I’m sure you agree that a strong brand is critical to the success of a business. It increases sales, attracts talent, and provides free publicity. So, how is your brand doing? Is anyone aware of it? What do they think about it? What is your brand known for? How does it compare to competitors? How does your brand health reflect your business’s survival and growth prospects?
A brand health check will assist you in determining your company’s current state and making necessary improvements. It indicates whether or not your brand is acceptable. Regularly measuring brand health will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.
The insights gained throughout the process will assist you in providing value to your customers and improving the overall perception of your brand. You will also be able to determine whether anything has harmed the brand’s health.
Brand health is defined differently by different people. Each contains a set of metrics and approaches, but they all lead to the same conclusion. Brand health is primarily determined by how effective your brand is in assisting you in achieving your business goals.
Brand health meaning
The metrics that determine your brand’s efficiency and how consumers perceive it makes up your brand’s health.
Rob Rush, a managing director at Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory, states that a healthy brand provides customers with consistent, memorable, and differentiated experiences.
Less satisfactory brands are perceived differently. Customers have little emotional attachment to them and cannot tell them apart from similar products.
To assess the health of your brand, consider all aspects of its presence, such as;
- Brand Awareness
- Brand Reputation
- Brand Equity
- Employee Engagement
- Brand Delivery and
- Brand Positioning
Judging from each element, you’ll get a good sense of your brand’s overall health.
Why measure brand health?
Every aspect of brand health is critical in its own right. Looking at the topic as a whole gives you a bigger picture and helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses. For instance, your brand awareness may be excellent, but if you don’t know whether it is positive or negative, you’re missing half the picture.
When you consider all of the factors, you can determine whether your brand is unhealthy, okay, or improving (or whatever scale you want to use). You can then take specific actions.
If it’s unhealthy, then your brand is actively harming your company. You’ll be able to see why this is the case and how to stop it using the metrics you’re tracking. When it’s excellent, you’ll be able to figure out how to keep it going. When it’s improving, you can start looking for ways to do better.
Essentially, it is about understanding your brand and using it to your advantage.
Measuring brand health also provides valuable marketing insights. For example, you may consider increased brand awareness to be a positive sign. On the other hand, brand awareness can be positive or negative.
Brand health monitoring answers clarifying questions like “What is the source of these brand mentions on Social media?” or “Does my reach exceed that of competing brands?”
Furthermore, the brand health check is an effective way to understand your market position, reveal your competitors, and listen to your employees and customers.
Of course, you can disregard brand health studies and continue to collect raw data such as social media likes or followers. Unfortunately, these are only fractions and not the entire picture.
Additionally, your brand’s health is important for personnel recruitment because strong experts prefer to work with strong brands.
How to evaluate brand health?
There are three common methods to determine your brand health. They are:
- Social Listening
- Focus groups and surveys
- Customer feedback
Let’s dive in and analyze each method;
1. Track the number of your brand mentions and social media sentiment through social listening
Brand awareness, brand reputation, and share of voice are the most visible brand health metrics revealed by social listening. You can track all of these metrics on social media (social networks, news sites, blogs, forums, etc).
However, if your target audience does not spend time on social media, social listening may not work for you, and you will need to resort to other methods, which will be discussed further below.
Social listening entails employing a social listening/social media monitoring tool to detect keyword mentions on social media networks, news, forums, and the web.
The tool analyses mentions of the brand (as well as that of your product(s), CEO, or any relevant hashtags) to show you the big picture, including sentiment analysis.
2. Collect detailed quantitative and qualitative data with Focus groups and Surveys
Social listening collects information that people post online. This means that the information is not influenced by the questions posed.
However, there are times when we require answers to specific questions. That’s when focus groups and surveys come in handy.
With the Focus group and survey approach, you can get a very good understanding of your brand awareness, especially among specific demographics (depending on how you conduct the survey). In-depth quantitative and qualitative data provided by participants will clarify how people perceive the brand.
These methods will also assist you in defining your employee engagement and brand positioning.
3. Analyze customer feedback to identify customer needs, recommendations, and complaints
When you’ve gathered enough information from your target audience, it’s time to turn your attention to existing customers. Customers shape brand reputation and brand awareness in many cases. This is why businesses today strive to be customer-centric. If they are satisfied, they can be your first promoter – even before your marketing team hits the ground running. They either make or break it by telling their friends about it or remaining silent, leaving positive or negative reviews.
You may want to take your existing customers’ feedback seriously because it can cost five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain them.
Get expert brand health tracking services in Africa with Survey54
We’ve already discussed the significance of monitoring and measuring brand health and some helpful strategies for achieving it. Do you require additional assistance? Survey54 is only a click away.
We enable companies to grow and scale with fast and transparent insights from audiences across Africa and emerging markets.
Survey54 offers clients top-notch research and consulting services that go beyond data collection. We use brand health insights in conjunction with sentiment analysis and other related insights to help clients understand brand loyalty, trust, reputation, and more.
Whatever your requirements, we will provide a bespoke solution to meet your needs! Contact us now.
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