When running a business, you want to influence your customers: find the people willing to spend money on a business in your industry and convince them that you are the right people to go to. It feels weird to think the influence flow should go the other way. Still, if you don’t allow your customers’ needs to influence how you make your business decisions, you’ll alienate a potentially huge chunk of your audience and miss out on their revenue.
You need to meet your market halfway: find out how those customers are making their decisions and make sure you are meeting them halfway. If customers aren’t shopping with, aren’t talking about, or aren’t as aware of your business, then it’s a sign you are doing something wrong, and you need to allow that feedback to influence your business.
Today, we’re looking at how you can do that and your most important first step: Brand Tracking.
A brand tracker survey is made up of several important components. First, the respondents: this survey tracks your brand health in the market, so you need to do a cross-section of people from that big group, not simply your customers. This means you almost certainly need to work with a market research firm with the necessary reach to conduct surveys that get you helpful data.
Respondents are asked to rank their brand in several key areas in the survey’s substance. Firstly, brand recognition. Do they think of your name when asked to list businesses in your niche? If they do, how soon do they feel about it, and what other companies come first on that list?
This gives you a measure of the unprompted recall of your brand commands. The next step digs deeper: customers are asked to rate their brand, identify their closest competitors, and identify the key qualities defining their industry’s success. This lets you know whether you’re perceived as trustworthy. If you offer value for money, are recognized as an expert in your field, are fun, relatable, or whatever else is the primary driver of customers to your brand.
Seeing where your brand ranks for these qualities, both absolutely and relative to your rivals, is a vital reality. If you’ve poured your time and resources into making a brand, you think it speaks to young people with money to spend on their level. In reality, that demographic doesn’t find you relatable, and then you need to be aware of it so you can change your strategy or find the customers your brand does speak to and lean into their concerns and priorities.
