As businesses continue to grapple with the coronavirus crisis, brands and marketers have entered a brave world of the new abnormal. This has forced marketers to shift marketing KPIs, re-assess priorities, and shrink budgets. Before COVID-19, driving sales was top-of-mind for marketers, as we observed in our GfK survey Branding and Marketing in the New Abnormal. However, during the pandemic, the focus has shifted towards maximizing marketing ROI.
Here are five few quick tips on how you can drive long-term equity for your brand and gain greater visibility of the consumer purchase journey.
1. Employ data-driven strategy
Brands are channeling their efforts to re-engineer their value chains, become more agile, and future-proof themselves through digital transformation. It is now imperative for brands to use data analytics and draw incisive conclusions that enable them to make effective decisions. Unfortunately, very few marketers have ongoing, real-time solutions for tracking brand equity, giving them the ability to position or reposition quickly and successfully in the post-pandemic environment. Services like Brand Performance Monitor give marketers the ability to pivot in a moment as the consumer world continues to transform.
2. Define marketing performance metrics
The traditional framework to measure KPIs for brand performance is based on a rear-view approach instead of a forward-looking one. The fundamental challenges faced by marketers when it comes to measuring ROI are 1) Assessing the impact of their brands against actual business performance and (2) Defining tangible performance indicators to justify or defend brand investments. Today’s CMOs need a future-focused, decision-driven method for brand tracking and managing their brands.
3. Embrace digital influence
The way customers interact with brands across digital touchpoints has fundamentally shifted and your past models and performance indicators may not be relevant anymore. What marketers need are digital competencies to deliver speed and innovation. This will help create authentic and meaningful experiences for the audiences. Brand Performance Monitor enables you to take market-led actions by linking insights from customer brand perceptions to your sales data. With this information, marketers can understand how consumers would switch between brands and detect which competitor is most likely to attract their current customers.
4. Quantify brand value to activate growth
A better understanding of what drives customer decisions today makes it easier to eliminate inefficiencies and plan for tomorrow. The key differentiator of monitoring brand performance is to know accurately how much brand revenue is due to the strength of brands and how marketers can increase that. This enables brand teams to look beyond “the funnel” and provides a complete hologram of consumers’ brand choices.
5. Create a measurement strategy for the long and short terms
Assessing your brand sentiment and getting insights from multiple data sources can help increase performance across all channels — allowing you to align communications with sentiment analysis to maximize growth potential. Brand Performance Monitor is the go-to solution for planning and measuring brand-building strategies helping answer your key business.
Be future-ready to win in this challenging landscape
Whatever the development phase of your brands—from early stage strategic brand positioning through to marketing-mix execution — Brand Performance Monitor will give insights into market performance, brand positioning, competitive landscape and brand attitudes and behavior. Brands that innovate during the crisis will always have the upper hand in the post lock-down economy.
When you can take the temperature of your brand’s health, performance and value on demand, you’ll be empowered to increase its performance on all levels. Your marketing will benefit, with more effective messages, perfectly positioned to reach target audiences based on what they desire today, and predictions of what they’ll want tomorrow.
Revolutionize your marketing ROI and brand value
