Diving into the Brand Tracking Survey to Revamp Marketing Efforts

The brand tracking survey is a critical tool to use in brand-building campaigns. In the ever-competitive landscape of business, in which new businesses are cropping up at staggering rates, it is vital to keep track of your brand’s health.

Your brand’s reputation is constantly at stake, given that in today’s round-the-clock online culture, the perception of your business can change at the click of a bad review

Branding is therefore a top priority in the current digital culture and upsurge in the ecommerce sector — which has experienced the highest annual growth in two decades. 

This article explains the brand tracking survey, along with its eponymous practice and how it can help your brand meet its branding, advertising and general marketing goals.

Understanding Brand Tracking 

Also called brand equity, brand tracking refers to the marketing efforts that are used to track the effects of brand building in a quantifiable way, thus placing attention on the outcomes of sales and conversions along with changes in brand perception before launching a fully new campaign. 

On a larger scale, brand tracking also refers to the encompassing process of measuring your brand’s health regularly. It grants you a contextual approach to continuously tweak and innovate your brand strategy. 

This is largely due to the fact that brand tracking involves checking your brand’s health in terms of strengths, weaknesses and general pulse. Brand tracking is especially important in maintaining a positive image of your brand and avoiding crises

In short, brand tracking allows business owners and marketers to maintain a healthy brand reputation, while keeping track of brand-building campaigns.  

Defining the Brand Tracking Survey

The brand tracking survey is a kind of branding market research tool specifically used for brand tracking, as its name specifies. 

This survey covers several concepts critical to brand tracking, such as your target market’s awareness of your brand, how they feel about it, what they expect from you versus your competitors and whether they see themselves purchasing from your brand again. 

A brand tracking survey can be used with other consumer surveys, such as advertising or launching a new product. When you run a brand tracking survey alongside these macro-applications, you’ll be able to understand before you launch your ads, product(s) or complete other broad campaigns.

This kind of survey is also critical to use during the launch of key actions in your campaigns along with their post-launch. In this way, you’ll be brand tracking your campaigns in their entirety, understanding their overall impact to your brand’s health. 

The brand tracking survey is useful in that it can help you stay abreast of all brand tracking campaigns.

The Importance of Brand Tracking for Marketing Efforts & More

Brand tracking allows market researchers and marketers to continuously keep tabs on the health of their brand. If this wasn’t reason enough to administer brand tracking, there are several more.

Brand tracking reveals your target market’s opinions of your brand. Opinions are divided into 3 chambers: overall brand warmth, brand momentum and the attributes your target market associates with your brand. 

  1. Brand warmth refers to the emotional associations that customers form around a brand. As such, it does not involve using traditional customer satisfaction means and metrics, such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
    1. Rather, it deals with the overall sentiment.
    2. Emotional attachment is not bent on change.
  2. Brand Momentum measures if costumes see a brand as “way up” or “way down” at a particular moment in time. It is not, however, the change in scores between 2 points in time. 
    1. A momentum is an assessment of a consumer’s forecast. It may include critical insights about incoming marketplace changes before they occur. 
    2. This is used as a predictor of future brand performance.
  3. Brand Attributes include any characteristic associated with a brand, be they negative or positive. As such, brands need to maintain a healthy image/reputation within their spheres.
    1. To do so, it’s important to choose the correct one and track your performance of it via various marketing campaigns.  
    2. To uphold positive traits, find the ones that most closely define your brand. 

Brand warmth and brand and brand attributes can both be measured through implicit methods such as performing strength of association tests via time pressures in a survey. 

Understanding your target market’s standing within all three chambers will give you an exhaustive overview on your brand’s standing for various marketing efforts.

There are also various other macro-applications with which you can run parallel brand tracking campaigns. The objective of brand tracking when used alongside these larger applications is to form a solid relationship with a brand’s target market by creating associations between the brand and the ideals you aspire to achieve and be remembered for.

The goal of these campaigns is to establish a relationship with the brand’s core audience and build associations between the brand and certain ideals.

The Concepts and Macro-Applications in a Brand Tracking Survey

Although the objective of brand tracking is universal: tracking the progress of brand-building campaigns and maintaining a healthy brand reputation, while keeping track of brand-building campaigns, it is not applied to merely brand opinions, as laid out in the above section. 

A strong brand tracking survey will provide a thorough read of a brand’s progress during various macro-applications and their campaigns. This will detect the changes that will create improvement for brands, along with those that are not conducive to brand-building

The following explains the macro-applications and other key concepts that a brand tracking survey can help carry through. 

The Macro-Applications & Broader Campaigns

  1. Product launches: This encompasses all the various developments of a new product launch, a new product feature or an upgrade of a product. You can measure how you stack up against competitors in terms of their perceptions of your products versus theirs. It includes:
    1. gauging product content with the product satisfaction survey
    2. Improving customer development
  2. Advertising campaigns: Ad campaigns include different ad groups, themes and the ads themselves. 
    1. Whether your ads are digital or physical (think billboard ads, subway ads, etc.) you can track your brand before launching them or during their stint.
    2. You can also test concepts before deciding if they build up your reputation, make no difference or cause harm.
  3. Competitive Research: Commonly used for comparative reasons, it is the ideal method for discovering how you measure up against competitors, whether they are direct or not. 
    1. Your surveys can include imagery from competitors if it is made public.
    2. You can also ask your respondents directly to rate your competitors against each other and in relation to your business.
  4. Customer loyalty: It is key to measure customer loyalty in relation to your brand. There may be thousands or millions in your target market who are not aware of your brand, thus it is impossible to measure their loyalty.
    1. Instead, you can build customer loyalty via brand tracking campaigns to build a synergy between your brand and the number of its loyal customers.
    2. Use a specialized customer loyalty survey to stay in the know of your loyalty. This helps build retention.
  5. Longitudinal Studies: While longitudinal studies are ambitious affairs, they can help you comprehend exactly how customer perceptions shift about your brand as time progresses.
    1. Longitudinal surveys assess the same population of people over a period of time, which can be anywhere between weeks and months.
    2. This kind of study grants insights on how consumer attitudes on a brand change over time, as the brand itself undergoes changes. 

The Concepts in Brand tracking

There are several key concepts involved in brand tracking. You ought to include all of them in your brand tracking campaigns. There are various ways to track these concepts in a brand tracking survey.

These concepts act as metrics in the practice of tracking your brand.

  1. Awareness: Understanding the segments of your target market who have heard of your brand, including specific people. 
  2. Perception: How your target market and specific buyers view your brand and their specific opinions of it. 
  3. Prior Usage: This involves studying who has brought from your brand in the past, who has continued being a customer and who has stopped altogether.
  4. Preference: Are you the preferred brand in your niche? Positioning your brand among others from a preference standpoint.
  5. Consideration: Understanding whether those who engage with your brand tend to purchase from it. 
  6. Net Promoter Score: Involves discovering brand advocates and deterrents. 

Brand Tracking Survey Questions

The following includes key questions to use in a brand tracking survey. These questions fit within the major concepts expounded upon above.

    1. Awareness Questions
      1. Have you heard of [brand name]? 
        1. Yes, No, other
      2. Which of the following brands do you know about?
        1. Multiple-selection question
      3. How did you discover [brand name]?
        1. Use after respondents selected a particular brand. (Use skip logic after a respondent chose a particular answer in the previous question)
    2. Perception Questions
      1. What comes to mind when you hear of ç
        1. Multiple selection and open-ended questions
      2. Which of the following do you associate with [brand name]?
        1. Multiple selection and open-ended questions
      3.  Why do you associate [brand name] with this?
        1. Open-ended question (Use skip logic)
    3. Prior Usage Questions
      1. Have you bought from [brand name]?
        1. Yes or no
      2. How often have you bought from [brand name]?
        1. Multiple choice questions with a range
      3. Have you stopped buying from us or continue to buy from time to time?
        1. Multiple choice ranking question
      4. Why have you stopped buying from us/ why do you continue to buy from us?
        1. Multiple choice ranking question
        2. Open-ended question
    4. Preference Questions
      1. Which brand do you prefer to buy from for your [niche] needs? 
        1. Multiple selection questions with the “other” option
      2. Which brand is better for [so and so] needs?
        1. Multiple choice questions and open-ended questions
      3. How would you prefer to complete your [so and so needs] with our brand?
        1. Multiple selection questions with open-ended questions
    5. Consideration Questions
      1. How often do you visit our [social media, website, other digital properties?]
        1. Multiple choice ranking questions
      2. Do you intend to buy from us after browsing?
        1. Yes, no, other
        2. Ranking questions
      3. Why don’t you buy after a browsing session?
        1. Multiple selection questions with the “other” option
    6. Net Promoter Score:
      1. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate our company?
        1. Scaled answer (1-10)
      2. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? 
        1. Scaled answer (1-10)

Creating Success from Branding Campaigns

The success of your brand campaign lies firmly in how your customers perceive your brand. Therefore, you should constantly keep track of them in relation to your brand-building efforts with brand tracking.

Brand tracking is not a lone affair, as it ought to be conducted alongside and prior to various marketing campaigns and macro-applications. Doing so will give you an accurate assessment of how your target market perceives your brand and its various campaigns — from advertising, to product launches and beyond.

A successful brand tracking campaign is dependent on a strong online survey tool that will equip you with the proper brand tracking survey. Such a survey should be versatile enough to be used in conjunction with other marketing and business needs, as you need to track your reputation in regards to various campaigns.