Was it Effective?

As mentioned the past few weeks, rebranding is a complex decision to understand. When pitching this often “radical” idea to a board you need to come with metrics that speak to others, money. It is imperative, after the rebranding occurs to track your target market and their reaction to the change in addition to tracking the return on investment since it is a costly endeavor.

When analyzing the reaction of your brand’s target market, it is important to have mediums for dialog to occur. Surveys are a popular method for opening this dialog with the customer. Depending on the type of business you have, there can be simple metrics to track such as website traffic to see if there is increased brand awareness. You can use simple tools such as Google Analytics to assist with this evaluation process as well. Another simple tool would be how often you are being mentioned in the press. The phrase “all PR is good PR,” comes to mind. Fortunately, you can learn much about customer feelings through mentions and develop a great understanding of the reaction of your target market. This media mentions is synonymous these days with social media engagement. Twitter and Facebook are great ways to hear your customers directly and you are sure to hear their voice either positive or negative. How the brand is perceived affects its performance which ultimately effects the bottom-line financials.

There are 3 main metrics to consider – Perception, Performance, and Financial. Perception metrics include awareness such as web traffic, followers, reach, etc. It also includes brand considerations, such as relevance, differentiation, and perceived quality. Performance metrics include the consumer behavior – purchases and loyalty. The financial metrics, which ultimately are what speaks to most internal employees, include market share, revenue, cost per acquisition, etc. It is important for your company to establish which metrics are most important. Then you can properly set benchmarks to compare the effectiveness of the rebranding and the impact it had on the brand. After analyzing these you can determine if the decision was effective and evaluate the ROI. There are countless data points marketers can take into consideration when measuring brand effectiveness or ROI for that matter. Today, there are great supplemental analytic tools to prove that social engagement translate and drive revenue. Proving top-of-funnel activities to bottom-of-funnel conversions translate into profitability for a company is key. Many companies utilize ad agencies who have the experience necessary to ensure the analytics are executed properly.