Brand data is the fuel that powers the engine of your business—but are you running on fumes or premium unleaded?
These are the three traits of data that every brand manager should aim to achieve:
1. Real-time
Successful businesses share many traits, but perhaps most important is proactivity. Reacting quickly and efficiently to issues and opportunities is valuable, but far more so is the ability to take action before a competitor spots the same opportunity or an individual customer’s issue becomes a company-wide problem.
This requires real-time data: constantly refreshed, regularly updated, frequently analysed and re-analysed. The right insights at the right time ensures that your brand strategies are adaptable and remain in-tune with your market when “dynamic” is no longer a benefit; it’s an expectation.
Read more: How to track, measure and improve your brand health, our free online guide.
2. Over-time
Looking to the past helps us understand our future—sometimes even predict it. Great brand data doesn’t just reveal a single point in time, it’s produced over the course of years to better understand the ebb and flow of your customers’ behaviour and that of the wider industry.
Wondering about the impact of a new marketing campaign? Good brand data has insights from a previous, similar campaign. Thinking about taking a new direction in your brand positioning? Good brand data will reveal whether your consumers’ mindsets about your brand are shifting.
Good brand data doesn’t solely look at your business in this over-time view either. It provides benchmarking inside and outside of your industry so you can check your performance against the competition and intercept upcoming threats before they have a chance to impact your performance.
3. Holistic
Good brand data isn’t just for data analysts. Good brand data makes itself available to everyone, not just in terms of access, but also in terms of accessibility: everyone from the CEO to the newest hire should be able to glean something useful.
This means you need a platform for the data that allows both a high-level strategic view as well as an in-depth analytical delve. There should be word clouds and overviews for those who want a quick glance and update, but there should also be per-customer and per-action perspectives that zoom in on detailed data points.
When data is holistic, everybody in the business can be empowered by it directly, not just those whose role it is to be the data experts.
Summary
Great brand data isn’t difficult to achieve with the right tools and platform—and any business that takes the time to invest gains access to the insights it needs to outpace the competition.
To find out more about the power that your brand can have for your business, check out our complete guide to brand health.
