Brand Health Tracking: Metrics, Tools & Techniques

Have you ever wondered if your brand can fall ill? Well, it can’t catch a cold, but your brand health can undoubtedly deteriorate due to bad customer feedback, social media backlashes, and other PR crises.

Brand managers like you often neglect the importance of brand health tracking as they focus on more tangible metrics of their brand, such as awareness and reputation. But all these are actually parts of the general well-being of your brand.

Brand health not only measures the current vitality of your brand but also predicts its long-term resilience.

In this guide, we dive into the most critical metrics for tracking brand health, introduce you to useful tools to help with your brand health study, and analyze techniques to rejuvenate your brand, if it’s seen better days.

Shall we begin?

What is Brand Health?

Brand health is fundamentally a set of brand metrics that show the overall well-being and strength of a brand within its market niche and among its target audience.

In other words, it shows how your — existing and potential — customers perceive your brand and how much they trust it over your competitors.

A robust brand health signifies strong customer relationships, positive recognition, and a high likelihood of business success. In contrast, weak brand health may indicate negative brand perceptions that you need to address immediately.

In a nutshell, it’s a pulse check on your brand’s image, positioning, and emotional connection with your audience.

If you aren’t already convinced that brand health is a vital measure for your next brand audit, keep reading.

Why is Brand Health Important?

You have to understand that brand health isn’t just another marketing metric. It reflects the overall success of a business in key areas such as new sales, customer retention, and even new talent acquisition.

For instance, think about Apple. A strong, well-established, healthy brand. Synonym for innovation, luxury, quality, AND a dream job for thousands of professionals.

We’re extending the example of Apple to four key areas where we believe that brand health matters greatly.

To Increase Sales

Brand health is crucial for increasing sales as it directly reflects consumer perceptions and trust. When a brand is perceived positively, it attracts more customers, garners word-of-mouth recommendations, and boosts consumer confidence in purchasing its product or service.

For example, Apple reported 394.33 billion U.S. dollars in revenues last year, making 2022 the most profitable year for the company since 2005.

Apple is considered one of the most valuable brands in the world. In spite of the steep pricing, that healthy brand reputation makes the difference between a consumer choosing an iPhone over a competitor’s smartphone.

To Expand Your Market Share

Also, a healthy brand is necessary to gain ground in the market. A healthy brand is not just recognizable but also trusted and preferred over the competition. As the number of new customers increases, so does the market share as well.

When your audience has a positive perception of your brand, they’re more likely to choose it over your competitors. So, it attracts new customers, thus steadily widening the company’s market share.

Furthermore, a strong brand can challenge existing competitors and discourage potential new ones, making it a strategic asset in capturing and maintaining a larger slice of the market pie.

For example, although the whole smartphone market declined by 13% at the beginning of 2023, Apple managed to increase its market share by 3% this year so far.

For Better Customer Lifetime Value

Brand health is integral to enhancing customer lifetime value (CLV).

When your customers are satisfied with your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases. And, also, to engage with the brand across various offerings, like new products, and over extended periods.

This relationship translates to longer customer retention and increased spending over their lifetime. In essence, brand health solidifies a bond with customers, encouraging them to continually choose the brand, thereby maximizing the total value they bring to the company.

In the Apple example, well, we all have that fanatic iPhone enthusiast friend who preorders their new iPhone every year, the second the announcement hits the news.

To Charge Premium Prices

Brand health is instrumental in justifying steep pricing. An established, well-perceived brand associated with quality products and reliable services enables the company to raise its prices.

It’s not uncommon for consumers to be willing to pay a premium price for brands they perceive as top-tier with a unique value proposition — ding, dong, iPhone!

In fact, brand health elevates the perceived value of the product or service. That’s how a company, like Apple, can charge more while maintaining customer loyalty as consumers believe they’re getting quality or prestige from their purchase.

Particularly in the iPhone case, Apple continuously increases the price of the new iPhone model every year, from $499 for the first-ever iPhone back in 2007, to $829 for the iPhone 14 last year.

So, you see that brand health is more than just another fancy marketing term. It’s a success measure of your whole business efforts.

Now that you realize the importance of it, let’s analyze which metrics to track to measure how healthy your brand is.

Top 10 Brand Health Metrics

Before checking them out, remember that all the metrics below are strong indicators of brand health combined. We mean that you should take them all into consideration to conclude that your brand is healthy or needs some extra care.

1- NET Promoter Score (NPS)

NET Promoter Score measures if your customers would recommend you to other people. It basically calculates the sentiment of the audience toward your brand, by comparing the number of positive and negative social mentions of your brand. It can also work for your total online mentions, not just on social networks.

Here’s the formula to calculate it:

To fuel this formula with actual numbers, you should use a social media monitoring tool. For example, with Mentionlytics, you can have all your online mentions gathered automatically. Then, the platform will divide them into positive, negative, and neutral based on their sentiment analysis and offer you the total numbers and percentages to make your calculations.

A high NPS indicates that your customers are not only satisfied with your brand but are also enthusiastic about promoting it to others. However, in case it results in a negative number, you know for sure that your brand’s started to cough…

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2- Brand Awareness

Brand awareness is an important brand health metric as it gauges how many people are familiar with it. There are plenty of brand awareness metrics that can help you paint the whole picture of it.

A good starting point is to collect your total brand mentions and analyze their volume and reach with a brand monitoring tool. You can extract meaningful information about how many people know your brand, in which countries and regions, in which channels people talk about you mainly, and more.

Pro Tip: Don’t forget to take into account your social media followers, newsletter subscribers, existing customers, and website visitors.

Regarding brand health, higher brand awareness often correlates with a significant market presence. This means the more customers you have, the more people are talking about you online.

Of course, that awareness can also be generated by negative comments and reviews, that’s why you need the next metric as well.

3- Brand Reputation

Brand reputation is what matters at the end of the day. You can have thousands of people talking about your brand. But what if they’re complaining about it?

That’s why brand reputation is a must-have brand health indicator. It shows how well your brand is perceived by your audience and how they communicate this perception to the world.

To measure your brand reputation, you can begin with online brand monitoring. Do the same for brand awareness but now go beyond the surface.

Dive into sentiment analysis and see if your positive mentions prevail over your negative ones. That’s a sign of a good brand reputation.

Also, you can follow these tips:

• Examine your mentioners closely and see if they’re celebrities, influencers, or even thought leaders.
• Check out the media outlets that are writing about your brand. What do they say?
• Track your campaigns with reputation management software to monitor what people say about your marketing and PR efforts.
• Pay attention to your customer feedback via review sites.
• Do hashtag tracking for your branded hashtags to monitor what people post about when using your hashtags.

Bonus: Discover 4 Online Reputation Strategies for Healthy Brands

4- Share of Voice (SoV)

Now, Share of Voice is basically a brand awareness metric but it’s also necessary for brand health measurement.

In short, it compares your brand’s visibility to your competitors and shows your slice of the audience attention pie.

The higher your Share of Voice, the more people are seeing your brand online, which results in higher brand awareness and, in most cases, a better reputation.

5- Brand Recall

Brand recall measures a brand’s memorability. If people can spontaneously recall your brand without prompts, it shows that your brand is on top of your customers’ minds.

To measure it, you have to run an online survey and ask the participants questions like:

“What brands come to mind when you think about [product/service]?”

Then, sum up all your results and divide the number of people who answered your brand by the number of the survey participants and multiply by 100 to get a percentage. If that percentage is lower than your most competitors, that’s no good news.

6- Brand Association

Brand association and brand positioning go hand in hand. This metric serves as a means to understand the mental connections of a customer between your brand and a feeling, image, or concept.

A brand with favorable associations like “innovation” or “reliability” is likely in good health, reflecting successful brand positioning. To measure this you can organize focus groups and have in-depth conversations to uncover what ideas your brand has been connected to in the minds of your audience.

7- Purchase Intent

Purchase intent is a predictive metric that gives you a glimpse into future sales potential. If more consumers express an intention to buy your brand’s products and services, it hints at strong brand health.

To measure it, you can run another online survey asking questions like:

“On a scale of 1 to 5, how likely are you to buy [product] if it were available in the stores that you regularly visit?”

The interpretation is quite simple. The more 5s you get, the higher the purchase intent of your audience. This can be a sign of extensive awareness, good brand reputation, and even customer satisfaction, in case you include existing customers as well.

8- Brand Loyalty

Brand loyalty is one of the ultimate brand strengths that marketers crave, as it indicates the degree of customer commitment. In fact, high loyalty suggests that customers see unique value in the brand, leading to repeat purchases and a lower likelihood of switching to competitors.

You can track down the loyalty of your customers by monitoring the user-generated content pieces they create regarding your brand. For example, video tutorials of how they use it, tweets praising your services, and more.

Pro Tip: Social listening tools can help you find and collect all UGC pieces of your loyal customers and measure their performance to fuel your brand awareness and brand reputation metrics too.

Furthermore, to measure your brand loyalty you have to count your repeat customers, check out your reviews, and keep an eye on referrals.

9- Brand Advocacy

Brand advocacy is directly tied to brand loyalty and word-of-mouth marketing. You know, satisfied customers often become brand evangelists who can increase your conversion rates, through referrals and recommendations.

However, brand advocates can also be your employees! Especially, professionals with strong personal brands, talented in networking and thought leadership.

Employee engagement plays a huge role today in increasing brand trust and cultivating a positive brand image. Who wants to buy products from companies that abuse their employees after all?

10- Brand Equity

Finally, there’s no brand health tracking without understanding the equity of your brand. Brand equity reflects how much your revenue is growing because of the brand. You can sell a non-branded smartphone for less than $100, but not an iPhone. That’s the true power of branding.

Strong equity means consumers are willing to pay a premium price and choose it over competitors.

Measuring your brand equity is challenging but rewarding. There are a lot of approaches out there that go beyond the purpose of this article, so we suggest you pick the one that best suits your needs.

That’s it! Now, you know all the metrics to measure your brand health. But don’t go just yet. We’ve got some methods and tools that can help you with this endeavor. Scroll down!

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3 Methods to Track Brand Health

Here are the three best ways that help you to measure and track your brand health.

#1 Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring can help you collect all the necessary information to measure brand health and make decisions based on facts, not notions.

Specifically, this process will equip you with the necessary data from your customers to enable you to measure all the brand health metrics we analyzed above.

What’s more, this data — a.k.a. social and web mentions of your brand —  represent the honest opinions and sentiments of your audience toward your brand, which are truer than any survey, focus group, or interview results.

#2 Customer Feedback Surveys

Customer feedback surveys serve as direct communication channels to measure your brand health.

By collecting feedback from the very people who engage with your brand, these surveys provide invaluable insights into brand perceptions, loyalty, and overall satisfaction. They capture immediate sentiments and uncover both strengths and areas of improvement.

Bonus: 10 Best Customer Feedback Tools to Elevate Your Products and Services

#3 Consumer Surveys & Questionnaires

Consumer surveys are very much like customer feedback surveys but with a broader audience in your target group.

They’re used to gather direct feedback from consumers and are valuable to calculate a variety of the metrics we analyzed in the previous sections, such as NPS, brand awareness, purchase intent, and more.

3 Tools to Track Brand Health

Use these three tools for brand health tracking.

#1 Mentionlytics for Social Media Monitoring

Serving as your brand health tracker, Mentionlytics can collect all the social media and web mentions of your brand and analyze them to extract meaningful information.

To be specific, in the Mentionlytics platform you can:

• See the total number of your online mentions and their total reach to help you calculate your brand awareness.
• Perform sentiment analysis of your mentions to help you measure your NPS, brand reputation, and brand advocacy.
• Have your Share of Voice automatically calculated in seconds.
• Do hashtag tracking to uncover your brand association through the keyword cloud.
• Track down every little piece of UGC to capture your brand loyalty.
• Analyze all your customer reviews and employee posts to spot brand advocates.

Try Mentionlytics with full features for free!

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#2 Typeform for Customer Feedback Surveys

Typeform provides an intuitive platform for marketers to craft engaging customer feedback surveys.

Its sleek design makes surveys feel less like a chore and more like a chat. Plus, with easy customization, you get exactly what you need. Your customers will actually enjoy giving feedback.

#3 Survey Monkey for Consumers Surveys

Survey Monkey lets you whip up tailored questionnaires in no time. With its vast template library and clear analytics, it gives depth to consumer feedback.

Also, users can customize the survey’s look and feel to ensure consistency with branding guidelines to establish trust and increase response rates.

How to Improve Your Brand Health?

Now let’s get some perspective from this process. You measured your brand health and hmm..it doesn’t look good. What can you do?

We’ve got three strategies you can follow.

Invest More in Marketing and Advertising

First, marketing and advertising are like the rudders of a ship — they steer brand perception.

Every ad and every campaign is an opportunity to tell a brand story and position it in the consumer’s mind and heart.

By investing wisely in these areas you can ensure that your brand remains top-of-mind for consumers and highlight your unique value proposition.

Create a Positive Customer Experience

Every interaction a customer has with a brand, from browsing its website to post-purchase support, shapes brand perception. That’s why a positive customer experience can boost your brand health.

When customers have seamless and delightful interactions with a brand, they’re more likely to return. Repeat customers are the backbone of a brand, ensuring consistent revenue and serving as brand advocates — word of mouth is the key here.

Build Relations with Influencers

Influencers, with their niche followers and credibility, can be powerful allies in improving your brand health because they have the trust of their audience. A nod from them can instantly enhance a brand’s credibility and appeal.

Moreover, by partnering with influencers,  you can extend your brand’s reach and break into new markets.

Bonus: Learn How to Find Social Media Influencers

Conclusion

To wrap this up, brand health proves that your brand strategy is successful and predicts future growth potential.

By doing some brand health research on a regular basis, you can ensure that your brand can not only survive but thrive, with a favorable impression on your customers’ minds.

It’s time for you to start tracking your brand health. Give it a try now with Mentionlytics — 14 days free, no credit card required.

FAQs

Q1: How Often Should I Track My Brand’s Health?

You should consistently track your brand health. A quarterly review provides a nice balance between responsiveness and avoiding short-term noise. However, it’s essential to adapt the frequency based on your market dynamics or significant brand events.

Q2: Can Brand Health Impact My Company’s Overall Financial Performance?

Absolutely! A healthy brand often translates to increased customer loyalty, the ability to charge premium prices, and a competitive edge, all leading to greater revenue. On the other hand, declining brand health can result in decreased sales, fewer customers, and reduced market share.

Q3: Where Can I Find Expert Assistance or Consultation on Brand Health?

For expert assistance on brand health, you can seek marketing agencies with a track record in brand management. Additionally, industry conferences, webinars, and workshops often host seasoned brand strategists. Online platforms, like LinkedIn, can also help connect with experienced brand health professionals for tailored advice and consultation.