How can brand tracking help my business?

Justify your marketing budgets and prioritize your marketing spend

Where and among which audiences is your brand lagging? Perhaps you have great awareness on the west coast, but you’re unknown to the midwest. 

How do you find this out? 

If you read the title of this page, you’ll know how—brand tracking!

Finding out where your valuable customers are—geographically, digitally, which life stage etc.—and how your brand resonates with them is crucial to knowing where to spend on marketing. 

We’ve recently expanded into the new regions. Through our brand tracking, we discovered we actually had quite high brand awareness in those regions, despite the fact that we weren’t operating there.

Liz Yates, Head of Growth at Oddbox

How Oddbox saved £200k on national expansion by running brand research

Read case study

Quantify success and ROI of your marketing campaigns

Okay, so you figured out where to reach your perfect customers and how to carry out your marketing strategy—amazing work!

Now’s the time to track the effect your marketing campaigns have on your brand. 

You’re looking for brand tracking! 

Brand tracking research is a particularly useful way to measure the success of some marketing activities that are otherwise quite hard to quantify. Think about things like PR or out-of-home advertising: your standard metrics—clicks, new users etc.—probably won’t apply. But tracking fluctuations in the perception consumers have about your brand, which can be influenced by things like PR, social issues, and out-of-home ads, is where brand tracking becomes super important.

Getting data points around things like brand awareness and ad recall makes it easier for us to link back to, say, high growth in short-term sales metrics.

Phil Denington, Global Creative Lead, Wise

Pro tip 💡

“If you feel like you’re not sure which consumer segments to run your brand tracking research with, running some consumer profiling research first makes loads of sense.

By running consumer profiling research you’ll identify the clear groups of consumers who’ll give you valuable insights into your brand. And these might not only be your actual customers—don’t discount the value of non customers’ opinions.”

Sam Killip

VP Customer Success

Track your position among competitors

Don’t neglect your competitors in your brand tracking! 

It will benefit you to run brand tracking on your competitors as well, to make sure you have a full understanding of your market and how your brand fits into it. 

Because—here’s a secret—your smartest competitors are probably doing the same thing to make sure they know where your brand sits compared to theirs. 

Pro tip 💡

“Measuring the NPS of your closest competitors is a fantastic way to get context around your own score. Not only does it let you know the score you should be striving to beat, but it can also tell you things about the state of the market in general.”

Nick White

Customer Research Lead

For example, let’s say your NPS score declines. In isolation, this is worrying information that will have you questioning where your brand has slipped up. 

But if you find that NPS has declined across the board in your category, you’ll know it’s a wider industry trend.

“From the brand tracker we can understand some of the emotional drivers from users. Together with our other data sources, the results are used to make both product and business decisions,” says Uwe Hook’s, Chief Marketing Officer at WorldRemit.

We can see how our competitors are doing, which is obviously important for us to understand to see where the opportunities are for us to grow and disrupt the space even more.

Uwe Hook’s, Chief Marketing Office, WorldRemit

Discover your biggest brand advocates

Some customers like what you offer, some are nonplussed, but some REALLY love what you do! And word-of-mouth still counts for a lot when you’re growing a strong brand (and even when you’re a household name). 

How do you find out who these people are? 

Yup, you guessed it—brand tracking will help you with this!

By asking groups of your ideal customers what they think about your brand you can also find out which segments are the ones most likely to organically promote your brand to their friends and family. 

Spot downward trends before they become an issue

This one’s all in the name—brand tracking.

Imagine your Net Promoter Score plummets by 10 percentage points—nightmare! It’s time to start some further investigations and discover the root cause. Finding the source of problems quickly means you can nip them in the bud and prevent any further damage.

When you’re continuously tracking your brand’s performance over time, you’re able to see which direction you’re heading in and take action to make sure the downward trend doesn’t continue.  

We came from a place where we had no brand research. Now we run a quarterly brand tracker, with added monthly dips into brand awareness.

Beatrice Ramelle-Rigollet, Research Manager, WorldRemit 

Benchmark your performance in different markets

Don’t assume your brand has the same clout in all markets. Consumers might have different general perceptions of your brand from market to market.

It makes sense to run your brand tracking in different markets to make sure you have a truly competitive picture of what people think about your brand.

“One of the biggest surprises was discovering that there was awareness amongst personas that we maybe didn’t want or need to be targeting. What that insight has led to is a more careful look at how we truly target exactly the right people.”

There’s been lots of things that we’ve learned from doing brand tracking where we can extract a single question and ask specific groups of people, or we can take it as the whole picture.

Deborah Lang, Head of Brand Service & PR, Bella & Duke