Investing in B2B brand tracker research is the key to keeping a brand relevant and generating value. Knowing where your brand stands today and what will impact its success tomorrow is what brand tracking studies will tell you.
Manage risks, seize opportunities & support strategies with a brand tracker
Brands are no longer just the concern of marketing departments. Leaders at every level recognize the role brands play in business success. Strong brands consistently outperform the market. They are what make your company, products, or services stand out. They drive volume, market share, and profit margin. Business leaders need to know the risks they face, the possibilities for the future, how to develop growth strategies and then, ultimately, to measure success. In other words, they need brand tracker studies.
Marketplaces are going through a period of incredible instability, rocked by economic issues, geopolitical disruptions, technological advances, and ever changing competition that never lets up. Marketers need to know how to respond to customer needs, what works, and where to spend resources to keep brands growing.
Investing in a brand tracker provides a tool for keeping a finger on the pulse of the market, measures results, and gives decision-makers from around the company insights into how this key asset is performing.
What is a brand tracker?
A brand tracker is a type of market research that monitors a brand over time across key metrics that track brand value and relevance. B2B brand trackers typically line up along the customer decision-making journey or the purchase funnel used by sales departments. Brand tracking research measures:
- Customer awareness
- Understanding of features and benefits
- Evaluation criteria/what matters to customers
- Purchase intent
- Loyalty in terms of repeat purchases and recommendations
- Brand equity
Addressing the challenges in managing brand tracking research
Designing a brand tracker, starting it up and running brand tracking research over time presents numerous challenges. A reputable B2B market research agency should work with you to resolve each of them.
Understanding your business. It isn’t enough to understand your brand, strategies and KPIs. Your brand tracking research partner should have a deep understanding for your customers. In B2B marketplaces, you typically have more than one stakeholder in decisions. You may need to conduct research that goes beyond decision-makers to include users, influencers, budget door-keepers and more.
Recruiting the right people. It is easier said than done. You need to work with a research partner who can find needles in a haystack in many cases, fully screen them, and ensure they stay engaged. Your partner should be able to scale recruiting, whether you need to talk to 40, 400, or 4,000 professionals.
Data integrity depends on respondents. Because brand trackers can be done in recurring waves, you’ll need to continually refresh participants. You need to make sure your professionals provide valid insights, even with turnover. So much of the value of your brand tracker is in historical data, so ensuring high quality and comparable respondents wave after wave is key.
Topical flexibility. While brand trackers are built to measure key KPIs over time, you need the flexibility to add time-sensitive and topical questions as the market evolves. A good partner will give you the ability to quickly respond to ad hoc insight needs.
Robust reporting. Brand tracker results rarely stand on their own. They often feed into a data warehouse and get incorporated into various decision-making systems. Easy access and portability of data increases its value.
Problem solving. Brand tracker research can be more complex than simple, one-off surveys. You need to work with a partner who has the experience to anticipate fielding challenges and the know-how to resolve them.
You invest precious time and resources into your brand. It only makes sense to put a brand tracker in place that monitors how well your investments are performing. And as important as brand performance is today, knowing what will drive brand value in the future is the real prize. Brand tracking studies should be a cornerstone of your B2B research agenda.
