Having worked for big brands and for start-ups in the field of brand marketing I get a lot of questions around brand measurement. It can be a minefield when picking a tool(s) for measuring brand. I’m going to walk through some of the free or cheap opinions that you can get started with today!
There are a number of ways to measure ‘brand’. Brand measurement can be a difficult conversation because before you can measure you have to agree on what is important to measure – there is no one-size-fits-all. There are groups of things that can be measured within the brand world and then depending on how much of a purist you are depends on when you move into the clearer world of performance measurement.
Think about it like a flow chart:
- Do I want to measure brand?
- Do I / my team have faith in brand building?
- Can brand building be measured without sales data?
- Do I / my team have faith in brand building?
If you answered yes to all of the above then you are a brand purist. If you answered no to the second or third question then you are brand hybrid and if you answered no to the first question then leave, there’s lots of other good stuff on.
A brand hybrid used to mean someone who didn’t really know a lot about brand marketing and someone who didn’t really know how to ‘do’ performance marketing. That’s absolutely not the case anymore. Brand hybrid people are great. The dream person is someone who can take a marketing idea and demonstrate how that idea can work across brand AND performance channels. That same personality, I guarantee, will also want to measure the success of their work. So let’s talk about brand measurement.
Types of brand measurement
- Brand awareness and unaided brand awareness – brand awareness is the general recognition and familiarity of a brand among consumers, while unaided brand awareness specifically measures spontaneous recall of a brand without any prompts or cues
- Brand recall – is a slightly more in depth analysis into the brand. The idea of brand recall is to give the customer a specific cue, such as a brand name, logo, or tagline. It is a measure of a consumer’s ability to retrieve a brand from memory when prompted with a specific stimulus.
- Brand Sentiment – is a measure of consumers’ overall perception and attitude towards a brand. Social media APIs provide the data for mentions of a brand and related information then natural language processing works to give you a quick analysis for positive and negative opinions.
- Share of Voice – by setting a ‘universe’ and measuring how many times your brand is mentioned in that universe you get to SoV or Share of Voice. It’s a useful measure when you want to know your relative marketing activity against that of our competition. Because you can’t measure the entire world you have to pre-set some parameters for SoV to work.
The top 6 tools everyone in marketing should know about
Below is a list of the top 5 tools I use on a regular basis for measuring clients’ brands online.
Google Trends: See How Your Brand is Trending Online
Google Trends is a free tool that allows you to track the popularity of keywords and topics over time. By entering your brand name as a keyword, you can see how much interest there is in your brand and how it’s trending. This can help you gauge your brand awareness and how much people are talking about your brand online.
BuzzSumo: Analyze Your Brand’s Content Performance
Buzzsumo is a tool that allows you to analyze your brand’s content performance by tracking how often your content is shared on social media. By analyzing the number of social media shares, you can see how much engagement your brand’s content is getting and how it’s resonating with your audience. This can help you measure the impact of your content marketing efforts on brand awareness.
Google Analytics: Measure Your Website’s Traffic and Engagement
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that allows you to measure your website’s traffic and engagement. By analyzing metrics like pageviews, bounce rate, and time on site, you can see how many people are visiting your website and how engaged they are with your brand. This can help you measure the effectiveness of your website as a tool for building brand awareness and driving traffic.
YouTube Analytics: Track Your Brand’s Video Performance
YouTube Analytics is a tool that allows you to track your brand’s video performance on YouTube. By analyzing metrics like views, likes, and comments, you can see how much engagement your brand’s videos are getting and how they’re resonating with your audience. This can help you measure the impact of your video marketing efforts on brand awareness. Also, YouTube has a product for feedback called Brand Lift surveys. Instead of showing an advert it will ask the audience segments questions about a brand or their memories about recent adverts. I have a detailed guide on setting up Brand Lift and Ad Recall survey’s here.
SurveyMonkey: Conduct Online Surveys to Measure Brand
SurveyMonkey is an online survey tool that allows you to conduct surveys to measure brand perception. By asking questions about your brand, you can gain valuable insights into how your brand is perceived by your audience and how aware they are of your brand. This can help you understand how much work needs to be done to build brand awareness and improve your brand’s reputation.
These tools are easy to get started with but do leave a comment below if you are struggling with anything. Also, let me know about other tools you use for brand measurement below.