A simple guide to measuring Brand Value for SMEs

That’s a great soundbite but how do you measure the value of your Brand without big budgets?

We’ve been asked this question by a few prospective clients who own SMEs recently, so we thought we’d share the answer and hope it’s helpful.

For small businesses, brand value is often inferred or anecdotal. One prospective client commented, “Oh I measure my brand with social media likes and comments.” While this is useful to understand some level of satisfaction, it doesn’t paint the whole picture.

To ensure sustainable growth, SMEs must understand how to measure their brand value accurately. Measuring brand value will provide new insights into not only your long-term brand health and strength but also offer opportunities to respond to changing customer behaviours quickly.

Like most things in branding, consistency is the key to understanding your brand value. In this article, we’ll highlight four cost-effective measurement techniques that will build year-on-year metrics for your brand health and enhance its value.

With your brand clearly defined and identity consistency applied to all your touchpoints, you’re now ready to start measuring its impact.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys
One of the most direct ways to measure brand value is by gauging customer perception. Annual surveys with carefully crafted questions can establish the baselines for your brand, such as brand recognition, recall, and loyalty. Always include an NPS (Net Promoter Score) question within your survey. This provides one of the most accurate scores for brand loyalty.  Tools such as Survey Monkey offer NPS templates to make adding this to your survey simple.

Customer Retention Rates
Look at your existing customers and determine the retention rates from repeat business and/or referrals. Monitoring these regularly for increases or decreases. Look at what attributes your repeat business customers hold and can you find more of those customers?

Social Listening Tools
Social media including blogs are today’s digital focus groups. Utilising tools that track brand and sentiment will give indicators of what your customers are saying about your brand. Real-time tracking of mentions of your brand, competitors and sentiment on topics related to your brand means you can head off any negativity quickly and amplify the positive to strengthen brand equity. Tools such as BrandWatch or Hootsuite Insights or Social Sprout offer advice on building a social listening strategy and the ability to monitor conversations in one place.

Employee Satisfaction
Happy and engaged employees can positively impact brand value. Measure employee satisfaction and advocacy levels. A workforce that believes in the brand is more likely to deliver exceptional customer experiences, contributing to an enhanced brand image. Personal development meetings are a great place to gather satisfaction measures and ensure each employee feels they are contributing to brand success.

These four techniques we feel provide the foundations for measuring brand value that doesn’t overwhelm or distract from the day-to-day task of marketing a SME. While there are more quantitative and qualitative metrics available, getting started with these baseline metrics allows you to gain an immediate and cost-effective view of your brand value. Decisions can then be taken if further investment is required to deepen the metrics to drive business strategy.