Introduction
In today's competitive landscape, tracking and analyzing brand metrics are vital for guiding a brand’s growth among new audiences. Designing an advertising campaign without the right brand metrics is like backpacking without a compass—you’ll move forward, but you won’t be certain it’s the right direction.
Like compasses, brand metrics can point you in the right direction. There are several different kinds of brand metrics, all of which provide a different insight, of varying value. In this post, we will help you get familiar with the brand metrics that offer the most actionable insights, which include:
- Sales funnel: provides a snapshot of the effectiveness of your customers' sales journeys from being aware of your brand to becoming a loyal customer.
- Sales drivers: identify the brand attributes most related to driving customers through the sales funnel.
- Brand sentiment: assess how potential and current customers currently feel about your brand and its competitors.
Insights from a Sales Funnel
One of the most important brand metrics you can track is your sales funnel. The sales funnel represents the step-by-step journey that customers go through, from initial awareness of a brand to consideration and ultimately making a purchase decision. More specifically, a sales funnel shows the percentage of consumers at every stage of the customer journey for a brand. These simple descriptive statistics can provide many insights into potential issues and solutions with a brand’s current marketing and sales strategy.
The Standard Sales Funnel
The standard sales funnel (as shown above) typically shows the percentage of consumers in a market who are aware of a brand, who have considered purchasing the brand’s products, and who have actually made a purchase. These three statistics, separately and holistically, provide a wealth of important information.
If your overall brand awareness is low, but the consideration and purchase rates from consumers who are aware of your brand are high, it indicates that your campaigns resonate well with your target audience. To further boost your brand’s growth, it becomes crucial to focus on campaigns with a wide reach. By increasing overall awareness through more widespread marketing efforts, you can expand your customer base and capture more potential buyers.
Conversely, if a high percentage of consumers are already aware of your brand but have not considered making a purchase, it suggests your sales efforts may need to be more tailored and persuasive. In this case, it’s important to focus on strategies that aim to engage and persuade consumers to move into the consideration stage. This may involve highlighting unique selling points that resonate with that audience, addressing pain points, or providing incentives like promotions to drive their interest and consideration. Below, we will discuss how to use a sales driver analysis to create more targeted messaging to drive consumers toward the consideration and purchase phase of the sales funnel.
By understanding the dynamics of your sales funnel and adjusting your marketing strategies accordingly, you can optimize your efforts and drive conversions. Regularly monitoring the metrics at each stage of the funnel can help you identify areas for improvement and make informed decisions to enhance your brand's performance.
Matching the Funnel with the Customer Journey
While the standard sales funnel provides valuable insights, it's important to acknowledge that it may not capture all of your brand's important touchpoints. It's essential to align the sales funnel with your brand's unique touchpoints to create a comprehensive understanding of your customer journey.
By closely mapping your touchpoints with each stage of the customer journey, you can guide consumers seamlessly through the sales funnel while addressing their specific needs and preferences. For instance, if your brand offers software as a product, providing free trials can be a crucial touch point. Tracking the percentage of trial users who eventually become customers offers valuable insights into the trial's effectiveness.
Additionally, it's important to track other touchpoints that can significantly impact customer behavior. For example, monitoring the percentage of customers who redeem discount codes or sign up through referral links from friends can provide insights into the influence of these touch points on conversion rates.
The range of touch points that can be informative is vast and will vary depending on your specific business and industry. The key is to track as many relevant touchpoints between your brand and its consumers as possible. This allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of various marketing efforts and identify areas that may require adjustments or improvements.
Using a Sales Driver Analysis to Understand the Value of Your Brand
The central question of what customers truly care about is a common challenge for any brand. While direct ratings of a brand’s attributes can provide some understanding of the extent to which consumers care about specific attributes or product features, more actionable insights can be derived from a sales driver analysis. A sales driver analysis reveals the brand attributes that actually drive customer purchase decisions. It helps uncover the attributes or aspects that have the most significant impact on increasing awareness, consideration, and purchase behavior.
A sales driver analysis integrates the sales funnel with consumers’ perceptions of the extent to which a brand embodies select attributes (i.e., affordable, trendy, durable) to identify those attributes that drive customers through the sales funnel. Through a custom survey, consumers rate the extent to which a brand they are aware of in a specific industry is seen to embody an attribute more or less than the average brand in the industry.
Through a logistic regressions model, one can calculate the attributes that are most predictive of considering and purchasing from a brand. While sales driver analyses typically use consumer brand ratings to predict consideration and purchase rates, it can be applied to any stage of the funnel. Therefore, if your brand struggles in a specific stage of the customer journey, it may be best to tailor the analysis accordingly.
The image above shows the results from a sales driver analysis for the alternative milk industry. Based on the analysis, there’s evidence that consumers in this industry perceive good taste as the biggest driver to both consideration and purchase. Therefore, marketing material should emphasize how good the product tastes (and hopefully it actually does).
However, not all attributes are equally effective at all stages of the funnel. As seen in this analysis, the perceived coolness of an alternative milk brand influences purchasing decisions but does not play a role in the consideration phase. In contrast, perceptions of a brand’s playfulness are important for consideration rates but not the actual purchase decision. Marketing campaigns can leverage this data by emphasizing the attributes most important for consideration rates in mass marketing material and promoting sales drivers that are most predictive of purchase rates closer to the point of sale.
For example, when designing commercials and other wide-reaching marketing material, an alternative milk company should focus on increasing perceptions of its products’ affordability and incorporate humor to capitalize on the importance of the playfulness attribute. In contrast, to bolster its chances of making a sale, the brand should emphasize the taste, affordability, and coolness of its products on the packaging material and in-store marketing.
A sales driver analysis provides insights into the specific elements that strongly correlate with purchase intent and/or drive customer preferences. This analysis goes beyond merely assessing the importance of attributes and focuses on understanding which attributes drive purchase behaviors.
These actionable insights can inform strategic decision-making, such as prioritizing resource allocation, refining marketing messaging, or enhancing product features based on the identified sales drivers. By understanding the factors that truly drive customer behavior, brands can tailor their brand positioning, messaging, and overall customer experience to better resonate with their target audience and drive business growth. You can view another example of a sales driver analysis (this time for beer brands) here.
Brand Sentiment: Capitalizing on a Sales Driver Analysis
Brand sentiment represents a comprehensive understanding of how potential and current customers perceive a brand compared to its competitors. By leveraging brand sentiment data, brands can focus on creating targeted messaging around the attributes most predictive of consideration and purchase rates. By understanding how consumers perceive the brand relative to the competition, brands can make informed decisions on which attributes to address in their marketing campaigns, maximizing the impact of their marketing resources.
While it is essential for a brand to maintain a positive perception, brands can strategically allocate their resources by focusing on remedying negative perceptions only for attributes that significantly impact consideration and purchase rates. This approach allows them to save resources by not addressing negative perceptions that don’t strongly influence consumer behavior. For example, using the sentiment data for the alternative milk company shown above, the brand manager may opt not to commision an email campaign focused on eco-friendliness or responsibility because those attributes have little to no impact on driving sales.
Moreover, brands can decide which attributes to emphasize in their marketing campaigns based on the existing positive sentiment. If consumer sentiment is already highly positive for certain attributes, brands may shift their focus to other attributes that may require more attention or creativity to convey. By identifying the areas where consumer sentiment is already strong, they can prioritize efforts on attributes that have a greater potential to influence consumer behavior. With consumer sentiment already extremely positive for their brand's taste, the alternative milk company may decide not to focus on taste in their upcoming marketing campaign and prioritize perceptions of the brand’s affordability and coolness instead.
Brand sentiment data allows brands to optimize marketing strategies. It can help them focus on the attributes that are most important to consumers and avoid wasting resources on those that are not. By understanding how consumers perceive their brand, brand can create messaging that resonates with their target audience and drives sales.
Summary
Brands hold the key to unlocking their maximum potential by harnessing the power of brand metrics. By utilizing key brand metrics such as the sales funnel, sales drivers, and brand sentiment, brands can navigate the complex landscape of marketing campaigns with confidence and precision.
The sales funnel accurately measures the progression of consumers at each stage of the customer journey. It provides brands with a visual representation of critical touchpoints, enabling them to identify where customers are in their decision-making process. By analyzing the percentage of consumers at each stage, from awareness to purchase, brands can determine which stage of the funnel needs to be targeted to ensure consumers reach the purchase stage of the funnel.
Sales drivers offer a deeper understanding of the attributes that drive customer behaviors along the sales funnel. By identifying the most important sales drivers for consideration and purchase rates, brands can highlight these attributes, thereby maximizing the impact of their marketing campaigns. Whether it's through tailored messaging, targeted promotions, or personalized experiences, aligning marketing efforts with the most influential sales drivers enhances brand relevance and increases the likelihood of conversion.
Brand sentiment, derived from consumer ratings across the brand and product attributes, provides invaluable insights into how customers perceive a brand and its competitors. Understanding brand sentiment allows brands to effectively position their messaging, leveraging positive attributes and addressing negative perceptions. By capitalizing on brand sentiment ratings, brands can strategically place messaging where it resonates the most, emphasizing drivers of consideration in mass marketing material and emphasizing drivers of purchase closer to the point of sale. This targeted approach ensures that marketing efforts align with customer preferences, driving brand consideration and improving overall brand performance.
In today's data-driven era, brands who harness the power of brand metrics gain a competitive edge. These metrics provide the necessary guidance to optimize marketing campaigns, tailor messaging, and enhance customer experiences. By utilizing the sales funnel, sales drivers, and brand sentiment as their compass, brands can navigate an ever-changing landscape, make informed decisions, and drive growth and success.
Does your brand need a compass for navigating the power of your brand’s metrics? Let us know and we’d be happy to help.
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