How to measure the impact of your brand strategy

It can be harder to measure the success of brand strategy activities - they tend to be less tangible than performance marketing metrics like website traffic, conversion rates or cost of acquisition.

But it is possible - and here's how.

When you have a defined brand roadmap and you work to align each element and deliver it consistently to your audience to generate stand out, reach and engagement, you can attach key measures to each tactic accordingly. This way you know that your efforts are paying off.

🟣 Your brand strategy is the platform to build success from.

🟣 Having the right measures in place make it easier to engage and align your teams.

🟣 Creating consistency in your messaging allows you to connect with the right audiences.

🟣 Measuring in the right way will keep you on track with building a successful, recognisable brand.

Brand Vision

Your vision is where you are going - what is the overall purpose of the business that you are working towards.

How to measure brand vision.

• Employee Alignment and Engagement - Conduct surveys and interviews to gauge employees’ understanding and alignment with the brand vision. High levels of alignment often translate to a motivated and cohesive staff. Your vision should be so simple and meaningful that people can understand it and relate to it. It should also be easy to recognise how to live and activate the vision through the work you deliver.

• Customer Perception - Use brand perception studies and customer feedback to assess whether customers and stakeholders understand and support the vision. A successful vision should inspire and attract loyal customers. This is harder to pinpoint but asking questions around why customer's buy from you will help to show the relationship between their loyalty and your vision.

• Progress Metrics - Evaluate the progress towards long-term goals outlined alongside the vision. This can include market share growth, geographical expansion, or advances in sustainability initiatives.

How to measure brand mission

Your mission statement is what you are doing to take the brand closer to the vision. It is the strategic output - what you do for your customer.

• Purposeful Engagement - Track the number of purpose-driven initiatives that align with and support your mission, and their outcomes. These could include community engagement projects, sustainability efforts, or social impact activities.

• Internal Surveys - Assess employees' sense of purpose and how well they can articulate the brand’s mission. A successful mission should be easily interpreted into team-level goals that they're working on through strategic and tactical activities. These measures may already exist in your goal tracking and monthly or quarterly reviews.

• Customer Loyalty and Trust - Measure customer loyalty through repeat purchase rates and Net Promoter Score (NPS). Make sure that you're reviewing measures that show your customer values the things you are focussing on, whether sustainable measures, keeping prices low, personalised service or accessibility. You can also analyse your reviews from customers for trends and key words.

Measuring brand Tone of Voice

Your tone of voice reflects your brand values and ethos and creates engagement and affinity with your audience.

• Consistency Audits - Regularly review communication materials across all channels to ensure consistency in tone. This includes social media posts, email newsletters, website content, and customer service interactions. Pay particular attention to how key messages are being used.

• Engagement metrics - Test and measure different key messages using variations of your tone of voice across your channels - be careful to separate the call to action from the tone as this will skew your results.

• Customer feedback - build questions into customer surveys to gauge your tone - ask customers to select from a range of keywords as to how your content makes them feel - reassured, happy, entertained, informed for example.

Measuring Unique Selling Points (USPs)

Your USPs are the aspects of your brand that truly make you stand out and helps customers to choose you based on suitability over a competitor.

• Sales Data Analysis - Analyse sales data to identify any correlation between the promotion of USPs and sales performance. Track the success of different key messages around your USPs.

• Competitor Analysis - Regularly conduct competitor analysis to ensure that the USPs remain unique and compelling. It may be the way you deliver your product or service, not the product itself. It might be your brand values or community. Ensure that you are evolving with market trends.

• Customer Surveys - Conduct surveys to understand how well customers perceive and value the brand’s USPs. Add in quick polls during and after purchase to see what element of your proposition prompted the purchase, incentivising customers to share feedback if you need to.

Measuring Key Messages

Key messages are the core statements that you build your overall brand messaging hierarchy around. These will get across what you do, who for and what problem you solve for the customer.

• Message consistency - regularly review and audit all internal and external comms to ensure that your key messages are front and centre, and being used in current and relevant formats.

• Engagement and Conversion Rates - Monitor engagement and conversion rates across marketing campaigns and compare the success of each key message.

• Media Coverage - Analyse media coverage to see if key messages are being picked up and echoed by the press and influencers.

Summary of measuring brand strategy success

Measuring the effectiveness of brand strategy elements is crucial for ensuring that a brand remains relevant, compelling, and competitive. Regularly evaluating the success of the vision, mission, tone of voice, USPs, and key messages allows a brand to make informed adjustments, driving sustained growth and deeper connections with both employees and customers. Through targeted metrics and continuous feedback, brands can refine their strategies and simplify the process of auditing a brand strategy.

This might all seem like a big, overwhelming task, but it's likely you already have some of these measures in place.

Need help? Get in touch for help in setting up and structuring your brand strategy measurements.