As a business graduate myself, I always wondered what the pinnacle of branding that one business can achieve is alongside team performance evaluation. It seems like the answer lies in carefully measured metrics that are involved in making a brand truly great.
For instance, if the question was what is the absolute objective a marketing strategy could achieve, then the answer would plainly be selling products and services without any need to put in any effort. The product or service would sell itself. However, when it comes to a brand, you need to deal with it like a living and breathing entity.
Methods To Analyze Your Team Performance
As we all know, living things can be quite complex to decipher. Here are some of the most viable approaches to see if your branding team is doing its job well.
1. Attitudinal Loyalty
A big and seemingly sophisticated-sounding term, attitudinal loyalty is basically the loyalty of customers and clients based on positive interactions and engagements with a particular brand representative. In order to do this, you must not only gratify key functional areas for your targeted audience but also offer some emotional support that helps in building long-term relationships.
“To gauge your team’s performance, you need to evaluate your client base and see how many of them have remained loyal to your products and services. If you find any discrepancies, then perhaps you need to delve into the practices your team indulges in to rectify the problem as quickly as possible.” – Mrs Elsa Keich from Research Paper Help
2. Comparison With Competitors
Competitors are, in fact, your biggest source of inspiration. Do not get us wrong here. The value of truly original and unique content can never be undermined. However, the statement that says to keep your friends close and your enemies closer apply adequately here.
Your competitors are in the same boat as you. Hence their actions, strategies, and line of action can actually offer you a terrific insight as to what your team has been missing out on to polish your team. A quick SWOT analysis can give you an in-depth study regarding what they are doing right and how you can do it better.
3. Evaluating Brand Assets
Brand assets, simply put, are all the characteristics that make you distinguishable and distinct from the rest. The brand name, identity, personality, logo, insignia, color themes, slogans, and taglines, are all part of your brand’s asset list. However, the brand team is significant among all. It is the evaluation that can help you understand whether your team is performing well to promote your brand or do they need an extra push in the right direction.
Two major yardsticks are used in cohesion to measure your brand assets. These are namely fame (or how well-known it is) and uniqueness (consumers are automatically associated with a particular element of your brand and never with a competitor). Any shortcoming should be a clear sign or warning that your team needs to pick up on their game.
4. Impact On Sales
How can we forget sales? After all, potential earnings and total net revenue generated is what make businesses and ventures sustain their profitability as well as continue to seek growth. One surefire way to evaluate your team’s efforts concerning the impact they have on sales is to measure your rate of return.
The cost of your investments should never outweigh your cash inflows. Sure marketing is expensive, and you need to spend money, but that is where your finance department will always complain. If you keep spending money without any hope of earning multi-folds in return, then it is pretty clear that your team is slacking off and needs to make amends right away.
5. Awareness
Creating awareness about your products and services among your team plays a huge part in making your business a success story. To measure awareness, you need to study the growth in your direct traffic or audience as well. You would also be required to conduct a comprehensive analysis based on your share of voice, earned media value, and referral traffic.
For the online marketing mix, your attention should be focused on backlink success and social media activities. However, the most primitive and also the most robust method of understanding just how aware your audience is about your company is simply asking them to fill out a diligently designed survey. It will tell you how your team is influential and effective.
6. Profitability
While some consider that sales speak directly about profitability then, sadly, they are mistaken. You can make a record number of sales, but if your company is suffering from long-term debt, then those sales can only assist in dampening the effect of a dying brand’s team. You can also learn more about sustaining the profitability of your venture by simply requesting a paper based on the topic from a reputable service for your team.
7. Social Media Impact
No one here, I am pretty sure, would argue just how impactful social media has become over the years and continue to do so in present times to influence people’s decisions. With staggering numbers of social media users across the globe, it is downright the most viral platform to promote your business and improve employees’ image.
Almost half of the population in this world uses social media. To be exact, there are 4.74 billion active social media users currently. It sums up almost 59.3 percent of the world’s population.
Facebook is particularly helpful as it can offer you its own built-in analytics to deliver incredible insights regarding your online activities. Similarly, YouTube offers lucrative rewards for making your channel become a hit amongst the masses. No matter which way you look at it, if your business’s social media account is alive, running, and bringing in constant activity from selected audiences, then your team deserves a pat on the back.
You can further target Linked & Twitter based on the nature of your audience. For instance, if you are a hiring firm, your progress on LinkedIn will matter the most.
8. Engagement
Building interactions are like the bread and butter of your marketing team. The moment your team stops engaging your audiences is when a product or service truly dies. People losing interest in your products and offered services show that they have either moved on to better counterparts or that they have simply outgrown the need entirely.
For a company, nothing can be more tormenting than seeing a competitor thriving through building interactions with customers and your own products and services sinking deeper and deeper still. If that is the case, then the evaluation is long over. It is time to inform your team that they need a new master.
9. Reach
Closely related to the aforementioned point, reach is where you can define how many people received your email or how many views and likes you get for a post. Reach tells you whether your team is meeting expectations or that threshold has been breached.
While we always strongly recommend businesses to go for quality, not quantity, over here, the line that separates the two is quite blurry. In fact, suggestions like making sure as many people get to receive your message can be considered expedient. However, we still advise that you keep learning and extend your reach by keeping some moral principles intact so that people do not get offended by your actions.
10. Market Share
This should not require much discussion. Market share tells you where your corporation stands as compared to others. There is simply no rocket science to it. The numbers and observations can speak for themselves.
Better market share means that your team is working good. Well, if your market share is not up to par, but the it has shown some improvement as compared to the past progress, you can rely on your current team’s performance.
However, if you have set a particular goal and have provided them with suitable resources to achieve it, and they are still unable to meet the given objective, you should consider counseling your team or have a look upon the methods they are working on.
There should never be a doubt in your mind as to what to do if you find market shares dropping. Your findings will clearly define your worst weaknesses, and that is how you can also put in your effort to improve your strengths and part ways with redundant policies and strategies.
While Summing Up On Team Performance…
There is no harm in playing safe. Evaluating your team’s performance on a periodic basis can help you rectify concerns and issues. Along with managing bottlenecks before they arrive. The performance of your team will always indicate how your business is grooming. Make sure that the better your team can perform, better you can reward them.
However, it should also correlate and strongly reflect how well your brand is establishing in the minds of the customers. You should deal with any inconveniences as soon as possible to prevent the situation from worsening. In the end, we would like to wish you the best in your future endeavors.