B2B Brand Tracking: Measure What Matters

What is B2B Brand Tracking?

Brand tracking is the continuous process of measuring what matters in your business from the viewpoint of your clients, your prospects, your suppliers, and your stakeholders. As basketball great Bill Bradley said, “Becoming number one is easier than remaining number one.” B2B brand tracking helps you with both.

Typically, B2B brand tracking metrics include:

• Overall Satisfaction for Your Brand
• Likelihood to Recommend (NPS Score) Your Products/Brand
• Likelihood to Switch to the Competition
• Intent to Renew/Increase Purchase
• Monitor the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Messages
• Competitor Ratings
• Products and Services Ratings
• Brand Awareness, Usage, and Attitudes

Because B2B brand tracking programs collect ongoing data, you can more accurately detect and measure changes in the marketplace.

Tracking creates actionable feedback, which has significant implications for your marketing strategy and programs and the success of your B2B business.

How do You Measure Brand Success?

It’s essential to leverage the multiple data sources and channels where you engage with your target audience and customers along the customer journey. Since so much of the B2B purchase journey is online, it is valuable to monitor social media and track website visits and conversions as part of your B2B brand tracking. However, these tactics will never provide you with rich attitudinal insights synchronized with your markets and benchmarked with competitive data. Designing a survey that tracks your brand performance accurately is critical.

Professional, experienced B2B marketing research firms can design a B2B brand tracking program that will get you the information you need with positive engagement from your customers. Their experience means they know what works in practice (versus theory) when executing a B2B brand tracking study for your industry. They have experience developing practical and “operationally-efficient” online sample designs and questionnaires that will save you time and resources over the life of your tracking program.

B2B Surveys for High Customer Engagement

There are three critical considerations for executing a good B2B brand tracking survey: what you ask, how you ask, and who you ask.

What you ask will be determined by your products, services, brands, industry, and strategy and goals for the information. It is tempting to try to answer every question your organization has about the market in one survey, but that is a recipe for disaster. Focus the questions on the information you must get from the brand tracking survey, and only that, for the best result.

Here are some tips for B2B brand tracking research:

Finally, getting the right people into the survey will depend on building the right sampling plan. Your options for surveying a subset of your target market are:

• Using a list source service,
• Using your internal customer database,
• Using a market research panel. (A market research panel is a database of individuals who have agreed to complete surveys for a small incentive.)

Obviously, you first need to decide if you want information only from your clients or whether to include non-clients, lost clients, and prospects. That will often drive your choice of the sample source. No matter which way you go, it is essential that you get the targeting right, and you are inviting the right people to engage with you in the brand tracking program.

If you use an online panel as part of your solution, your market research panel provider should work with you to validate their panel members with your customer records.

When is B2B Brand Tracking a Good Idea?

B2B brand tracking is a good idea whenever you need to be a data-driven organization where innovation, marketing, and performance management are all driven by real-time customer and marketplace insights and dynamics. Once you have the results of your brand tracking survey, you can take action to understand the data and adjust your business.

Whether you want to measure how your brand, products, and services perform against market changes or if you are trying to fine-tune your current brand tracking program, there are many good partners and tools available to you.