How to conduct a brand health check?

Brand health check will help you determine the current state of your company and implement necessary improvements. Conducting brand health check regularly will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors.

If you conduct a brand health check regularly, the process will give valuable insights into your brand overall business performance and will indicate areas that need improvement. The insights gathered during the process will help you provide value to your customers and improve the general perception of your brand.

Take a look at our short guide to brand health!

• What is brand health?
• Why should you measure brand health?
• How to measure brand health?
• Brand health metrics
• How to improve brand health?
• Brand health check up sum up

What is brand health?

Brand health measures how effective your brand is in helping you achieve your business goals.

While measuring brand health, you should take into account different aspects of your brand presence, for example:

• brand awareness
• brand reputation
• brand equity
• employee engagement
• brand consideration

Tracking all the metrics listed above will help you get the full picture of your brand’s health.

Of course, you don’t have to incorporate every metrics into your brand health analysis. Choose the aspects of the analysis that will benefit your brand the most.

Why should you measure brand health?

A healthy brand is one of the most important assets you can have. 

Your brand can help you achieve your business goals. A strong and healthy brand will help you find new customers, increase brand awareness, and even improve your customer experience. 

It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? Well, it’s not.

There are million of reasons why customers choose one brand over other. Among the key factors that influence customer behaviour are:

• friends’ and family recommendations,
• cooperations with influencers,
• online reviews,
• brand reputation,
• brand awareness,
• employee engagement,
• brand positioning. 

And guess what – the last four points are strictly related to brand health. 

Which means you have a lot of say when it comes to influencing your potential customers and winning them over. 

A healthy brand is important as it can be one of the most crucial factors that will differentiate you from your competitors.

The market is very saturated and sometimes it’s hard to compete with other companies. A strong and healthy brand can be your hallmark that will help you win over customers.

Why is it important to look at a big picture?

When it comes to brand health, every aspect of brand performance is important. Getting a holistic view will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses and develop an all-encompassing brand strategy. 

If you consider all the factors, like brand reputation, customer experience or brand awareness, you can spot the negative aspects you should improve.

For example, if you take a deeper look at your social media strategy, you can see that your brand can generate a lot of buzz on social media, but if the prevailing sentiment is negative, this obviously isn’t good for business.

If you measure all the factors together, you will get a comprehensive view of your brand’s health. 

To make matters simple you can set three grades your brand can achieve:

• healthy brand – you should focus on keeping things going for you as they are, or look for innovations to become an industry leader;
• a just – fine brand – you should develop a set of improvements you can incorporate to your business;
• unhealthy brand – your brand is damaging your business and you need to act swiftly to improve the situation. 

How to measure brand health?

To measure brand health you’ll need a media monitoring tool, for example, Brand24, Buffer’s top social listening tool. 

Check brand’s health and set up a free trial (no credit card required).

When you enter your keywords into a project creation wizard, the tool will start gathering and analysing all the publicly available mentions on the Internet and social media platforms, for example, Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

Brand24 collects publicly available online mentions containing your predefined keyword. The tool is compliant with all strict Facebook regulations and the GDPR. 

If you want to measure your brand’s health, enter the keywords strictly related to your brand, for example:

• brand name;
• your branded hashtags;
• the name of your product or service;
• the unique hashtag you add to your social media posts.

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Brand health metrics

To correctly asses the health of your brand, you need to take a look at specific brand trackers. Carefully chosen brand health metrics will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses that, ultimately, will help you boost your overall business performance.

Brand tracking will help you identify your brand needs to be one step ahead of your competitors. Tracking brand health and improving it over time can have a positive impact on brand loyalty, the number of new clients, and churn levels.

What do you need to measure to assess your brand health?

1. Brand awareness

Brand awareness will tell you how familiar consumers are with the qualities or image of your brand. The best way to measure brand recall is to use a social listening tool.

A healthy brand will have not only high brand awareness levels, but also the buzz it generates will be mainly positive. 

Brand24 analyses all the mentions that contain your predefined keywords. It will also analyse the buzz and show you:

• the total number of mentions;
• social media reach – an estimate of how many people stumble upon your message on social media;
• the sentiment – the number of positive and negative mentions about your brand. 

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If you’d rather analyse the mentions one by one, take a look at the Mentions tab. 

Thanks to filters you can analyse only positive or negative records, filter them by number of interactions, or a specific domain. 

2. Brand reputation

Brand reputation measures how your brand is viewed by others. 

Consumers will trust a brand with good reputation. And there’s no better way to build a positive brand reputation than by providing your customers with exquisite customer service. 

What does it mean exactly? 

A great customer service will help your clients quickly and in a friendly way. 

Customer service is one of the most important aspects of brand reputation. Your customers will appreciate a helpful customer success team, and it might be the decisive factor in their buying process. 

Since time is of the essence, an Internet monitoring tool is an indispensable help. 

Brand24 will show the mentions from the Internet, including posts where your Facebook fan page was tagged and Facebook reviews.

Monitoring social media networks and spotting mentions about your brand can help you avert a social media crisis.

By answering quickly to your customers’ queries you ensure not only a boost in your brand reputation, but you’ll also be able to decline your churn rate. 

Happy customers stay with a brand longer and spend much more money. It’s a game worth playing. 

3. Employee engagement

That’s one of the most difficult aspects of brand health check. 

This brand health metric will tell you how passionate your employees are about their job. 

In other words, it all comes down to your leadership skills. Can you inspire people so they are committed to their job and your organization?

A high employee engagement results in higher ROI, more efficient organisation and higher work culture. 

How do you achieve high employee engagement?

It starts with the right recruitment process, followed by clear mission statement. For many millennials, salary isn’t the most important factor while choosing a job. 

Things like positive impact on the environment, helping others are equally important. 

You don’t have to look for a cure for one of the civilization diseases, but your company can actively take care of the environment by looking at some cutting-edge technologies. Even something so simple like using energy saving light bulbs can be a good starting point for creating an employee engagement culture. 

Another point worth mentioning is creating a space where your employees can easily share their ideas and criticism. I might be hard to hear what’s wrong with your company, but it’s essential for your growth. 

And your employees will surely appreciate that their voice is being heard. 

4. Brand positioning

Brand positioning is a process of positioning your brand in the mind of customers. 

To put it simply, you have to find a niche on the market for your brand and try to be a leader in it. There are various strategies when it comes to brand positioning – your brand can be unique when it comes to pricing, promotions, packaging, customer service, distribution, and much more!

How to choose your brand’s niche? The easiest way will be to compare your brand to your competitors and try to beat them in one of their key positioning points. 

For example, a brand positioning statement for Amazon says:

Unlike traditional book retailers, Amazon.com provides a combination of extraordinary convenience, low prices, and comprehensive selection. 

As you can see, the key is to choose your brand positioning niche and then develop successful strategies to compete with others, be it much lower prices or exquisite customer service. 

5. The share of voice

And last but not least — the share of voice. This metric will tell you what part of overall online discussion was initiated by a certain social media profile.

The higher the share of voice, the more popular your brand is among its target audience. That means you are preparing content your audience wants to interact with. It can also indicate that your branding strategy is working — your brand is something people talk about online.

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How to improve brand health?

Once you know how to conduct a brand health check, it’s time to see what to do when you are not satisfied with the results. How to increase brand recall, brand equity, and reach your target audience?

The solution is simple — social listening. With the help of a social listening tool, you can spot any questions your existing and potential customers might have and answer them right away.

1. Monitor the number of mentions around your brand and social media sentiment

A great way to do it is by taking a look at the Summary tab in Brand24. It will not only show you the number of results, social media reach, and positive and negative mentions but also show the difference between two time periods. 

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Sentiment analysis will help you determine whether your brand message resonates well with your audience. A spike in negative mentions should set off an alarm and encourage you to investigate the matter. 

2. Spot customers’ complaints early and solve their problems

It doesn’t matter what business you run, your customers should occupy a central spot. Showing that you care about their problems will ensure that your clients will come back and will spread good word about your business. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most powerful form of marketing there is. 

Receiving a negative review or customer complaint is not the end of the world. In fact, it might even be good for your business. People tend not to trust products or services with perfect scores. 

The key to success is to respond swiftly to a complaint. Brand24 offers three possible solutions to this problem:

1. a Slack integration – you can connect your Brand24 project with a dedicated Slack channel and receive notification every time there’s a new mention;
2. an email alert – every time there’s a new mention, you’ll receive an email. In the Project Settings you can set up a filter to only receive notifications with negative sentiment;
3. an in-app notifications – Brand24 offers a mobile app, both for Android and iOS, so you always have access to your projects. 

3. Analyse customer feedback

Beside customer complaints, you’ll probably spot a lot of customer feedback in your brand tracking project. 

Customer feedback is usually really hard to get, so it’s extra important to spot your customers suggestions. 

It will give you a hint in which direction you should develop your product. The features you think are important might be completely irrelevant to your customers. 

4. Organise focus groups and surveys

That’s a bit tricky point. First of all, focus groups are quite expensive to organise. Surveys, on the other hand, are time-consuming for its users. 

You can ask your customers to fill out an online survey by offering a discount code or a specially prepared piece of content.

Although focus groups are expensive, you’ll receive a very in-depth qualitative data, that will reveal a lot about brand health. Not only will you know how your brand is perceived today, but you’ll be able to spot how it changed over time. 

5. Run a brand awareness campaign

Brand health metrics rely strongly on the number of people familiar with your brand. The more people talk about your company or product, the higher brand awareness levels.

Presenting your product to a new group of people will help you spot any weaknesses your brand or product might have. Improving them will ultimately help improve your brand health.

Brand health check up sum up

Conducting brand health checks on a regular basis will help you get ahead of the competition and spot problems right at the beginning, where you can easily fixed them. To effectively build a strong brand you need a social media monitoring tool. Such tool will save you a lot of time and let you focus on what is really important — providing value to your customers and improving the perception of your brand.