Ever wonder how a specific group of individuals might perceive your brand? Especially after running a new social or influencer campaign, or receiving negative press? If so, conducting a brand perception study might be in your future.

Due to a lack of quality data, marketing professionals are often forced to rely on flawed assumptions or vanity metrics when it comes to measuring the impact of their influencer partnerships and social content. There hasn’t been a way to connect social audiences and engagement to real individuals, preventing marketers from accurately measuring the impact of their campaigns. Until Now.

In this blog, we’ll explore:

Methods most marketers leverage for evaluating brand perception, sentiment, and impact
A better solution for measuring brand perception: Identifying exposed social audiences with Silhouette™
How to easily run any brand perception and impact study with Silhouette
Example of how a marketing team can measure brand impact with Silhouette

Methods most marketers leverage for evaluating brand awareness, sentiment, and impact

There are a variety of methods and services that marketers currently leverage to conduct brand perception studies, but are either problematic or provide a fraction of the data needed for an accurate picture of brand health.

Forced exposure

Many marketers will invite a subset of their target audience to view a specific piece of content, immediately followed by a survey where they can provide their feedback around the brand’s messaging or its products and services. In tandem, a control group will be surveyed so that an analysis can be run comparing the impact on those who were served the content vs. those who were not.

Why is this method problematic? It lacks measurement of organic exposure to content, and is not appropriate for measuring the brand impact of negative press as no marketer will want to expose or re-expose their target audience to less than favorable news.

Pre and post-campaign targeting

Another method that marketers may employ to better understand the impact of their influencer and social media efforts is targeting their ideal audience to take a survey before and after an important campaign.

Issues with this approach? There is no guarantee that those surveyed post-campaign were actually exposed to the social content, skewing results.

Social listening platforms

Frequently, marketers will do their best to measure the impact of their influencer and social campaigns by tracking resulting conversations, brand mentions, and sentiment on social media.

The downside? While it may be helpful to note the increasing volume of positive or negative mentions post-campaign, or to read through people’s comments on specific content, there is no guarantee that the people whose opinions are being taken into account are representative of your target audience.

Collectively, most brand measurement studies require casting a wide net in hopes of reaching your intended audience, spending valuable time and budget purchasing email lists, running generalized ads or investing in a survey platform. The good news is, there’s a more targeted solution to reaching your audience by identifying exposed and engaged audiences.

A better solution for measuring brand perception: Identifying exposed social audiences with Silhouette

The above ways of measuring campaigns are a great starting point. But they don’t provide a holistic understanding of impact.

Leveraging the industry’s only comprehensive social audience insights platform, Silhouette, can you gain a clear understanding of who is organically engaging with your content across the major social changes they frequent:

Alternative social data and insight solutions rely on Twitter data alone. Very few influencers and social users are strictly on Twitter. So it’s imperative that you gain access to social audiences engaging with influencer partners or other brand content across major social networks if you want the most holistic view of impact.

Luckily, using a social audience insights platform like Silhouette makes capturing exposed social audiences incredibly simple, so you can start accurately measuring brand perception and impact.

How to easily run any brand perception and impact study with Silhouette

Silhouette’s brand measurement capabilities offer a seamless user experience, allowing marketers to do all of the below within the platform:

• Easily build custom social audiences, including those exposed to specific content
• Select from pre-built survey templates to measure brand awareness, perception, or purchase behavior
• Deploy brand lift or always-on tracking surveys
• Access campaign insights on intuitive dashboards

Here is our simple step-by-step process to how marketers are measuring brand perception, sentiment and health using Silhouette.

Example of how a marketing team can measure brand perception with Silhouette

Let’s look at an example scenario of a fast fashion brand who came under fire for its production practices and overall effects on the environment. In response to the backlash, they immediately wanted to take a pulse on current brand perception and health.

Within Silhouette, the brand was able to gain an aggregate view of the audience exposed to negative press across social channels From there, they deployed targeted surveys to those exposed audience members in addition to a control audience made up of gen pop. This allowed them to better understand the impact the press had on viewer’s overall impression of their brand as well as their overall opinions on the brand’s products and services with this recent news in mind.

With survey responses in hand, the marketing team was able to take a more data-driven approach to their counteractive messaging, and launched ad campaigns toward exposed audiences across their preferred media channels.

Take the guesswork out of brand perception and measurement

As marketers, our job is to create the connections with our audiences that drive growth and revenue. We can’t do that without understanding how they perceive our brand. Silhouette’s power lies in eliminating the guesswork and assumptions about our audience and the impact our marketing decisions have.

If you want to learn more about brand health or impact studies, let’s chat.