December 26, 2013
Branding Strategies
"You can't manage what you can't measure." Sage advice.
I come back to this quote again-and-again to remind myself of what is most important in branding: sales. I'm not interested in the soft, squishy side of marketing. I want to see brand strategies that clearly move the sales needle.
In a mid-market company I consistently look at six measures of brand performance.
Reach is a primary measure of branding, and focuses on how many people your brand engages on a monthly basis.
Big brands typically measure reach through advertising impressions, but that's not relevant for mid-market firms with small advertising budgets. Instead measure your digital and media reach:
Reach leads to awareness, and awareness drives the top of your sales funnel.
Sales velocity demonstrates a few aspects of your brand:
Tracking sales velocity requires adding time metrics to your CRM system. Consider how long it takes your team to respond to an inquiry, and then the time it takes to move a prospect between each stage in the sales process.
How often do you have to discount, and leave money on the table?
A strong brand is price resistent. Customers understand the value of your services, and choose it first. They expect the service to be fair market value, but they don't expect it to be the cheapest.
In your CRM or accounting system track your discounts as a clear measure. How much money is discounted per transaction? How much money is lost to discounting per month? If the number is high it can be an indicator of several problems:
Frequent discounting is the canary in the coal mine for brand challenges.
How often do your customers come back to interact with your brand?
Frequency is not necessarily a buying metric. Frequency compliments reach, and indicates if your brand is sticky beyond repeat purchases. It demonstrates how often your prospects, customers, centers of influence and market are engaging with your brand.
Look to your digital and social metrics to measure frequency:
The ultimate measure of a brand is inquiries. How often do you receive inquiries for your products and services? Is your brand pulling in new customers?
Volume is a simple metric: how many inquiries (leads) do you generate per month?
Each of the above five metrics on their own will not give enough insight. For example seeing your total reach for one month doesn't present a lot of value.The key to improving your brand and your sales performance is to track these metrics over time:
Data is just data until you draw it back into your decision making process. Track the metrics that will help you manage your business and brand.
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