Brand tracking surveys can be a total game-changer for understanding how your target audiences see your brand. Unlike a one-off product or campaign survey, brand tracking takes a big picture look at your overall brand health and equity over time.

Implementing regular brand tracking allows you to keep an eagle-eye on important performance indicators, jump on emerging opportunities, and get insights to inform your overall marketing strategy. From messaging and positioning to media mix and campaign creative, brand tracking helps guide decisions across the board.

In this in-depth guide, we’ll break down what brand tracking is all about, the different types of brand surveys, how to create effective surveys, ways to apply the insights, and pro tips for making brand tracking a core piece of your ongoing marketing strategy.

Let’s start by looking at what brand tracking is really all about.

What is Brand Tracking and Why Does it Matter?

Brand tracking simply means continuously surveying your target audiences to assess key metrics related to your brand’s health and performance. Doing this over regular intervals enables you to:

Spot trends and monitor changes over time

Benchmark against competitors or industry averages

Compare performance across regions, customer segments, product lines, etc.

Connect brand KPIs to important business outcomes

Some examples of what an effective brand tracking program aims to measure include:

Brand awareness – how many customers are aware of your brand? What does your aided vs unaided brand awareness look like? How is awareness evolving?

Brand image – what perceptions, associations and emotions is your brand eliciting? How strong is your brand identity and personality? How does your image stack up to competitors?

Consideration & usage – how often is your brand being considered and chosen for purchase? What share of category consumption does your brand capture? How are these metrics trending?

Loyalty & satisfaction – how happy are customers with your products and service? How likely are they to recommend or repurchase your brand?

Brand attributes – how do you rate on important attributes like quality, innovation, value, style etc.? How does this compare to other industry players?

Tracking these kinds of brand KPIs over time serves like an early warning system for potential problems and helps you capitalize on growth opportunities while they’re still emerging. It provides unique visibility into the ongoing health and equity of your brand.

Next, let’s explore the main types of brand tracking surveys to understand what insights each can provide.

Types of Brand Tracking Surveys

There are a variety of different brand tracking survey types, each providing insights into specific aspects of your brand health. The main types include:

Brand Awareness Surveys

These surveys aim to measure consumer brand awareness for your company and products. Questions gauge both aided and unaided awareness, typically asking respondents:

– Can you name any brands that sell [product/service]? (Unaided awareness)

– Are you familiar with these brands? (Aided awareness)

They may also measure familiarity with brand identifiers like your logo, tagline, spokespeople, or other brand assets. Top-of-mind awareness is also often tracked by asking:

– What is the first brand that comes to mind when you think of [product/service]?

Monitoring brand awareness metrics provides insight into your brand reach and visibility. It enables you to identify gaps and opportunities related to communications and positioning.

Brand Image Surveys 

Image surveys measure the perceptions, associations, and emotions consumers attach to your brand. This could include measuring brand personality traits, identifying key associations, tracking satisfaction and consideration, or evaluating trust and loyalty.

Open-ended questions can uncover top-of-mind associations, while brand personality scales help quantify image attributes. For example: 

– What words or phrases come to mind when you think of Brand X?

– On a scale from 1 to 5 where 5 is extremely [attribute] and 1 is not at all [attribute], how would you rate Brand X?

Tagging emotions to your brand can also help quantify image. For example:

– To what extent do you feel [emotion] when engaging with Brand X?

Understanding your brand image allows you to identify strengths to leverage and weaknesses to improve in your messaging and positioning.

Brand Usage Surveys

These surveys track metrics related to brand usage and penetration. Key metrics include:

– Category and brand penetration: Percentage who use/purchase product/service overall and your brand specifically 

– Frequency: How often they purchase/use the product/service

– Recency: Date and time since last purchase/usage occasion

– Brand switching: Changes in the brands purchased over time

– Market share: Your brand’s share of total category consumption 

Usage surveys may also identify drivers of brand choice, purchase triggers, and situational factors that influence brand selection. These insights can inform marketing strategies aimed at increasing share of usage.

Brand Satisfaction Surveys

Understanding satisfaction and loyalty is key for retaining existing customers. These surveys track:

– Satisfaction with brand experience, interactions, product/service quality

– Net Promoter Score (NPS): Likelihood to recommend the brand to others

– Issues causing dissatisfaction 

– Loyalty: Providing insights like share of wallet, repurchase intent, or churn risk

Uncovering drivers of satisfaction and recommendations enables you to take action to improve loyalty and brand perception.

Now that we’ve covered the key brand tracking survey types, let’s look at steps for developing effective brand surveys.

How to Develop a Brand Tracking Survey

Well-designed brand tracking begins with developing a survey tailored to your specific brand objectives and KPIs. Follow these steps:

Identify Your Goals and KPIs

Start by clearly defining your research objectives and identifying the metrics you want to track. What questions do you need answered to guide strategy and branding decisions? 

Common brand tracking KPIs include:

– Brand awareness and associations

– Usage and adoption rates

– Consideration and preference vs. competitors

– Satisfaction and loyalty 

– Brand attributes like quality, value, differentiation

– Ad and campaign recall and impact

With clear goals, you can craft the right survey questions to capture data on both current brand performance and changes over time.

Choose Your Survey Method and Frequency

Key decisions involve how you’ll administer the survey (online, phone, mail, in-person) and survey frequency. 

In most cases, online surveys provide the most cost-effective ongoing tracking. Options include:

– Continuous tracking: Fielding the survey daily/weekly to gather data in real-time

– Periodic snapshots: Surveying quarterly, bi-annually, or annually to benchmark performance  

Determine frequency based on your need to monitor metrics and budget. More frequent fielding enables you to spot trends sooner.

Craft Your Survey Questions 

The survey itself should include a mix of question types:

– Open-ends to uncover top-of-mind perceptions

– Brand image scales to quantify attributes

– Aided awareness and consideration questions

– Category usage and loyalty behavior questions 

– Classification questions to analyze results by segments

– Trend analysis by asking some questions repeatedly over time

Limit open-ends and keep most questions succinct, objective, and quantitative. This streamlines analysis, especially for ongoing tracking. Randomize options to avoid bias.

Test and Refine Your Survey

Before launching tracking, test your survey to identify issues including unclear wording, biased questions, technical errors, or poor flow. Start small with piloting, then refine based on feedback.

Optimizing survey design upfront results in higher quality data over the long-run.

Next we’ll explore analyzing and reporting on brand tracking surveys.

Analyzing and Reporting on Brand Tracking Survey Results

The data analysis and reporting process turns raw brand tracking survey data into insights to guide strategy. Best practices include:

Analyze brand metrics: Assess latest results on KPIs like awareness, perceptions, usage, and loyalty. Look at topline metrics and segmentations.

Identify key trends: Examine survey results over time to spot positive and negative shifts. Look at trendlines by total sample and consumer cohorts.

Benchmark against competitors: Compare your brand’s performance on key metrics to competitors, category averages, and leaders. 

Connect to business outcomes: Relate brand health KPIs to sales, market share, growth metrics where possible. Correlate stronger brand equity to business results.

Isolate opportunities and risks: Flag any metrics, consumer segments, or geographies representing opportunities for gains or potential brand threats.

Present user-friendly reports: Visualize through charts, dashboards, and highlight summaries. Focus on presenting actionable insights.

Ongoing brand tracking reporting provides a snapshot of brand health and equips the team to act on survey findings. Next let’s look at applying brand tracking insights.

Ways to Use Brand Tracking Survey Insights

There are many ways to take action on brand survey insights to strengthen marketing strategy and brand health:

Guide Brand Positioning and Messaging

Survey feedback on brand image, associations, and perceptions provides guidance for crafting optimal brand messaging and positioning. Track studies can identify current equities to leverage or weaknesses to shore up through messaging.

Inform Media Planning and Buying

Brand tracking results can inform critical media mix decisions. For example, low brand awareness among a target segment may indicate a need to allocate more media budget to building reach and visibility through specific channels.

Identify Growth Opportunities 

By analyzing brand metrics by consumer cohort, segment, or region, you can isolate pockets of opportunity to focus efforts on for driving growth. Act on insights like dissatisfaction in a certain customer tier or declining loyalty among specific demographics.

Benchmark Against Competitors

Regular brand tracking allows you to monitor your performance on brand health metrics relative to competitors. Use it to identify areas you are leading or lagging in to guide where to invest or realign.

Track Campaign Effectiveness  

Rotate in campaign-specific brand tracking questions to gauge awareness, comprehension, favorability, and impact on brand metrics over time. This demonstrates how different campaigns and initiatives contribute to overall brand health.

Monitor Brand Health Over Time

Ongoing brand tracking builds a rich data asset to assess brand health long-term. Analyze multi-year trends and correlate brand KPIs to business results over time.

Next we’ll look at steps for making brand tracking a regular part of your marketing strategy and processes.

Integrating Brand Tracking into Your Marketing Strategy 

To reap the full benefits of brand tracking, integrate regular surveys into your ongoing marketing strategy and processes. Ways to do this include:

Set Up Ongoing Tracking

Move beyond one-off studies by implementing continuous or quarterly brand tracking. Build this into your budget and create an annual tracking plan detailing the focus, timeline, and frequency for surveys.

Connect Survey Data to Business Outcomes 

Link brand health metrics to sales results, growth, and profits. Identify leading indicators from tracking data that may predict future business trajectory.

Share Findings Across the Organization

Socialize results through reports, presentations, and meetings. Ensure everyone from branding to product teams leverages insights to inform decisions.

Continuously Optimize Based on Results 

Use brand tracking data to regularly refine strategy and plans. Course correct messaging, media mix, or initiatives that aren’t strengthening brand KPIs. 

With these best practices, brand tracking can become an integral part of your ongoing marketing strategy.

Keys to Effective Brand Tracking Surveys

Some final keys for success with brand tracking include:

– Align surveys to specific goals and KPIs you want to monitor over time

– Survey frequently for more real-time monitoring capabilities

– Ask consistent questions for reliable trend measurement 

– Segment thoroughly to isolate opportunities among consumer groups

– Avoid survey fatigue by thoughtfully managing sample sources and frequency

– Optimize for mobile since many surveys are completed on smartphones

– Focus on key drivers like awareness, usage, loyalty, and associations 

– Visualize and socialize results across the organization

– Quickly course correct based on brand tracking survey flags

Conclusion

Implementing ongoing brand tracking through surveys provides invaluable visibility into the ongoing health, perceptions, and equity of your brand. It serves as both an early warning system to flag risks and issues as well as a guidepost for capitalizing on growth opportunities.

By integrating regular brand tracking into your marketing strategy and processes, you’ll gain unique insights to inform everything from branding and positioning to campaign creative, media mix, and messaging. The ability to benchmark and monitor important brand health metrics enables stronger, more data-driven decision making.

Brand tracking is a long-term investment that pays dividends through building stronger brand equity and loyalty, detecting challenges early, and ensuring marketing continually optimizes based on the voice of the customer. Approach it strategically as a centerpiece of your brand’s analytics and you’ll keep your finger on the pulse of brand performance over time.