How to Analyse Your Brand's Online Impact

Your brand plays an influential part in your business's ability to make the difference you really want to make, especially online. To be compelled to make a change, customers expect to see a clear, creative, and consistent brand that tells a story and engages their emotions.

To understand whether your brand is achieving this or not, you need to analyse your online impact. Here are four ways to do just that:

Measure engagement

Take a look at your analytics; how many people are commenting on your posts, voting in your polls, responding to questions, mentioning you, sharing your content, etc. Measuring engagement is a great way to understand how your brand is impacting others.

Questions to ask:

• How many people are engaging with my brand online every month?
• What percentage of my followers is that?
• Which platforms have the most engagement?
• Which content elicits the most engagement?
• What day/time do people engage the most?
• Which people are engaging most often?

Track sales

It's all well and good having people engage with your brand, but you need those engagements to turn into bookings or purchases. Whether you sell products or services, making sales means that customers are engaged and impacted enough to invest. Therefore, it's essential to see how many sales you are making, and which content is converting those sales.

Questions to ask:

• Am I getting sales via my online presence?
• Which platforms are converting the most sales?
• Which content on each platform is converting the best?
• Which product or service makes the most sales?
• What times of the day or the year are people buying?
• At what stage in the customer journey are people buying?

Listen

Social listening is a standard marketing practice. Hubspot describes it as "the monitoring of your brand's social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand or discussions regarding specific keywords, topics, competitors, or industries, followed by an analysis to gain insights and act on those opportunities."

When it comes to analysing your brand's online impact, you can pay particular attention to customer feedback and direct mentions of your brand.

Questions to ask:

• What positive things are people saying about your brand?
• What negative things are people saying about your brand?
• What language are your customers using when they discuss your brand?
• How do they describe what you do to others?
• Are there any keywords that are regularly used to describe your brand?
• What emotions do people have when discussing your brand? Are they excited, angry, hopeful, inspired, frustrated, informed, etc.?
• What is making them talk about you and your brand?

Ask

Lastly, an amazingly insightful way to measure your brand's impact is to straight-up ask. Pop some polls and questions on your Instagram stories, create a survey to send to your email list, reach out to some customers to interview 1:1, or ask in person. However you choose to ask, speaking to your online audience is the most direct way of understanding your brand's impact.

Questions to ask:

• How do people first come to encounter your brand?
• How would they describe your brand?
• How would they explain what you do to others?
• How often do they encounter your brand?
• How often do they engage with your brand?
• What content makes them likely to engage with your brand?
• How likely are they to purchase from you?
• How likely are they to recommend you to others?
• How impacted are they by your purpose or mission?
• How do they feel when they encounter your brand?
• How likely are they to take action or make a change after encountering your brand?

Whether you measure engagement, track sales, engage in social listening or ask your audience about their experience, analysing your brand's online impact is an informative way to see how your brand is performing. This can highlight where there are opportunities for improvement so that you can amplify your influence and make even more of a difference.

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