You Ask, I Answer: Which Brand KPIs?

In today's episode, Jen asks, what are some solid KPIs that brands should be looking for uh this year and next year? So good question because brand KPIs traditionally for marketers have been uh a little difficult to measure. A lot of marketers struggle to measure brand in any meaningful capacity, partly because for a lot of us we have a very difficult time even expressing a definition of what a brand is. The um the definition I tend to enjoy is uh one by Zay Frank from way back in 2006 where he said a brand is a an emotional aftertaste from a series of experiences. And so I I think that's a a fantastic definition.

How do you measure that? How do you calculate that? How do you uh make that something that is less subjective and more objective because at its core it is emotional? Well, there's a bunch of different numbers we can use to try to quantify brand. Uh but when it comes to KPIs, remember that the definition of a KPI is a metric for which you either get a bonus or fired.

Right? Anything that has no serious meaningful consequences in either direction is just a metric, right? If I saw somebody on uh social media was saying, you know, social media reach. I would not want to be held accountable for that because you have there's you have very little control over that, at least on the unpaid side, um, as social algorithms continue to scratch at the screws, right? There's very little that you can do as a marketer that will give you uh reliable, repeatable, measurable results.

You can do all kinds of stunts, but did that really change anything from the business perspective? Brand has a lot of metrics that are meaningful from the business perspective and will have a strong mathematical relationship and possibly a causal relationship to money in the bank. So, what are those metrics? Number one branded organic search. Meaning somebody goes to a search engine and types in your brand name is a good metric of brand, especially when you categorize your brand organic searches by sentiment and intent.

So if you're saying Toyota, and you search for, and we're talking about the Prius. If you search for a Toyota Prius, that's a neutral brand intent, right? It's the someone's just looking for the brand. If you're looking for Toyota Prius recalls or Toyota Prius sucks, it's pretty clear what you're searching for, right? If um you're looking for a Toyota Prius reviews or uh Toyota Prius recommendations or Toyota Prius uh prices, those are a little more on the positive side, right?

You're you're trying to ascertain is this something that I should buy? I've heard things about it, those things might be good. I should probably check and see what other people have said. So that sort of branded organic search is a powerful tool for measuring brand. Number two, NPS scores are essential for brands.

So an NPS score, net promoter score, is a two question is what is the likelihood that you would recommend uh what's the likelihood that you would buy from us again in the next 90 days? And number two is what is the likelihood that you would recommend us to a friend or colleague in the next 90 days? Score of zero to ten, right? And companies that do NPS really well measure that at every transaction. One of my favorite airlines, JetBlue, uh sends out an NPS score for every leg of a trip.

So not just how was your flight to to San Diego and back, it was how is your flight from Boston to San Diego? How is your flight from San Diego back to Boston? Two separate customer experiences, and therefore two different NPS scores, because it could be that your experience with the the San Diego-based ground crew was not great, right? And they want to know that. So it's really smart, good usage of uh NPS scores.

Third, to a lesser degree, um, social media mentions in a recommendation context. This requires um advanced text mining, and in many cases is actually not worth it, uh, unless you're a very large brand. But social media mentions in a recommendation context are when somebody asks on Reddit or Facebook or Twitter, can anyone recommend a hybrid car? And if you can identify that question and then and then the subsequent answers, so everyone says Toyota Prius, guess what? Your brand's doing well.

If everyone says avoid the Toyota Prius, like okay, so our brand marketing's not going so well. Right. When you fill out a form on a website, when you text a brand, when you walk into their store, when you uh send them an email, heck, even when you subscribe to a newsletter, if you as the brand are not asking a question like how did you hear about us or what made you come in today, you're missing a key opportunity to measure the strength of your brand. If you're asking how did you hear about us, and nobody says, like Facebook, and you're all in on Facebook marketing, guess what? You've got a problem.

Right? That is a a serious mismatch between the effectiveness of your brand and uh and and the things that you're trying to do. Right, and that starts to get into uh like social media brand KPIs, which is a whole other story than just the brand KPI overall. But if you had to pick one of those to start with, I would start with that categorization of branded organic search. Because again, uh as was detailed in the book, Everybody Lies, people type things into a search engine, they would not ask another human being, right?

They are more honest there because they think they're not being watched, even though they ever think they do with a third search engine is being watched. Um as such, that honesty allows them to ask questions of search engines and get reasonable answers. And so if you can measure that, and you uh you don't need like gazillion dollar technology to do that, uh you can if there's not a lot of search volume, you can uh you can make the intern count up uh the numbers in your SEO tool of choice. Um better uses for interns than that, but if you had nothing else, that's where you could start. Uh any good SEO tool should help you with that.

Google Search Console, the free tool from Google, uh, will help you with that. So that's where I would start. If you have nothing else, then I would go to uh point of conversion questions, because you have total control over that at every point in the conversion process, and then look at the other options afterwards. So that's how to do brand KPIs or how to start doing brand KPIs. Understand that brand and market research are professions unto themselves within marketing.

You can hire a market researcher to do all this stuff. It will be reassuringly expensive. But it is a profession unto itself. So start with the metrics I mentioned, and then once you feel confident in those numbers and your collection methods, and you have numbers from which you can make a decision and about what to change, then you can take on more and more uh advanced market research as well. Uh as always, please leave your comments in the comments box below.

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