Leveraging Data and Analytics for Enhanced Brand Reputation
‘Authenticity, consistency, brand image, reputation. We’ve all heard these buzzwords when we think of branding.
While these are necessary elements on which a solid foundation of branding stands, they’re not the only elements required for branding. One of the most crucial elements that helps keep a brand going is data. Enough data equals enough samples for your brand to know what’s working and what’s not.
After all, 3 in 5 organizations use data analytics to drive business innovation. So, the correlation between data and branding is the one you should dive deeper into!
This article discusses practical ways to leverage data analytics to enhance your brand reputation. However, before we move to it, let’s briefly look at the reasons branding is important in the first place.
Reasons why branding is important
Branding embodies a company’s reputation, which few companies are lucky to gain overnight or even in years. While the tangible aspects of branding, such as logo, colors, labels and designs, play a key role in defining a brand image, the intangible aspects matter in the long run.
Below mentioned are a few intangible parameters that make branding important for businesses.
Builds a strong brand identity
All businesses promise to offer good products, timely delivery and great service. However, they miss out on the answer to “Why should a customer choose it over others?”. Establishing a brand identity automatically gives you an edge over your competitors.
All you need to know is:
- your brand values
- how do you create that value
- how do you map your services to represent the value
Branding makes promoting products easy.
Would you buy a soft drink bottle without a label? That’s what branding helps your business with. Packaging and labeling not only differentiate your product from the rest but also make it easier to sell.
Branding builds trust among customers
The art of consistent branding fosters trust among customers. So focus on delivering quality products as it helps create that emotional bond between you and your customers, which helps in creating a loyal and solid customer base.
Branding makes diversification simple
Introducing a new product becomes easy when you already have a brand. Branding helps build credibility, further simplifying the process of launching new products in the future, as you’ll already have a customer base by then.
Branding protects businesses with legal compliance
Trademarked products are legally protected as it’ll become hard to steal your products, design, logo, etc., once it’s trademarked. Moreover, you can charge whatever fees if anyone wants a franchise.
Now that we know the significance of branding let’s get to three ways to leverage data analytics to take your brand reputation to the next level.
3 ways to leverage data analytics for your brand
Building an authentic brand voice comes from consistent efforts in finding new ways to enhance your branding. Below are four practical ways to do so.
- Use brand management software
You can spend time and resources enhancing your brand reputation when you don’t have current systems consuming most of your and your team’s time. Here’s when using brand management tools such as equity management software come to the rescue. Streamlined equity workflows with software give your team space to be more creative and automatically take your company a step above in terms of your brand reputation.
A few prominent reasons to invest in brand management software are as below.
Strengthens your brand vision and messaging
No matter how creative strategies you put into place, they need to align with your brand values to earn the results you expect. Active brand management software asks whether the strategies align with your brand vision, giving you a clear direction.
Helps assign roles and responsibilities
Brand management is a vast umbrella. So, software helps assign team responsibilities and follow an action plan, eliminating major confusion that may show up during the process. Plus, it utilizes the potential of all team members.
It gives you clear objectives and goals
Failed campaigns or strategies more often stem from a need for clear goals. Brand management software ensures the campaigns defined come from a clear set of goals that align with your brand.
- Perform sentiment analysis on real-time customer feedback
Your to-be and existing customers leave out cues that could bring your brand close to their wants. Meeting their expectations is key to customer retention, isn’t it!
Sentiment analysis from customer data helps you analyze the audience’s intent and opinions expressed on several platforms. Analyzing this data lets you know their likes and dislikes about brands, advertising content, etc. A few ways to do so could be:
Perform Social media sentiment analysis
Sentiment mining from social media channels gets you a market analysis of customers’ likes and dislikes on a granular level. For example, Instagram polls, comments on YouTube, and other channels are places to gather insights.
Gather brand experience insights
While understanding customers’ likes is important, so is knowing their expectations. Brand insights help you identify the gaps in the current market, ways to retain customers, build a loyal customer base, and increase sales conversions.
Get multilingual insights
Through sentiment analysis, you can analyze customer data across geographies, ethnicities and cultures to know more about product popularity, competitive brands, and success rates of ad campaigns.
- Integrate best residential proxies to protect brand reputation
Ideating and implementing creative campaigns gives you attention from customers.
However, integrating the best residential proxies helps protect your brand from attention from malicious users. They are the middlemen your website needs to keep your brand identity intact. Some brands have lost their credibility due to patent theft, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, domain name abuse, trademark squatting, etc. Fraud, malicious reviews and bot attacks on online ads aren’t left behind in the list.
After all, protecting your brand from such cyber attacks is crucial in enhancing your overall brand reputation.
Monitors and safeguards brand integrity
Proxies track brand IP and reputation, identifying instances of brand abuse, counterfeiting, and copyright piracy on a significant scale.This, eventually helps you secure your brand integrity.
Helps overcome geo-restrictions
Since proxies enable brands to access the internet from different locations, it helps in overcoming geo-restrictions. This allows brands to analyze and access content from across the globe and incorporate learnings from the analysis.
Combats ad fraud
With the help of proxies, you can verify advertisements, combating ad fraud and ensuring optimal allocation of ad expenditure. Plus, they help address potential challenges that may bring down your brand’s credibility in the future.
Leverage data to build and enhance your brand reputation
While the strategies mentioned in this article focus on leveraging data and analytics to uplevel your brand reputation, offering quality services/products is vital to building a brand reputation. You need enough data for analysis to leverage data analytics, which comes from consistently delivering your products.
So, the first step to building your brand reputation is to ensure your products are qualitative and fulfill the customer’s needs. Then, collect data and use it to take your brand in a different direction than it presently is or keep it in the same position as it is, depending on where your brand currently stands.
Your job now is to pinpoint what gets in the way of building the brand you envision and get solutions to those either with your team or by hiring professionals!
Frequently Asked Questions
- How exactly does data analytics enhance brand reputation?
A company requires data to make informed business decisions. Data analytics simply allows companies to collect, monitor, measure and manage data. This data includes social media mentions, customer feedback, website traffic and other relevant metrics, helping companies take corrective actions if and when required.
- What is the role of customer feedback in managing brand reputation?
A business becomes a brand only through its customers. So customer feedback plays a crucial role as it gives valuable insights into products or services quality, customer service and overall brand image in customers’ minds. Analyzing this data helps companies recognize areas of improvement in each department and create actionable plans to address these customer concerns, enhancing the brand reputation.
- How can businesses use data-driven insights in customer communication strategies?
Data-driven insights help companies devise communication strategies that work. For example, if data shows a specific product gets highly praised, the company can use the product as a highlight in all its communication strategies going forward. Making a product or a service that customers like a focal point in communicating with them makes it easy for companies to get their point across.
