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Brand reputation is an important concept to track for a corporate because it has impact on virtually everything from your customer turnover rate to your employee happiness. But it can also be tricky to quantify reputation unless you have your metrics right. In this post, we will go over the ten most important brand reputation metrics and what they can achieve for your company.
What’s in This Post:
What Is Brand Reputation?
Brand reputation as a term is quite self-explanatory. The term literally means your brand’s reputation in the hearts and minds of all your stakeholders; your employees, shareholders, customers, partners, and audience. It’s what people think when they see your brand, how it makes them feel, and what kind of actions it makes them want to take.
Brand reputation can be a personal experience which is difficult to measure and quantify with metrics. This is true especially for corporates or larger global organizations with millions of stakeholders. With the right KPIs in place, however, it’s possible to get a good idea of how your brand is received by your different audiences. Measuring brand reputation is worth the effort because it gives a solid understanding of how your new campaigns, product launches, press releases, reports, and your company in general, is doing in your market.
Corporates have the good and bad fortune to be often featured in the media. You can quickly attract good press and mentions, but just as quickly you may find your brand in a PR crisis. Only by analyzing these metrics over time will you develop an understanding of what resonates with your people and how they wish for your brand to grow.
Before we get into the metrics you can implement, it’s worth mentioning that your brand reputation will be at risk unless your brand communications are consistent. A sure way to lose an audience or confuse customers is being inconsistent with your brand. As your company grows, the likelihood of inconsistencies grows. Makes sense, your brand is managed by people, after all, and the more diverse the crowd, the more likely it is that your messaging, tone of voice, visual style, or other components of your carefully curated brand essentials are misunderstood, outdated, or simply ignored.
You won’t get far with measuring your brand reputation if your target audience is confused about your intentions or don’t recognize your brand. If you’d like to find out more about how you can automate brand consistency and access your digital content faster, check out our guide to brand management solutions.
Alright, now your content is consistent, and you’ve made brand reputation metrics a priority, time to get into the real deal! Here are the 10 best brand reputation metrics to monitor. You don’t need to get started with all of them. Think about your priorities, what you want to know and if you are ready to act upon the data you get. Metrics are useless unless you act on your findings. If you'd like to learn about metrics and KPIs for brand strategy, check out this post.
First up, volume. By measuring volume, you are measuring how much attention any given content/launch/campaign is receiving over time. While volume itself doesn’t say anything about the temperature and tone of comments/shares/mentions, it does tell you whether people are finding the topic you are discussing interesting and worth reacting to.
Sentiment analysis (or opinion mining) is a form of natural language processing that gives you information about the tone of reactions your brand is getting. Are people being positive? Negative? Somewhere in between? That’s what you will find out if you focus on analyzing sentiment.
Share of voice checks your position on a certain topic and compares it to the rest of the market. It tells you how much of the conversation you own in your market. It can give a nice indication of how well your brand content is attracting discussion in your target audience and what your brand visibility is.
This metrics refers to how many times your content is being shared or written about in the press. There are tools like Meltwater that can track press activity and give you insights about who is writing about you and in what tone.
This one is an old method, but very valuable. Corporate brands shouldn’t just focus on interacting with a wider audience if they want a solid understanding of what their brand’s reputation is. No one can give better insights than existing customers. Therefore, it’s a good idea to include some customer success data in your metrics selection.
Online reviews don’t only talk about the mood of your existing customers, they also have a big impact on your potential future customers. You wouldn’t book a hotel that has received horrible reviews on TripAdvisor. Why would your prospects close a deal with your company if your reviews are less than admiring? It’s extremely important to address and respond to bad reviews, but it can also be valuable to track how much feedback you get, where, what about, and what the tone is.
Customer lifetime value is particularly interesting to track for corporates with long-standing (SaaS/PaaS) customers or clients. Do your customers get enough value for their money to stay with you for a long time? Do they trust your company? Are you successful at upselling? If customers leave immediately when their contract expires, it will most likely mean that your proposition is not right, which in return will have an impact on your brand reputation.
Getting referrals is the ultimate compliment! Customers or partners are so happy with you that they are willing to not just share their positivity, but actively encourage others with similar business needs to come talk to you. Tracking where you get referrals, how, and why will both help you in spotting your potential brand ambassadors but also see if your brand reputation is fluctuating.
How many followers do you have on social media, for instance? Are you seeing a trend of growth or decline over time? As a corporate (depending on your industry), it’s good to monitor how many people follow you and who they are. Are you attracting your target audience? Did you get a surge of new followers after the last product launch? These are good things to monitor for your brand reputation.
Finally, regularly monitoring your success with emails, newsletters, and website is a solid way to look at your reputation. How is your traffic? What kind of pages are attracting visitors, and do they convert into leads? If you are, for example, getting more than average unsubscribes after a certain campaign launch, that could be indicative of negative reaction within your fans.
I hope this gives you a good overview of what is possible in the realm of brand reputation. To get the most out of reputation, or any concept, metric or KPI, you should think about how they play into your brand management strategy. Develop action plans to improve matters if you notice a dip in reputation. Think about how and where you communicate and be open to feedback to maximize your success. If you’d like to learn more about managing a brand, join our free course that covers all topics important for a corporate brand manager:
