Marketing analysis: Key metrics to measure the strength of your brand marketing
Marketing data lakes are easy to drown in. With so many dashboards and systems available, brand strategists can get lost when trying to make sense of it all. This isn’t just little “m” marketing focused on tactics and execution — this is big “M” marketing: where market research, brand strategy and competitive positioning align. It’s the difference between focusing on day-to-day digital marketing analytics and looking at the big picture.
We know marketing analytics are everywhere, and the best way to put them to work is to identify the most important metrics to evaluate the strength of your marketing. By focusing on the most valuable and insightful data points, marketers can move quickly to understand the effectiveness of their campaigns and build a strong brand that resonates with its target audience.
Take a look at seven of the most helpful metrics to evaluate brand marketing and hone in on the marketing performance analytics that can help enhance your strategies.
7 of the most important brand marketing KPIs:
1. Brand awareness and recognition
Brand awareness measures consumer knowledge of your brand. Brand recognition refers to the ability of consumers to identify your brand among others.
How it’s measured:
Many aspects of brand marketing can’t easily be plugged into a calculator — and brand awareness and recognition are a great example of this.
The gold standard is to use a reputable firm to conduct customer surveys of your target audience to gather input. Other KPIs that marketers should monitor include:
- Branded search volume
- Direct traffic to your website
- Site referral traffic
- Google Trends data
Why it matters: Awareness is the foundation of brand strength. Without awareness, customers won’t consider your brand when making purchase decisions. Tracking brand awareness through surveys, social media mentions, and website traffic can provide insights into how effectively your marketing campaigns are reaching your target audience. Keep in mind that these methods tend to have some bias, unless you do a true random sample at a statistically significant scale. High recognition indicates staying power and a strong brand presence.
2. Brand sentiment
Brand sentiment assesses consumer feelings toward your brand.
How it’s measured: Many social media and PR tools aggregate data to offer sentiment analysis on-demand. These tools use a predefined model or algorithm to classify mentions of a brand as positive, negative or neutral based on the language used. Advanced tools will also be able to consider sarcasm and other context cues. The tool then uses sentiment scores to provide a snapshot of brand perception and trends over time, showing if sentiment is improving or declining.
Why it matters: Monitoring brand sentiment allows you to gauge public perception to identify potential issues or areas for improvement, and proactively address negative feedback.
READ MORE: Take a look at this case study showing how international brand North Sails used marketing data to change their approach to social media.
3. Share of Voice (SOV)
SOV measures your brand’s presence in its specific market compared to a select set of competitors, usually through advertising, social media and public relations efforts.
How it’s measured: The first step in calculating SOV is to define the scope, which includes the time period and channels or sources to be measured. SOV is a percentage, which is then calculated by dividing your brand’s mentions within the defined scope by the total mentions for all relevant brands in the market, and multiplying the result by 100.
Why it matters: SOV data provides context of your brand’s SOV relative to competitors. High SOV does not always correlate to a larger market share. To evaluate SOV data, it is important to consider not just the volume of mentions, but also their sentiment, quality and relevance.
4. Website traffic and conversion
Website traffic measures the number of visitors to your brand’s website, often analyzed by sources such as organic search, paid ads, social media and referrals. Conversion measures the percentage of users who take action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or filling out a form.
How it’s measured: Google Analytics makes it easy to find website traffic and other KPIs that represent your overall site health, including:
- Average number of pages per session
- Average session duration
- Bounce rate
- Conversion rate
Why it matters: Tracking website traffic provides insights into how effectively your digital marketing strategies are driving potential customers to your site, while metrics such as bounce rate, average session duration and conversion rate help show how your marketing efforts convert awareness into tangible action
5. Engagement rate
Engagement rate measures how actively consumers are interacting with your brand’s content across various platforms, including social media, email, and websites. It is also helpful to look at engagement rate as the opposite of bounce rate.
How it’s measured: Engagement rate is a percentage, which is calculated by dividing your brand’s interactions by the total number of followers, and multiplying the result by 100.
Why it matters: High engagement indicates that your audience finds your content relevant and valuable. By analyzing likes, shares, comments, and click-through rates, you can fine-tune your content strategy to enhance customer interaction and loyalty.
READ MORE: This case study shows how Texas A&M Athletics increased engagement and grew their donor base through data-driven insights.
6. Brand loyalty
Brand loyalty refers to customers’ likelihood to choose a particular brand over its competitors: because of reputation, status, trust, emotional attachment, positive experiences and other factors.
How it’s measured: Net Promoter Score (NPS) is one metric used to measure brand loyalty. This data can be collected via the customer survey question “How likely are you to recommend [brand] to someone else?” on a scale of 1 to 10. Responses are categorized as Promoters (9-10), Passives (7-8) or Detractors (0-6). Calculate the percentage of responses in each category; then, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
Why it matters: Positive NPS indicates customer sentiment is generally favorable, which helps support brand loyalty. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and have a greater lifetime value. They also provide a more stable stream of revenue than one-and-done customers, and are more likely to act as a brand advocate by providing invaluable word-of-mouth marketing within their network.
7. Customer satisfaction
Satisfaction is a measure of a customer’s experience with a brand. High satisfaction typically translates to brand loyalty and repeat business, while low satisfaction often results in complaints and customer churn that can cause reputational harm.
How it’s measured: Perhaps the simplest and most effective way to measure satisfaction is through the use of customer surveys. These can include a combination of open- and close-ended questions. While close-ended questions, such as a simple ranked choice, offer precise measurements and often have higher response rates, open-ended prompts collect valuable direct feedback in a customer’s own words.
Why it matters: Customer satisfaction is key to a brand’s growth and success, impacting everything from customer loyalty to the company’s reputation. It is important not only to aim for high satisfaction, but to use negative feedback to identify areas for improvement.
The benefits of AI marketing intelligence tools for data analysis
Measuring the strength of your brand marketing is crucial for CMOs and CXOs looking to drive growth through brand-building. By closely monitoring the metrics that matter, you can gain valuable insights into your brand’s performance in real time — allowing you to save internal time, streamline processes and help your brand thrive in a competitive marketplace. Investing in the right tools for marketing data analysis makes it easier to track these key metrics.
By aggregating infinite data sources into one AI-powered platform, marketing intelligence tools like Alembic empower businesses to uncover insights that get lost in the noise. This holistic view integrates multiple sources, including:
- Social Media
- Email Campaigns
- Website Analytics
- Influencer Marketing
- Radio & TV Media
- Podcast Advertising
- eCommerce Data
- Mobile Apps . . . and more.
The Alembic Marketing Intelligence Platform enhances the accuracy of insights, amplifies the takeaways and allows teams to quickly pivot strategies based on real-time performance metrics.
Data-driven decision-making is key to building a powerful brand. Embracing metrics and knowing how to use them is the difference between drowning in your company’s data lakes and putting the data to work to support your business goals. The insights gained from digital marketing data analysis should inform current efforts and, more importantly, help chart a path for future success.
Get Alembic: The next gen digital Marketing Intelligence platform
Alembic analyzes marketing channels to optimize a brand’s marketing investments and maximize conversions. Across the funnels of first- and third-party data, the platform ingests data and uses proprietary, AI-powered algorithms to identify the specific insights CMOs need to develop an action plan to increase revenue. Think enterprise-ready can’t be easy to use? Book a demo of the Alembic Marketing Intelligence Platform to see for yourself.
