Loved brands rule all. Recognition, loyalty, awareness, response to promotions and media spend are all affected by the power of
brand
. Not to mention backend items like attracting talent, dictating what you can set your product pricing at in the first place, influencing your EBITDA margins or selling into your next B series of funding. A strong brand is what sets the field apart from
marketeers
, to
market mastery
. And with privacy restrictions, the evolving direct-to-consumer movement, emerging channels and consumer-centric narrative leading into 2020, it’s more important than ever.
Check out our considerations below for three immediate ways to start aligning your media funnel with brand insights and tactics to activate against it.
First things first. Build your brand. No,
really
. This crucial step must be authentic and unmovable. Take the time to own your voice, narrative and uniqueness within the market so it becomes unshakeable
and undeniable. Use this to power your media decisions. Align, model, optimize, rinse and repeat:
Build Your Brand Tracker:
By using
Google Data Studio alongside Google Surveys360,
you can create a free, shareable, custom
Brand Tracker
dashboard to visualize and align all brand metrics alongside front-end media metrics and on-site analytics. Your Brand Tracker should holistically dictate your true north. Here are a few things to measure:
Brand Awareness & Recall:
How well the market is aware of your brand or can recall it is a good indicator of your overall positioning and top-of-mind power. If this is strong, media margins can shrink, EBIT goes up and you can garner higher selling points on your products. These metrics can be measured by utilizing an
exposed
vs
. unexposed response
methodology, or for the savvy, pulling against search queries, onsite analytics and more.
Brand Association:
We recently put out an article,
“Do Users Like You?”,
in which we discussed methods to drive positive brand association. But what is being
perceived
from users, does not always translate to what the brand
actually
represents. Make sure that your target audiences perceive your brand the way you want to be represented, whether that’s as a thought leader, disruptor, etc. It needs to be monitored and optimized just like any other media metric. If you do this well and consistently optimize it, business lift will occur naturally as your brand is evangelized with an ever-growing base of champions. The methodology for this can best be accomplished using the standard
exposed
vs.
unexposed
and layering in an open question format dedicated between the two.
Brand Loyalty & Intent:
So they bought. Was it the price undercut? Or was it the loyalty to something larger and stickier,
like brand? Measuring under the lens of brand can help move media dollars past the click and evangelize impression-based channels, while also uncovering general loyalty and intent. Using re-marketing, or
exposed
lists, available in
Surveys360 and
running campaigns in an
unexposed
pool, you can measure direct influence from interested buyers, while understanding the greater industry intent.
These three metrics run as evergreen campaigns alongside other KPIs from media and analytics are a powerful combination. Piping them into a visible, shareable browser-based dashboard activates not only media optimization, but market capture, showing that past the click, loved brands truly rule them all.
Want to get started with Surveys360 and a Customized Brand Tracker? Reach out to us at
sales@adswerve.com