Measuring your brand online is something B2B professional service firms can find challenging. This is due to the fact that a brand is often perceived as something intangible that can’t be measured. Since measuring a brand requires the commitment of resources and attention, many B2B small to medium-sized firms pay little attention to it. In the long run, failure to measure your brand risks the implementation of the wrong branding strategies, wasted marketing investments, and reduced ROI.
How do you measure your brand?
1. Create online surveys
An easy way to measure your current brand awareness is by conducting online surveys. For example, you could have a questionnaire on your website to ask visitors how they found you, or if they had heard of you before. You can also create a survey that measures your client experience called a Net Promoter Score (NPS)
2. Search Popularity
Use Google Adwords, Keyword Planner and Google Trends to see the volume of searches for your brand name. You can also use them to monitor your competitors’ brands, as well as some other top industry keywords over time to see the trends in search volumes.
3. Monitor Your Brand
Good brand management requires careful monitoring. Set a little time aside each day for checking up on your brand’s presence. You may also want to set aside a bigger block of time weekly or monthly to carry out a more detailed analysis.
Tools for Monitoring Your Brand: There are many online tools you can use to measure your brand. Tools such as Social Mention and Trackur keep tabs on your online reputation for you. When your brand is mentioned, they’ll alert you and provide a link. SocialMention actually analyzes comments about your brand and shows you the overall sentiment, and you can choose to see only positive or negative listings.
Google Alerts: All of these tools are slightly different so you should spend some time finding the ones that are the most effective for your B2B professional service firm. In the meantime, Google Alerts provide the simplest and easiest system for monitoring online. You select keywords or phrases, such as your brand’s name, and then Google lets you know when something is posted online. You can choose either to be alerted immediately or as a daily or weekly digest.
More Specialized Tools: There are also tools for specific social media sites. Twilert is a tool that works in the same way as Google Alerts but focuses on Twitter, while Hyper Alerts is a similar tool that alerts you of Facebook activity.
There are also specific analytic tools designed to help you boost your search engine rankings. Google Analytics is a great tool to track the number of people who searched your website directly, bookmark pages on your website, or clicked a link in an untracked email or offline document. Monitoring this over a particular period of time will give you an indication of the trends in your brand awareness.
4. Unlinked Mentions
You may also want to find unlinked mentions and link them back to your site. An unlinked mention is when someone posts something about your brand online but doesn’t link back to your website. This is a lost opportunity for you. If there is a link leading back, it will bring you more traffic. Most people post content without thinking about including live links, so if you find unlinked mentions and reach out to the site owner, they’ll often be happy to link to your site. Be sure to provide the link in the email to make it easy for them to link back to your site by adding it to the appropriate page in question. You can do this simply by calling or emailing the owner of the site and explaining your objective, and also taking the opportunity to create a more formalized backlinks partnership with them.
5. Social listening
People often go online to talk about the brands they like and those they do not like. Social listening is an inexpensive way to track conversations about your brand across social media and the web. This is done by keeping track of social media shares, likes, and comments. Tools such as Oktopost and Hootsuite enable you to not only schedule social media posts but to monitor interactions in single dashboards, while more niche tools such as Tweetreach provide advanced analytics and the ability to monitor contributor influence.
Brand and the bottom line
While these tactics will help you measure your brand to see what works and what doesn’t, a common mistake by many B2B professional service firms is linking their brand’s success and visibility to revenue. The trick with branding is how to capitalize on it and convert goodwill and digital interactions into future sales and satisfied clients.
Create a solid foundation for future sales by paying attention to these methods of measurement. Read more about how your audience can recognize your firm online through your voice and tone, or check out our Insights for more useful information on brand management. And if you enjoyed reading it, feel free to share this post on social media.
