The seven key metrics that capture customer insights to help build and maintain a strong brand.
1. Customer needs
Having a good understanding of your customers’ needs will help communicate more relevantly and more effectively position benefits. We may think we know what our customer needs, as we have experience selling our specific services. But how do existing and potential customers describe their needs in relation to your services? And how do they describe their wider needs? These needs go deeper than the literal services you offer, they uncover needs like saving time and money and building successful businesses.
2. Expectations
For any business it’s important to manage customer expectations. But how often do we ask what they are? A Salesforce survey found that 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. Expectations gathers what the customer expectations are when buying your product or service. These might include reliability, accuracy, speed and cost. Expectations are informed by a customers’ experiences over time.
3. Brand Perceptions
Brands are shaped by what customers think of them. Perceptions gathers how existing customers describe us, e.g. they offer good level of service, they are quick to reply to a problem. Perceptions also gathers any negative perceptions, e.g. slow delivery, hard to get hold of, etc. Perceptions also provide an opportunity to gather insights into what customers think of your sector as a whole. This will uncover general attitudes to the sector, and help you position yourself in the market. Gathering perceptions also tracks how well you are living up to your own values, personality and service promises.
4. Purchase Intent
Purchase Intent documents how likely people are to buy from you. It also tracks the frequency of a purchase, e.g. in the next 2-3 month, 6 months, once a year. This enables brands to track the purchase habits by each audience type.
5. Recommendation Intent (Net Promoter Score)
Word of mouth recommendations are an important source for increasing sales and building your brand community. Net Promoter Score tracks how likely a person is to recommend you.
6. Unprompted Brand Recall
All business, organisations and charities operate in a crowded and competitive market, where customers are happy to use a number of different suppliers at any one time. We know that a large proportion of customers will shop around before committing, meaning customers routinely engage with a number of different brands who they are likely to buy from at any one time.
Unprompted Brand Recall measures the number of potential and existing customers who think of your brand when they are considering a purchase It tracks the ranking you hold when a potential customer is asked to think about relevant brands. The highest ranking companies tend to be the bigger companies and those who invest heavily in marketing.
7. Brand Recall
A key objective for any business is to build a strong and successful brand. Brand Recall measures key visual identity elements that help build a strong brand. It measures how many people can describe your logo. It measures what colour people associate with your brand. It measures what imagery people associate with your brand. Combined with Perceptions data these two provide the complete score of how well your brand is being perceived, understood and remembered.
