It is becoming more and more critical for companies large and small to understand their customers using brand intelligence tracking. This data can help brands connect with clients on a deeper level to deliver an experience that stands out from the pack. Let’s take a look at what brand intelligence is and some best practices for your brand to optimize its consumer experience.

According to McKinsey & Co., proving ROI from marketing activities and investments is difficult. Over 40% of marketers say proving the ROI of their marketing activities is their top marketing challenge.

What is Brand Intelligence Tracking and Why Does it Matter for My Business?

Brand intelligence is a measure of how well a company or brand delivers on specific attributes of a product or service that it promises its customers. A healthy brand offers consistent, memorable, and differentiated quality experiences for the customer. In contrast, less satisfactory brand intelligence produces customer experiences that are inconsistent and delivered with little connection to the customer.

Why is measuring brand intelligence difficult? First of all, brand intelligence is impacted by a variety of factors. These factors include the ever-changing platforms that buyers can use to discover, engage, and comment on a brand (and its competitors). Successful brand intelligence tracking includes a couple of things. First, measuring the brand intelligence metrics that matter, then following brand intelligence over time, and finally contextualizing brand intelligence strengths and weaknesses to adjust brand strategy.

Become the best you can be at brand intelligence by using advanced social listening technology to understand your competitors, your market, and your pipeline. Let’s get into how your brand can optimize the data you need to take your brand a step further.

Best Practices for Successful Brand Intelligence Tracking

Choose the right platform

When deploying brand tracking strategies, many tools help uncover both the “who” and the “why” related to your brand. First, who are the customers who connect the most with my brand, and why they are outperforming other customers in your pipeline?

Using a combination of buyer research and online data analysis, brands can uncover the way that their consumer connects with their brand. Using social listening tools, we can examine the idea that customers search for your products and see how they use them in context.

Social listening technology allows you to gather candid information about how buyers discuss your brand on social media. This kind of unsolicited information does wonders for determining what fixes or additions should go into effect for your product.

You must find the right product for you that allows the ultimate customizability. Having access to agile trend detection capabilities and personalizable reporting provides you with the data you want to see.

Assess competitors

One of the most important parts of brand intelligence tracking is understanding the competitive landscape in your field. In a constantly growing marketplace, you need to know what your rivals are doing to attract customers. Knowing this information helps you to understand how to differentiate your products and services.

Being in tune with your competitors means you are also in tune with the top trends in your industry. Trend analysis capabilities, in conjunction with social listening tools, are integral to assessing future brand strategy. Rolling out new products as trends develop makes a massive difference in how consumers evaluate your brand. Knowing that your particular brand is listening to the ebb and flow of online conversation makes all the difference for someone doing their product research.

Brand intelligence tracking positions your brand to stay on the cutting edge. In an increasingly competitive consumer landscape, companies need to grab onto any opportunity they can get to diversify their offerings from those of other brands.

Define goals and establish consistency in checking data

First of all, it is essential to know the long-term goals of your brand intelligence campaign and focus on them while implementing strategy. Some common goals include amplifying new products or services, increasing new or established sales, and bettering an organization’s public image or press profile.

Additionally, setting up a successful brand intelligence tracking program relies on consistency. Sophisticated platforms harvest new data every day, meaning that every moment, how people perceive your brand may change. This shift can occur in response to a variety of uncontrollable online factors. This quickly changing environment is why keeping a schedule allows you to stay on track with goals on time.

It is always beneficial to review your brand intelligence tracking results, looking towards what questions or approaches could change in subsequent rounds of analysis. Brand intelligence research should drive actionable insights, and continual brand tracking can improve the quality of findings.

Use data to enhance your brand

Successful brand intelligence tracking utilizes all the data available to make a better product or present a better service. Creating actionable, data-backed insights based on the real feedback of individual consumers unequivocally proves the ROI of brand intelligence initiatives.

Take your brand tracking findings and drive impactful marketing decisions, including paid, earned, shared, or owned campaign investments. Change your metric performance or plans for ongoing tracking to study your brand intelligence over time.

Study your brand tracking results to connect metric performance with business initiatives, activities, or organizational strengths and weaknesses. Key questions to ask when studying the brand tracking results include:

  • Which key metrics performed the strongest? The weakest?
  • Are the results evenly spread out or are there specific segments where interaction is stronger or weaker?
    • This could be age, gender, location, etc.
  • Was there a measurable change in results based on any marketing campaigns or sales promotions?

Are you looking for more information about crafting a successful brand intelligence tracking initiative? Check out our new Brand Intelligence Use Case Story that follows a global banking brand’s quest to connect better to consumers online.