In this blog, we’ll look at how best to monitor and track brand health using market research.
Just like people, brands go through good times and bad. They can be thriving for months, years, or even decades, and then suddenly start to go into a brand health decline. However, the path to rebuilding brand health can be found with the right insights, tools, and brand strategy. Just as people keep track of how they’re feeling and what they need to do to fix any health problems, brand managers need to monitor their brand’s health to keep it in good shape.
Table of Contents:
- Best brand health tracking solutions
- Why use brand health tracking software?
- What should you look for in a brand health tracker?
- The evolution of brand tracking software
- Tips for using brand tracking software
- Implementing brand tracking software
With ongoing developments in technology, it’s become simple to keep tabs on the key metrics that contribute to strong brand health - such as brand perception, customer experience, brand loyalty, and brand reputation. With the right online platforms, automated tools, and software, all of these metrics are accessible at your fingertips.
Jumping right into it, below are eight tools to consider to get the most from your brand health tracking.
1. quantilope
As an automated platform built around high-quality, efficient, actionable insights, quantilope noticed that many brand health trackers don’t quite capture the level of detail many brands need to grow. Most trackers will measure traditional brand funnel metrics like brand awareness, consideration, usage, and purchase intent, but to fully understand consumer interactions with a brand - they need more of a deep dive; what makes a consumer think about buying a product or service in the first place?; what brands do they think of when making those purchases?; why are people not buying their brand?
To help brands answer these impactful questions, quantilope built a brand tracking solution centered around the acclaimed work of Professor Jenni Romaniuk of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of Marketing Science (author of Better Brand Health and co-author of How Brands Grow). This modernized approach to brand health tracking generates in-depth research insights for actionable strategies and a solid picture of a brand’s performance.
A key part of this new approach is that strong brands have a high ‘Mental Availability’ - that is, these brands naturally come to mind for consumers when they are in certain buying scenarios for a product or service (these scenarios are known as Category Entry Points). Mental Availability and Category Entry Points are two key concepts that help in brand growth, yet few research teams are leveraging these modernized metrics in their typical brand trackers.
With quantilope, research teams can leverage the new brand health tracking approach through the simple use of pre-built templates (both for a pre-study to determine Category Entry Points and for the main brand health tracker). All templates are fully customizable with intuitive placeholders to update for your own particular category. And, the templates were designed for the category to reduce any specific brand bias - this means technically any brand in your category could leverage the same tracking study.
Final results are shared in a real-time tracking dashboard with chart visualizations that make findings easily digestible to any stakeholder.
2. Brandwatch
Brandwatch offers a broad range of features and tools that can track brand health metrics. These include social listening tools, sentiment analysis, trend analysis, image analysis, crisis management, influencer marketing, and more. It tracks data in all these areas to help brands better understand their consumers. Brands using Brandwatch can monitor their brand’s performance and plan marketing based on what the target audience needs from the category.
Another key part of Brandwatch that other social listening tools may not offer is the ability to track print and broadcast media rather than solely digital. Brandwatch also has the ability to track paid campaigns.
As brands learn about their target audience and potential influencer partnerships, they can build marketing and engagement strategies around these aspects to create special bonds between themselves and their customers. This in turn builds customer trust and loyalty (two key parts of brand health).
3. Brand24
Similar to Brandwatch, Brand24 is a digital tool that allows brands to monitor their online presence, engage with their audience, manage their brand reputation, and act on social media insights - all essential areas that feed into overall brand health.
With a focus on social media monitoring, brands using Brand24 can track mentions of brands, products, or keywords across various online platforms. Brand sentiment analysis of social media posts provides a deeper understanding of customer feedback by grouping mentions in terms of how positive, negative, or neutral they are. Brand24 provides detailed analytics and customizable reports, allowing you to measure the impact of your social media efforts, track campaign performance, and generate valuable insights to optimize your marketing strategies for better brand health.
Some consider it a more affordable solution for social listening compared to other tools on the market. Because it’s considered to be more affordable, Brand24 may be best suited for smaller to medium-sized companies that need flexible pricing plans.
4. Hubspot
HubSpot’s CRM platform helps you to track brand health by monitoring brand conversations and measuring brand engagement (i.e. blog traffic, click rates, etc.).
Hubspot merges seamlessly with many existing customer service tools (such as Salesforce), making it easy to track several elements of your overall brand health. Hubspot’s Marketing Hub tool allows brands to monitor traffic connected to individual marketing campaigns while its Operations Hub organizes customer data to review important brand metrics related to brand health.
5. Awario
Awario monitors conversations about your brand online so that you can see how your brand is perceived and in what context people are talking about it. Positive and negative mentions of your brand give a good indication of your brand’s health, and mentions can be filtered to narrow in on specific aspects. Competitive brand monitoring is also possible: just set the software to identify mentions of competitors, and then conduct an analysis on how competitor brand perceptions compare to yours.
Awario has the added benefit of identifying opportunities for growth. New contacts can be made with prospects who are looking to partner with brands like yours - such as influencers who can expand your reach and help increase sales.
6. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is considered an all-in-one social media management tool for social media publishing, engagement, social listening, and advertising. It’s a versatile tool that offers highly customizable insights into the conversations people are having about your brand or other topics of your choice. Its contact management feature keeps contacts and communications organized, while its content management allows you to compose and schedule posts to make messaging and timing align with the needs of consumers.
Insights are presented in real time, making it easier to react to brand mentions as they happen - either by engaging with consumers or taking immediate action with your product or marketing. Hootsuite presents insights in a straightforward way, ensuring they are always relevant to only the interests you have specified - and for a comprehensive understanding of what people are saying on social media, the tool allows you to integrate other social listening tools into your dashboard.
In addition to your own metrics, Hootsuite also tracks competitive benchmarks so you can see how you’re measuring up in comparison. Two other specific branches of the tool are Hootsuite Impact - helping you keep track of your ROI and Hootsuite Amplify - helping to extend your brand’s reach.
7. Talkwalker analytics
Talkwalker is an AI-driven brand tracking tool that sheds light on how consumers see your brand and engage with it. It allows you to track your brand in real time against competitors, showing where its strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities lie.
There are three main strands to Talkwalker: Marketing, Customers, and Social. Its Marketing focus tracks consumer trends and monitors how consumers interact with your brand. The Customer portion of their platform takes data from a wide range of sources to see what the current trends, preferences, and themes are. Finally, its Social aspect of the platform listens to online conversations about your brand, giving further insights into brand perceptions and the ability to protect your brand’s reputation.
8. Semrush
Semrush is a tool that provides insights around keyword research, competitive benchmarks, website and backlink audits, search rank tracking, advertising performance, market share analysis, and much more.
A cornerstone of strong brand health is having a brand that’s easily found online when consumers are searching for a particular topic, platform, solution, or use case; aka, having strong search engine optimization (SEO) - a main focus of Semrush. When you prioritize your content around the best keywords, you’re more likely to rank higher in search engines, leading to more clicks on your page, and ideally, more customer conversions.
Semrush allows you to set up tailored tracking pages to track groups of keywords, topics, or key competitors. You can also set alerts to receive emails when your tracked keywords change position (into or out of the top 10 search engine results). This is valuable context to help guide future content or to improve existing content on your site.
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Why use brand health tracking software?
Brand health tracking is important because it allows any problems with a brand to be tackled as they arise. A brand might be doing well but then something will happen to shake things up: a competitor launches a strong rival product or a bad review impacts consumer trust. It might not be one event that has an effect on brand health though - there could be a slow erosion of brand strength, caused by a number of factors building up over time resulting in a brand that is weaker than it was before. Tracking your brand health over time will inform your brand of weakening associations as they happen, giving you a better chance to rectify them before more damage is done.
Measuring and benchmarking brand health allows for a constant review of what a brand can do to retain existing customers and attract new ones. This might mean tweaking products, extending the product line, or amending your marketing strategy. Waves of research can be done at any interval you choose - commonly monthly or quarterly - and allows you to be hands-on with the types of tracking questions you ask respondents and how you access the data. It also enables research to be done quickly and efficiently - and in the fast-changing world of brands, speed is of the essence.
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What should you look for in a brand health tracker?
Brand health tracking can help businesses make pivotal decisions, which is why the most important thing to look for in a tracking research solution is high quality. Your tracking platform or software should provide high-quality survey templates, a trusted respondent panel, AI technology, and trusted data-cleaning tools that all lead to high-quality brand health findings. For even higher-quality results, look for a brand tracking solution that offers advanced research methodologies beyond basic brand health tracking metrics.
The second major element to consider in a brand monitoring tool is how user-friendly it is. For fast, efficient research, it could make the most sense to manage brand health tracking yourself - but that’s only possible if your solution is hands-on with intuitive features. Things to look for in a user-friendly platform are drag-and-drop modules or pre-programmed templates, automatic charting, easy-to-build reports, how easy it is to share findings across your organization, and of course, how easy it is to set up and launch new waves of your tracker.
Thirdly, a brand health tracker should be flexible. This may go against what many traditional agencies advise in keeping trackers 100% consistent over time. The truth is, markets change as do businesses’ objectives. Over time, you may find that the current metrics you’re tracking aren’t providing value anymore; your tracker should offer the flexibility to swap that question out with one that does. Making changes to your tracker shouldn’t involve back-and-forth documents with color-coded edits that inevitably get mixed up somewhere. Your tracker should make it easy to replace, add, or remove questions as needed.
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The evolution of brand tracking software
The evolution of brand tracking software is best observed by the shift from manually-programmed surveys to AI-driven capabilities. Such capabilities (like AI co-pilots and machine learning algorithms) allow businesses to do more research, with a higher volume of data, significantly faster, and in a more hands-on nature. Additionally, the analysis that comes from AI-driven tools is often much more sophisticated and intricate than manually-observed findings alone; these tools can point out findings that humans may have missed with their own eye - whether by mistake or due to researcher bias.
Today, many brand tracking software tools are easily integrated with other analytics tools - creating a one-stop resource for brands to get a clear picture of their brand's performance (e.g. how marketing campaign performance ties into brand tracking metrics, perhaps).
This new age of brand tracking software equips brands do more with less. Looking ahead, it's likely that the types of brand tracking software available are only continue to grow and improve as the need for consumer insights rises, despite shortened timelines.
Tips for using brand tracking software
Used correctly, a brand health tracker is a powerful tool for managing your brand and getting the most out of it. Below are a few tips to keep in mind when building your brand tracking study on your chosen brand health tracking software platform or tool:
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Make sure you include all the key metrics that will help with your marketing and brand management. Involve all stakeholders at this stage, so that everyone gets what they need from brand health tracking. A solid group of metrics around your brand will provide a firm foundation for monitoring its health and taking action where needed.
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Track your competitors as well as your own brand. Observing competitors’ successes or failures, marketing campaigns, advertising approaches, product launches, and other activities can provide guidance for your own successful business decisions. Competitor analysis might also reveal gaps in the market where you can fulfill unmet consumer needs.
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Plan your research schedule to make tracking work for you. If you feel your company would be swamped with too much data, or your brand is in a category that doesn’t change as quickly as others might, then a quarterly or biannual tracking study might work best for you. On the other hand, if you have a strong team that is able to keep a close eye on the brand, or your brand is in a volatile category where new product launches, offers, and communication changes are frequent, a monthly tracker could be the right cadence.
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Make sure you actually leverage the insights from your brand tracker. It’s easy to have a tracker running for a long time and forget to make full use of it. Monitoring it closely will help you boost your brand when it needs boosting, direct budget where it will have the most impact, and spot opportunities before your competitors do.
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Tweak the tracker where needed. There may be times when you find that measuring a certain KPI hasn’t turned out to be useful, or there is a new one you would like to add. Regularly review your tracker to prove its value and make changes where necessary.
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Implementing brand tracking software
Implementing brand tracking software is an exciting project for businesses. It often means faster, more efficient tracking insights without the extra effort. When implementing a new brand tracking software (after you've chosen which software or platform to go with), consider the following elements to ensure your tracker can deliver long-term success.
Training:
A software is only valuable if your team knows how to use it. Be sure to provide comprehensive training to ensure your team understands how to use the software effectively - including all the features and capabilities that come along with it. As new members join your team, make sure they get prompt training to jump right in as well.
Many software providers dedicate a consultant to each project so that users have a go-to resource for any specific needs or questions. This is something to consider during your software vetting stage; look for providers that proactively communicate and respond in a timely manner - these are qualities you'll appreciate once you get started with your tracking project.
Sample:
When implementing a brand tracking software for the first time, be mindful of the panel you're using. This is another consideration to keep in mind during the software selection process, to check if your software is panel agnostic (i.e. you can connect to any survey sample you wish). One you select a sample group for your tracking study, you'll want to keep this consistent in subsequent waves so you can justifiably make comparisons back to prior data points.
Many panel providers can even ensure that the same respondents don't complete your survey more than once within a certain timeframe (e.g. a respondent can only participate in your tracker once a year - even if it runs quarterly). This ensures you're getting fresh, unbiased opinions each wave from people who aren't familiar with the questions asked.
Compliance:
When implementing a new brand tracking software tool, make sure you adhere to any relevant business privacy regulations and industry standards. This includes protecting sensitive information and ensuring compliance with legal requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, and others.
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For more information on how quantilope can support your brandhealth tracking needs for actionable, high-quality brand insights, get in touch below!