Metrics can help you understand how your brand is performing within the framework of customer perception and competing brands. Measure your digital branding efforts to determine how these metrics affect your bottom line.
Consumers are interacting with brands in the digital space more than ever. The digital platform is often the first introduction a consumer has with a brand.
Whether you’re brand new to digital or experienced with it, measure your digital branding efforts to understanding how your brand is impacting your sales, revenue, and conversions.
How to Measure Your Digital Branding Efforts
It’s important to measure your digital branding efforts to determine how your brand is doing in the marketplace within the framework of customer perception and performance.
Your Brand Perception
How your brand is viewed affects how well your brand performs in the market.
Brands need to measure their digital brand perception and understand how their activities impact their entire brand performance, including, awareness, consideration, and trial.
When making purchasing decisions, Internet users seek online product reviews, recommendations from discussion forums, or feedback from social media sites.
SEE ALSO: Digital Branding Checklist for Small Businesses
Your Brand Performance
Measuring brand performance differs from one brand to another. Brand ‘A’ can be concerned with performance against competitors and Brand ‘B’ can focus on conversions.
To start, ask yourself the following questions:
- Why are you measuring your digital brand impact? If you don’t know where to start then it will be difficult to finish. Understanding why you’re measuring in the first place is critical to your desired outcomes.
- Are your digital branding activities resulting in the achievement of business goals? Be sure to outline the steps for proper attribution. We have developed a free ebook that will help.
- What outcomes signify value delivered to the business bottom line? A download? A new lead? A purchase?
These are all the questions you should ask when measuring your brand performance.
Measure Your Brand Identity
How is your brand perceived in the marketplace? What do key audiences believe about your brand, and what feeling does your brand evoke?
Naturally, brand perceptions influence how customers think and act. The stronger those perceptions are, the more likely they will be to influence purchasing decisions.
If you don’t understand consumer perception of your brand, you can’t effectively market your brand and grow your business.
When you measure your digital branding impact, you can determine whether your customers purchase your product, recommend your company to others, or turn to the competition.
Questions to Ask
- How do you want people to feel or act in response to your brand message?
- What can followers expect to see from you in their feeds?
- What story are you telling with your content?
Sentiment
- What Are People Saying About My Brand?
- Who Is Talking About My Brand (and My Competitors)?
- Where Are People Talking and Engaging?
To better reach your target audiences and new consumers, you need to know where people are engaging so you can get involved in relevant conversations–which leads to the next topic.
Measure Your Brand Visibility
How easy is it for your target audience to find you?
Brand Visibility Action Plan
Step 1: Make sure you know who your target audience(s) are (chances are you have more than one).
Some ways to do this:
- Run a Twitter Profile Keyword Analysis: There are already people following you. What are they into? They’ll let you know with their Twitter bios. You get demographic data like hometown, career, hobbies, alma mater, gender, values, and more.
Step 2: Find out where your brand appears and how people are being referred to your site and digital properties.
Step 3: Start measuring, and set up your benchmarks.
Traffic metrics to pay attention to include:
- Overall Site Traffic
- Traffic Sources
- Mobile Traffic
- Click-Through Rate (CTR)
- Cost Per Click (CPC)
SEE ALSO: 10 Engagement Metrics You Should Be Tracking
As a social marketer, your visibility evaluation should always take SEO efforts into account as well.
A successful social media campaign should also have a positive impact on your search ranking.
Measure Your Brand Credibility
These are some of the questions that you must ask if you wish to successfully manage your online reputation.
- Is your business or brand well-known online?
- How do people feel about you, and what do they think about when they come across your brand online?
- What kind of content appears on search engine results pages, review sites, and social networks when your brand name is being searched?
In Conclusion
As your customers and prospective customers interact with your brands in the digital space, you have to measure both web and social analytics.
Your social accounts, social ads, and website are often the first points of entry for a customer.
Measuring and optimizing your digital branding efforts on all fronts is the key to understanding how you are impacting your sales, revenue, and conversions.
We recommend going through this measurement process, following the identity, visibility, and credibility framework, annually.
These three traits are inextricably linked, and brands who rank strongly in all of them are unstoppable.
It’s time to really understand your digital branding impact, so you can communicate your value to the rest of your organization and continue to drive value for your brand.
