Branding and rebranding can be tricky. There are several factors to consider, and when your brand is ready, you need to be sure it performs to your—and your customers’—expectations. But how do you quantify your brand’s performance? What metrics best express how your brand is fulfilling its goals? The right metrics will give you a deeper understanding of how your brand is faring compared to your competitors and meeting customer needs. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at brand metrics, along with our list of the 10 metrics you need to monitor to track your brand performance.
Data is an important driver for numerous aspects of marketing. Brand metrics are quantifiable measures of brand performance and health. And you must keep monitoring these metrics to stay on top of trends, watch for indicators that you need to make changes, and learn how your competitors are faring.
Tracking these metrics allows you to measure the impact of your marketing strategies and campaigns. It can also provide feedback on your brand health and the effectiveness of your overall brand strategy. Simply launching your brand without tracking metrics puts you at a distinct disadvantage.
When you measure and track brand metrics, you have a quantifiable calculation of how your brand performs for your customers and against your competitors. Keeping tabs on brand metrics ensures that you can see when you are succeeding and catch any slight downward trends that may need to be acted on immediately—before they affect your brand health.
Brand metrics are also useful when you need “hard numbers” to bring to leadership. You can justify your spending on campaigns and demonstrate the value of your marketing team with a clear presentation of quantifiable data.
What should you look for in terms of brand metrics? The best metrics meet the requirements of the SMART framework. They should be strategic, market-driven, actionable, repeatable, and account for all of the touchpoints throughout the customer journey.
Let’s take a closer look at the SMART requirements:
Strategic
The metrics you choose should be aligned with your organization’s strategic objectives and goals. Without this alignment, the metric is meaningless.
Market-driven
The metric must be measured through the lens of the market. Internal company metrics should not be measured for brand performance data. You’re looking for external metrics that measure brand performance for customers and against competitors.
Actionable
Metrics must offer guidance for action. If no action is associated with the metric, it isn’t a valuable measure for your brand. In other words, if you measure a metric and you have no way to impact the metric if it changes, it’s not a good metric for bra