A brief overview of KPIs
KPI stands for Key Perfomance Indicators and is a term commonly used in business to measure how things are going. For business goals KPIs represent a metric that is used to gauge how well you perform.
Those working with digital marketing are often used to talking about these metrics in the form of website visitors or new leads. Metrics for social media are often the number of new followers, conversions from difference Social Media sources and how the overall engagement from followers.
Why do you need key metrics for brand management?
Planning is key, but so is structure and proper brand management.
All parts of a business utilize metrics in some way. Marketing is no different. However, these metrics are most often connected to the digital marketing efforts ans results as they tend to be easier to report on. It can be a bit tricky to change your mindset and identify other metrics for marketing that are not directly linked to these digital business goals.
If we were to use customer support as an example it becomes clearer how KPIs can be applied for less tangible areas of marketing as well. Customer support often deal with metrics aiming to reduce response times and offer quicker solution of support tickets, and also to deal with less tickets overall. How can this be managed? By making sure customers first look through a FAQ to similar questions before they are able to connect to customer support. Less complex questions are resolved before even reaching customer support and it has positive effects where wait time it thusly reduced and overall requests are fewer in number.
KPIs for brand management can work in a similar manner; focusing on processes. For example workflows that need to be improved in order to achieve faster delivery of branded material, or seeing how systems and tools can be used more efficiently.
Identifying your KPIs
Understand the challenges
How are things functioning today? You can't set any metrics without understanding how things work currently. Start by listing issues and problems faced by the organization with regards to brand management. Look closely at the challenges and needs of the marketing department:
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Are there any sinkholes swallowing a lot of time?
We email our creative agency a lot in order to sort out deliverables...
We can't get our campaigns out on time because we have to wait a long time for adjustments made by local offices... -
What recurring scenarios are there?
We are often asked about where the latest version of our company presentation is...
Our retailers don't use our logo in the correct way...
Set a goal and define your KPI
Key Performance Indicators are a way of seeing how things are progressing in relation to set goals. That's why it's crucial that both goals and KPIs are based on your organisation and its actual challenges/needs in mind. Start by identifying your goals. Once you have a starting position you can now decide what metric to use and how to work with improving it.
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If the scenario is: Our retailers don't use our logo in the correct way...
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With the current status: About 8 out of 10 of ads/campaigns created by our retailers for our products use our logo incorrectly (wrong version, poor resolution, wrong colours, etc).
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The goals could be: All retailers that create their own ad material for our product will use our logo in accordance with out brand identity.
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A KPI could then be: 8 out of 10 campaigns by retailers shall by the end of the year be using our logo correctly.
Measure, compare and report
The headline says it all. Once the the metrics are set and you have a starting value, you only need to start measuring and following up on how things are progressing as new processes are implemented.
To work with Key Performance Indicators
Setting your goals and KPIs is just part of the picture. In order to succeed, it is necessary to make certain decisions about how the KPIs are intended to be achieved. Here's one last step:
This lays the foundation for the strategy you have for working with the KPI.
To achieve our KPI, we must: Make our brand guidelines available in our brand management system for all resellers where they can also download and use the valid logos.
Not to many
It's easy to go gung ho for KPIs and suddenly finding yourself with a list a mile long of interesting metrics to follow. However, the general consensus is to keep the number of KPIs between 4 and 10, or 3 KPIs per business goal. The key takeaway is to not have to many metrics at once that are connected to widely different goals – it's much more difficult to keep on top of follow up and gaining any real valuable insights.
More tips about KPIs for Brand Management
To find you KPIs and work with them is not only about identifying workflows and processes for improvement. It's also important to have the right tools and software in place in order improve further.
In our white paper about Marketing and Brand Management we talk more about what the two concepts are and why they are well worth investing in.
