Often times brand marketers, and performance marketers don’t mix because one is perceived as having less expertise. Fun fact, it’s brand marketers. The reason being is that measuring brand is more of an art than a science. As a result, you often get conversations such as: “we need to do “XYZ” but we don’t know why”.

Given the climate of today, the time to lean into growing your brand market share is now. However, how do you justify placing a tight budget behind brand marketing if you can’t measure it? Brand is important; however, it falls by the wayside because performance is prioritized given its measurability. While you can’t measure brand to the same granularity as performance marketing, there are proxies you can put in place as you expand your market share.

Now more than ever you’ll see that brands are leaning more into organic content and reducing or either completely pausing ad spend. As a result, brands need to leverage social conscious hashtags as well as branded hashtags. By developing branded hashtag campaigns, and leveraging social listening tools, you can benchmark your customer sentiment, and identify what you need to address to your customer base and how you as a brand plan to support those concerns. How does It look?

Scrape every piece of text on the internet that mentioned your brand over the last week

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Then leverage Google NLP to get a sentiment score and use this as your benchmark.

Now that you have your benchmark you can run your new brand campaign and see if sentiment improved. (Note that this is still a loose proxy)

This is where the ever-popular “empathy “ comes into play. Your messages need to derive from a true place of empathy to prevent yourself from coming across tone-deaf.

Empathy, engagement, and measurability are the three areas you need to tackle if you want to grow your brand market share. Ideally, more brand market share equals more word of mouth sales and stronger brand loyalty.  Most importantly, all of these lead to lower customer acquisition costs and increased margins.

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