Brand Performance Explained: Importance & Strategies

At Nepa, we strive to improve the performance of your brand through a variety of market research strategies. It can be carried out to improve success in the long term.

What is brand performance marketing?

Brand performance marketing, also known as brand purpose marketing, focuses on improving your brand’s reputation and of course, its performance. It involves portraying your brand values in a way that increases your customer’s understanding of the service or product, therefore increasing the trustworthiness of your brand.

It can also increase consumers’ want or desire to become loyal to your brand through brand positioning techniques and visual narratives to create a relationship between consumers and your brand.

What are some brand performance indicators?

When measuring the significance of brand performance, it can be difficult to accurately review the impact it has had on sales, awareness, and reputation.

There are certain tools you can use that can help you measure brand performance, including Google Analytics and Google Search Console. However, first you need to determine your KPIs.

Metrics and KPIs in brand performance marketing

To begin looking at your KPIs, consider the following points to establish where you currently stand in terms of awareness.

Top-of-mind brand awareness

Top-of-mind brand awareness (TOMA) refers to how the consumers currently perceive your brand name in a specific category of product. For example, when you think of a hoover, you think Dyson, when you think of glasses, you think Specsavers.

Understanding the TOMA is a key concept in market and brand performance research, it can help you order how high different brands rank in consumers’ consciousness.

Unaided brand awareness

Unaided brand awareness is defined as the ability for your target audience to identify or list your brand name alongside other brands without hints or clues. For example, if you were asking people for a list of bed manufacturers, would they list your brand name among SilentNight, Simba, Emma, and Sleepeezee?

If consumers aren’t able to identify your brand alongside the top brands in your category, this can provide you with opportunities to try and increase your brand’s reputation and familiarity with that industry.

Aided brand awareness

Unlike unaided brand awareness, this method of brand performance tracking involves asking your target audience if they have ever heard of your brand name before. For example, you may ask your audience if they have heard of SilentNight, Simba, Emma, and Sleepeezee before, if they are familiar with the top brand names, then ask if they have heard of your brand.

This method of brand performance again challenges the idea that your brand is recognised within that industry or category alongside larger brand names.

Product launch

Prior to the product launch, you can test out your brand performance. Testing individual components before the product or service becomes live can help identify issues before they arise.

This can include visual ads or social media posts, creative copy, and content to see if it presents the right message you want to convey to your audience, as well as the intended response. You can even split test features of the campaign to see which returns more clicks.

Other tools to measure brand performance

There are a range of tools that can be used to measure brand performance, these help you identify what you are currently succeeding in, as well as identify areas of improvement, therefore forming new strategies and business ideas.

Click-through-rate and conversions – Google Analytics

Click-through rate (CTR) and conversions on Google Analytics can also measure brand performance.

CTR refers to the number of clicks that your ad receives which is then divided by the number of times your ad is shown. This can be used to gain an understanding of how your keywords, paid ads and keywords are currently ranking. Discovering how your brand currently ranks is a great way to see which competitors are performing better than you, and where you are excelling. Tracking keyword movements can also help you see how changes to your marketing techniques are affecting the rankings.

Conversions can be set up to measure things like purchases, clicks on a certain page e.g. contact page, or when a user completes a certain event such as filling out a form. You can explore what pages people are landing on before leading to a conversion and pick out what pages may need improvements such as the navigation, internal linking, or any user experience issues.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console can show impressions, these show the key terms people have searched for and how many times your site has been shown based on these searches.

For example, your site may have shown up 1,000 times for the term ‘Bed manufacturer London’. This can help you identify what key terms you are ranking for, what is correctly being targeted, and what needs to be improved. For instance, you might be showing a large number of impressions for a search term you aren’t wanting or aim to rank for.

The above brand performance indicators can identify how well your brand performs in certain industries amid different audiences. All of these methods can measure search performance and volumes for your brand name, product name, and other variations.

Survey Monkey

Using a survey or questionnaire tool such as Survey Monkey can be a great and efficient way to get a larger number of responses and opinions on an upcoming product or service.

Showing examples of copy, asking questions based on brand awareness, and asking consumers to rate from 1-10 on user experience features can help gauge what needs to be improved and therefore increase your brand performance.

Examples of brand purpose marketing

Nepa and GANT

GANT chose Nepa to help their market growth. Starting with understanding GANTs main competitors and current market techniques, Nepa underwent a deep dive in order to understand and pick out the areas of potential growth.

Nepa then established their core KPIs in order to form key assessment criteria for their new continuous health trackers. This method covered 11 markets and resulted in 24/7 data tracking.

Find out more about this case study and its success here.

Keeping Kellogg’s relevant

Nepa worked with Kellogg’s to relaunch their Pringles range. Using marketing intelligence tools and omnichannel paths, Nepa was able to target a wider audience, focusing on a range of marketing channels. This market research increased their brand performance with effective propositions and marketing, resulting in large net worldwide sales.

Read more about Kellogg’s case study here.

Glossiers’ UGC strategy

Glossier made its marketing activities an investment priority, heavily focusing on social media marketing in the last year or so. They used platforms such as Instagram to communicate and reward their consumers as well as broadcast their values. This form of marketing through user-generated content creates a trustworthy brand and can see consumers identifying more with people who use the same platform as themselves.

Using social media to showcase their products from influencers and celebrities, they managed to avoid involving external partners to sell their products, and their tactics paid off, with sales increasing as well as their brand performance and awareness.

Source: https://www.launchmetrics.com/resources/blog/what-is-brand-performance

VARNER retail company

Nepa managed to uncover hidden opportunities working with VARNER. They are a Scandinavian-based company that consists of many retail chains such as LEVIS and Dressmann.

By understanding how each individual retail brand performed in their current markets using a continuous brand tracker, as well as having regular insight meetings using the data collected, Nepa managed to explore new business ideas through current trends and hot topics, resulting in the discovery of missed opportunities for growth.

This resulted in positive adjustments to business strategies and processes as well as areas of action.

Read more about VARNER and Nepa’s partnership here.

Increase your brand performance today

If you’re looking to increase your brand performance marketing through effective strategies such as brand tracking and data collection, then Nepa can guide you through the process. We are market research and data tracking experts, using brand performance indicators to identify new opportunities and potential weaknesses.

Stand out from your competitors with brand asset optimisation. Nepa can help you identify your brands’ attributes and current reputation and use this to increase your business’s assets.

Contact us today for more information, or take a look at our case studies to explore recent success stories.