Why brand tracking is now more important than ever

In today’s environment, consumer behavior changes rapidly and businesses across the globe need to adapt to keep up with the change. Brand messaging, concepts and strategies that have worked for years have suddenly been upended. What consumers want changes with the daily influx of viral information and social media trends. Gen Z shoppers seem to want very different offerings than even slightly older Millennials. 

So how do brands stay agile and alert? More frequent brand and industry tracking.

We’ve previously discussed what brand trackers are and why they are needed. But in today’s volatile market, brand tracking is more important than ever. A well-executed tracker is the most effective way to collect and monitor real-time insights, allowing companies to make quick and informed business decisions.  In this article, we’ll discuss how brand tracking has become more accessible to businesses of all sizes and why brand tracking should be performed more frequently to keep pace with changes in consumer perception and behavior. 

Frequent Insights: Don’t Let Your Brand Get Left Behind

With more and more commerce occurring online, consumers are getting savvier and more fickle. Social media has become a primary source of information and news for many people in our global economy. But some findings suggest that brands seem to be the last to understand the power of influencers and trends. What is hot one day, is old news the next. 

Legacy brand tracking was a long and arduous process, and often actionable results were not available until several weeks post-fielding. Oftentimes the results were stale by the time they were fully analyzed. Today, innovation in the market research tech industry allows even novice researchers to set up and run robust tracking studies in less than a week. Online sample marketplaces offer access to multiple panel sources, providing both speed and scale. According to independent research, sample recruited from multiple sources also leads to high quality and consistent data, wave over wave. 

It is imperative to collect consumer feedback often. Not only does it give insight into customer behavior, but it also allows a brand to monitor/identify current and emerging trends as well as significant changes in the market. Brand trackers enable companies to evaluate current strategies and measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.

What to Keep In Mind When Designing a Brand Tracker

The first step to brand tracking is to determine your target market and outline all relevant brand metrics. The goal is to understand your brand’s position in the market along with your competitors and measure key performance metrics throughout the year. 

Key components of a successful brand tracker include: 

  • Capturing and monitoring key brand health metrics such as awareness, consideration, associations, satisfaction, and loyalty for your brand along with your closest competitors
  • Tracking current and future consumer trends/sentiments in real-time
  • Measuring the effectiveness of brand strategies and marketing initiatives pre and post-campaign 

Other key factors to consider when running a successful brand tracker are to make sure to partner with an experienced research team, keep the questionnaire short and concise (we typically recommend 30 questions or less), and collect responses from the highest quality sample sources. Poor questionnaire design, inexperienced partners, and bad data quality can materially impact the usefulness of a brand tracker.

Brand Tracking Can Be Agile and Accessible

Even if you are a novice researcher or marketer, there are intuitive brand tracking solutions available to help you get started. Like many technological advancements, these insights solutions make research more straightforward and more cost-effective. Conducting a frequent and well-thought-out brand tracker is imperative to maintaining a competitive edge in today’s fast pace environment.

PureSpectrum is your partner for innovative research. Our platform offers both a quality first Sample Marketplace and an easy-to-use Insights Platform. We also have a professional services team of seasoned market research professionals on call 24/7 to assist with your project. This innovative synergy allows anyone the ability to program studies, quickly source respondents within a global marketplace, and analyze data all on a single dashboard. 

If you would like to learn more about how PureSpectrum can help launch your brand tracker, check out the PureSpectrum Brand Tracking FAQs below. Or reach out to our knowledgeable team. We can’t wait to help you get started!

 

PureSpectrum Brand Tracking FAQs

  1. How do I know what my target audience should be? 

First, ask yourself who is your ideal consumer or whose opinions/sentiments you wish to track. This will determine your target audience. A brand tracker typically targets potential buyers/users of your products and services but can also include prospects outside of your ICP in areas that you wish to explore. 

The PureSpectrum Insights Platform allows users to easily collect responses from the general population or target respondents based on criteria such as age, gender, shopping behaviors, income, job title, and more. 

2. How many people should I be collecting in each wave of the brand tracker? 

A lot of this depends on the target audience for your research. For broader consumer groups, we typically recommend 1000+ responses per wave and a minimum of 200 responses from each consumer segment. For more niche target groups, smaller sample sizes are acceptable. For guidance, feel free to reach out to the PureSpectrum team for recommendations.

3. How often should I run my brand tracker? 

You should always start a tracker as soon as possible to understand your brand’s position in the market. Aligning a tracker with marketing campaigns is also common, just be sure to run at least one wave before the campaign begins to establish a baseline.

Trackers can then be run monthly, quarterly, or yearly depending on how often your team needs metrics to make key decisions. The great thing about PureSpectrum’s brand tracker solution is that we offer customized engagement based on your needs.

4. When am I able to see my tracker’s results?

The PureSpectrum Insights Platform shows users their results in real time. All responses are cleaned during collection and aggregated in an intuitive dashboard for easy analysis. Data is presented in a charts and graphs format with the ability to filter and compare different variables. The visualizations are instantly exportable as crosstabs or other formats for inclusion in presentations and reports. Just enter an email address to quickly share the dashboard and results with any team member. 

5. How do I write a brand tracker survey?

Writing a brand tracker doesn’t have to be a big daunting task. The most important thing in a brand tracker is to determine your KPIs and develop questions that allow you to measure them. Including behavioral and demographic questions is a best practice to get more insights into your audience and better understand how your brand is performing in the market.  PureSpectrum has an in-house research team available to help you get started. 

6. Is running a brand tracker expensive?

It doesn’t have to be! PureSpectrum is the only company that owns its own sample marketplace and survey platform. By combining the industry’s highest-quality sample marketplace with a robust survey platform, we’ve allowed users to forgo the third-party markups of the traditional survey platforms and conduct sophisticated brand tracking on a global scale at an affordable price.

7. Does PureSpectrum offer services to support my brand tracking research?

Yes, PureSpectrum offers design consultation, programming, translations, and data analysis to fully support your research. 

8. Can I run my brand tracker in multiple countries?

Yes, PureSpectrum provides access to respondents in 60+ countries as well as translation services to ensure your questionnaire is localized for each market.

About PureSpectrum 

PureSpectrum offers a complete end-to-end market research and insights platform, helping insights professionals make decisions more efficiently, and faster than ever before. Awarded MR Supplier of the Year at the 2021 Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards, PureSpectrum is recognized for industry-leading data quality. PureSpectrum developed the respondent-level scoring system,  PureScore™, and believes their continued success stems from their talent density and dedication to simplicity and quality.

In the few years since its inception, PureSpectrum has been named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in North America on Deloitte’s Fast 500 since 2020, and ranked for three years in a row on the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative List and the Inc. 5000 lists.