3 Keys to Understanding Your Brand’s Health

Monitoring brand health is vital for growth and success regardless of the company. But, for B2B marketers understanding brand health presents a unique set of challenges. For example, every industry has its own sentiment. Each brand’s customers have a different user experience. Still, there are approaches that can help companies better assess how their brand is overall.

Here are three keys to understand your brand’s health.

Key #1: Monitor Brand Recall

As marketers we get trained early that awareness is the foundation of brand success. If customers don’t know a brand exists, there is no way they will seek it out. But in B2B, the more important measure is Brand Recall. Why? Because Recall is more closely related to activity. Think about it, without brand recall you won’t remember the name of the company’s website you want to visit. In fact, according to research from Google, “67% of purchases are influenced by digital.” (source) This makes brand recall a key metric to understanding not only your brand’s health but also demonstrates the correlation between brand recall and a purchase in the future.

Key #2: Use Social to Monitor Sentiment

Customers talk to others about brands when they have strong feelings. Good experiences lead to positive discussion, but negative experiences can hurt a brand quickly. Nowadays, the swing from high to low can be even more volatile and fast because of social media. While there are plenty of software options out there that will track brand mentions, it’s also essential to move beyond mere mentions and pay attention to context with social listening. And sentiment is a way to measure the role of context in brand mentions.

Key #3: NPS for Sure… But Watch Out

Net promoter scores are always a good indicator of future growth. According to Bain & Company, “In most industries, Net Promoter Scores explained roughly 20% to 60% of the variation in organic growth rates among competitors.” (source). In fact, even more to the point, brands with high NPS have higher customer lifetime value.

But to measure NPS successfully one must look across a competitive set (to understand your NPS in context). Secondarily, some of your customers may buy product A from you and others may buy product B, each segment will have differing NPS scores because of each of those product’s user experience. Also be mindful that your NPS survey needs context, provide a simple follow on question of why the surveyed customer selected that number. You’ll be surprised at the insight you gain from those verbatims.

Moving beyond the basics of brand awareness to consider brand health is taking an active stance when it comes to growth. It may seem like a lot of data to collect, but the payoff is a stronger brand that can grow better, smarter and faster.

Brand health is like personal health–regular checkups help prevent nasty surprises. Companies can often make small but positive changes and see long-term benefits. Brand health is too important to overlook. Sales might seem great now, but taking a deeper dive into brand health will help ensure those great sales stick around and allow the company to grow and move in the market’s direction proactively rather than reactively.

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