand campaigns and brand marketing efforts can be a study in frustration. Unlike tracking other performance marketing campaigns, branding can prove challenging to accurately quantify. However, when you use a tool that was specifically created to track your brand’s health and performance, you’ll gather more accurate data and, consequently, be able to make smarter marketing decisions. 1 2. Proves that Brand Activities are Worth their Budget Brand tracking software makes it possible to gather data that allows you to accurately quantify Return on Investment (ROI). With this, you’ll be able to prove to your boss that the brand marketing budget is going to a worthy cause. Instead of taking a stab in the dark and guessing if the latest uptick in traffic can be attributed to your most recent brand campaign, brand tracking allows you to know for sure. By accurately measuring your brand campaign performance and overall success, you can rest assured that you’re spending your budget wisely. 3. Allows You To Monitor & Segment Your Target Audiences When creating brand messaging for campaigns, you have to craft communication that keeps each specific target audience in mind. Why waste money trying to convince the general population of your brand’s value when you can speak directly to the consumers who are likely most interested in your brand? Brand tracking software allows you to not only identify and define your niche target audiences but also collect data on how they’re responding to your brand. You can then further segmented the data by audience attributes to generate more nuanced insights — which make it easier to refine brand messaging going forward. 62% 10% 23% 14% 4. Allows You to Track Core & Customized KPIs With brand tracking, you can easily monitor core KPIs such as brand awareness, brand consideration, brand associations, brand usage, and more. This kind of data allows brand managers to better understand how target audiences respond to their brand — what their knowledge levels, preferences, and associations are. Some brand tracking tools even allow for KPI tracking customization, which makes it possible for brands to monitor the key metrics that actually matter to their marketing strategy. With this kind of data at hand, you can gather more meaningful insights which, in turn, make it easier to effectively communicate with your target audiences. Plus, it helps prove brand campaign effectiveness to management! 5. Allows You to Track Your Competitors’ Performance You’ll be excited to hear that many brand tracking tools also allow you to monitor the performance of your top competitors. This makes it easier to see where you’re over- or underperforming in comparison. With this information, you’ll be able to identify opportunities for growth and areas that need improvement. And now that you know how well the competition is appealing to your target audiences, you’ll be able to plan more effective brand campaigns and work on increasing your brand loyalty. What types of segmentation does brand tracking allow? Q U ESTIO N 03 QUESTI ON 3 / What types of segmentation does brand tracking allow? There are a few main types of segmentation that apply to brand tracking, such as market segmentation and audience segmentation. To begin with, market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad business or consumer market into its most important segments or sub-groups. Before identifying your target audience, it’s important to identify your market segmentation. Next, we have audience segmentation, also known as customer segmentation. This is the process of grouping consumers together based on shared characteristics. There are several different ways that you can do this, such as: Demographic segmentation, Geographic segmentation, Behavioral segmentation and Psychographic segmentation. These types of audience characteristics are the building blocks for your segmentation. These demographic, geographic, psychographic, or behavioral criteria are what you can use to frame and analyze your audience. For example, a target audience for a sporting goods brand could be men aged 25-45 who live in cities and are interested in extreme sports. As you can see, this example included demographic, geographic, and psychographic segmentation — making it a quite specific target audience. Demographic segmentation based on attributes such as age, education, and gender Geographic segmentation based on consumers’ locations Behavioral segmentation based on consumers’ actions Psychographic segmentation based on perceptions, interests and mindsets What are custom audience characteristics? Q U ESTIO N 04 QUESTI ON 4 / What are custom audience characteristics? Custom audience characteristics are similar to your standard audience characteristics, except they’re unique to your brand. The purpose of custom characteristics is to enable you to filter, analyze, and compare your brand’s performance across your various target audiences. Using custom audience characteristics, you can compare data between the general population and your target audiences. This then allows you to tweak current audiences or discover potential new target audiences for your brand. For example, a brand that sells wetsuits would be interested in target audiences filled with people who surf, people who live by the ocean, or people who go free-diving. However, to be able to drill down and find their specific niches, they may want to track some custom audience characteristics in the form of customized KPIs. So, to get the data they need, this brand might want to include custom characteristics such as “Interested in environmental sustainability” or “Requires a 10-year warranty” in their surveys. By tracking specific, customized characteristics, this brand will be able to see how they compare to their competitors in areas that are actually important to them. AGE GENDER WHAT DOES YOUR AUDIENCE LOOK LIKE? EDUCATION income Gen Z Yoga Tech Savviness region NICHE brand audience Q U ESTIO N 05 What are the standard KPIs for brand tracking? Awareness Advocacy Preference Usage Consideration QUESTI ON 5 / What are the standard KPIs for brand tracking? To be fair, not every brand tracking tool will offer the exact same “standard” KPIs. However, there are a few that show up quite frequently. These include, but are not limited to, unaided brand awareness, aided brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference, and brand usage. Brand awareness is generally the level to which consumers know about your brand. Aided awareness is when they are prompted with a list of brand names or logos and unaided awareness is when they’re asked a question such as: “Name the top three brands that come to mind when you think of the _____ industry.” Brand consideration is pretty much what it sounds like — how likely are consumers to consider using your brand? The same goes for brand preference: To what extent do consumers prefer your brand over the competition? Finally, brand usage measures how many consumers actually use your brand. Together, these KPIs capture the journey a customer goes through from discovery to purchase. Individually, they can be used to track the performance of your campaigns in converting your target audience into reoccurring customers. Furthermore, these standard brand KPIs can also be used to inform your strategic brand objectives. What are some other important KPIs for brand tracking? Q U ESTIO N 06 QUESTI ON 6 / What are some other important KPIs for brand tracking? Once again, each brand tracking tool will offer different additional KPIs. So, we will discuss some of the more popular ones in this section. Beyond the standard KPIs discussed above, many tools also offer brand affinity — which is to what extent those who are aware of your brand like or dislike your brand. Another great KPI to track is brand association. This asks consumers to name the feelings, qualities, and characteristics that come to mind when thinking about the brand in question. Another great KPI to track is brand experience. As a general rule, this KPI measures how much consumers like or dislike your brand, as well as how likely they’d be to recommend your brand to family or friends. In terms of brand experience, it may not seem fun to gather feedback on why consumers don’t like your brand. But, as a brand manager, you can use this information to help refine future brand messaging and communication. Brand EXPERIENCE Emotional associations Functional associations Brand Associations Next, we have brand purchase behavior, which is an umbrella term for a few different brand KPIs — recency, frequency, value, and retention. The goal of these KPIs is to help brand managers better understand consumers’ purchase intent. Essentially, how are they interacting with your business, where do they drop off in the conversion funnel, or how often do they return? As the name suggests, recency measures how recently a customer has purchased from your brand. This KPI can be used as a helpful qualifier, as sometimes brand managers need to sort out respondents who haven’t purchased from their brand in a while. For example, perhaps your brand recently underwent a full rebrand and you only want to analyze the behavior of those who have purchased since then. This is a great reason to track recency. Another sub-KPI of brand purchase behavior is frequency. Within a given time period, frequency measures the average number of times a customer has purchased a product or service from your brand. How does frequency help you? Well, perhaps you’d like to compare one-time customers with frequent customers to look for new insights? Retention Value Recency Frequency Brand Purchase Behavior