People don’t tend to drive somewhere they’ve never been before without first consulting a map. Yet companies often continue down the road they are on without stopping to think where they want to go.

Writing a brand positioning statement will help define the sort of company you aspire to be and give marketing a consistent voice.

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What is a brand positioning statement?

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the importance of understanding your customers. Uncovering consumer insights gives you a competitive edge by allowing you to meet the needs of your customers, and better communicate that in your marketing.

However, you also need to understand your own brand. That might sound ridiculous: you understand it better than anyone, right? But a brand is a complex beast, which makes it easy for your marketing to become diffuse.

Is your view of the company reflected in the beliefs of the public? Do you really know how your customers think of your brand?

A brand positioning statement explains what your brand does, who you target, and the benefits of your brand, in a short, concise statement. The statement will generally be an internal document, although it should be used as a guide to ensure all content is consistent.

The brand positioning journey

You can simply write your positioning statement in a brainstorming session, although it may be more useful to develop it as part of a wider journey.

Creating a simple statement will still provide value, but a deeper look at the brand and industry will ensure your statement is placed in context.

To create the statement you need to think about where you have come from, where you are now, and where you want to go. Then you just need to work out how to get there!

Understand the history of your industry

If you know the history of your industry you gain an understanding of its meaning in consumers’ lives. Every industry has its own history, language, context and imagery that your marketing will be framed by.

Having some historical context helps you understand what consumers think of your industry before you look at what they think of your brand.

Understand where you are today

What do your customers currently think of you? Listening to your customers can inform here, whether through surveys, anecdotes or social listening.

Social listening provides the scale of quantitative research, but with the added benefit of collecting the voice of the customer. This makes qualitative analysis possible, allowing you to understand the language people use when discussing your brand.

To create a really thorough brand positioning statement you might want to first perform a brand audit to gain a fuller picture of where you are currently positioned in the mind of the consumer.

Identify where you need to go

Your brand positioning statement will help define the direction of the company and its marketing. As such, it is important to know what you are aiming at.

Think about the ideal product or service that could be provided in your category. However far away it feels, having the perfect product in mind can help map your journey towards it.

Decide how to get there

You need to understand the benefits you can bring to the customer. Evoking an emotional response through these benefits is a powerful marketing tool.

This short Apple video brilliantly explains the tech giant’s approach to design, which begins with an attempt to elicit an emotional response.

How to write a brand positioning statement

The positioning statement is generally used as an internal only document, not a tagline. All the same, it needs to be fairly short to be clear and memorable to staff.

It should only contain four elements.

1. The category in which the brand operates

The category/industry/vertical your brand operates in will often be very obvious, but it can be beneficial to think about this.

Your product may overlap into multiple categories, or your industry might have sub-sections within it. Defining the exact space in which you operate helps focus your direction.

2. The target audience

You might have more than one, but focusing on your main target group gives a clearer message. It can be a good idea to work out who your most valuable customers are before deciding on this.

3. The benefit to the customer

Not the shiny new feature that you are really happy with, but the actual benefit the customer will derive from being a customer of your brand.

4. The reason why the brand will deliver on this promise

A brand might be the most cost effective option available by not having bricks-and-mortar stores. A software company might have the most advanced technology that provides better functionality.

Whatever the reason, there has to be something backing up your claim.

You can then take these elements and fit them into the following brand positioning statement template:

(Brand) is a (1) company that provides (2) with (3) by (4).

For example, Rhino Energy Drink is a canned energy drink company that provides adventurous millennials with the energy they need to live their busy, active lives. It does this with its special formula of high-quality ingredients.

Check the impact

Once you have implemented your statement and have been using it to guide your efforts, you can check that it is having the desired effect of focusing your messaging.

Social intelligence can be particularly useful here, listening to the voice of the customer to understand the language that is being used and the brand associations people have when talking about you.

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There are various definitions of brand health. Each includes a collection of metrics and approaches, but they all lead to the same thing. Brand health is essentially measured by how effective your brand is in helping you to achieve your aims. That effectiveness can be measured in a number of ways, such as:

• Brand Reputation
• Brand Awareness
• Brand Equity
• Employee Engagement
• Brand Positioning
• Brand Delivery

These are just a few examples, but they arguably all fall under brand health. Each metrics plays its own role, but they fit together to make your brand a powerful asset. Think about what metrics are most relevant to you and build a list that makes sense.

Why is it important?

Each aspect of brand health is important in its own way. Looking at the topic as a whole gives you the bigger picture to make it clear where your strengths and weaknesses are. For example, your brand awareness might be great, but if you don’t know whether it’s positive or negative awareness, you’re missing half the picture.

If you consider all the factors together you can work out if your brand is unhealthy, fine, or thriving (or whatever scale you want to use). From there you can take specific actions.

If it’s unhealthy, your brand is actively damaging your organisation. Using the metrics you’re tracking you’ll be able to see why this happening and how to stop it. When it’s thriving, you can find out how to keep this going. And when it’s fine you can look for improvements.

Essentially it’s about getting a full understanding of your brand and how you can use it to your benefit.

Measuring Brand Health

First we can look at a few methods to gather data on your brand. With different factors involved in brand health, there’s plenty of different ways to do this. After that, we can look at how to take lots of metrics and use them to indicate brand health clearly.

Social Listening

Social listening tools, like the Brandwatch Analytics product we offer or the many others on the market, give an incredible amount of insight into your brand on a number of levels.

You can measure brand awareness by looking at volumes of mentions around your organisation and products. You can them compare that to your competitors to see how you how you’re doing comparatively.

From there you can also measure sentiment around those mentions. In other words, whether they’re positive or negative. This can give you an idea into your brand reputation.

Then you could look at you brand positioning by looking at how people talk about you. Do they associate you with the image you’re trying to project or are you viewed entirely differently?

You could also look at employee engagement and track how successful your employee are at spreading the word on places like Twitter or Reddit.

Focus Groups and Surveys

Another common way to do brand research. You can get a very good understanding of your brand awareness, particularly among specific groups (depending on how you conduct the survey).

You again get sentiment from these, but you can also get some very in-depth qualitative data too. Thinking around brand positioning and reputation you can choose exact questions and find out more details on how people see your brand.

Customer Feedback

Similar to focus groups and surveys, conducting regular interviews with your customers can give great insight into brand health.

For example, you can see whether their view of your brand has changed over time, why they chose you over your competitors, and what they like and dislike about you.

You can get this data with basic feedback forms, talking to your customer-facing employees, and conducting more in-depth interviews with customers. All of these will be integral to measuring brand health.

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Tracking Brand Health

So when you’ve chosen your metrics and collated the data for each, what’s next? It’ll mostly look like a range of unrelated numbers with widely different contexts. The best bet is to visualize this information that quickly shows when things are changing.

In this case, a good old-fashioned spreadsheet is your friend. You could do this in Excel, Sheets, or any other program. We won’t go into the specifics of formulas, but none of this will be too complicated.

So, we want to be able to get an immediate idea of brand health, but also easily compare current figures to previous ones for context. To visualise this, we’ll need just a single table.

1. Organize your data

With so many sources you’ll probably have a load of spreadsheet files with lots of different figures in them. The first thing you need to do is pull out the exact figures you want and bring them into one file. Then set up a table including each one with a time series of your choosing.

Although it’s a bit more complicated, you could bring all of your spreadsheets into putting each on its own sheet. Then you could have your main table pull in data from each one automatically. This saves the effort of copying and pasting all the time. It’s worth doing, but always double-check everything is correctly set up.

Here’s an example:

2. Format Your Table

Now you have all your data ready, but it’s not instantly clear how everything compares to each other. We need to add some extra visual info so we can draw conclusions easily. The easiest way to do this with a table is to use conditional formatting. This is a set option in Excel and Sheets, so it’s pretty easy to do.

You select one column’s figures at a time and apply formatting to each one individually. The best option is a colour ramp. You can choose whatever colours you want, but in this case we’re going to pick red to show bad results, and green to show good. This formatting uses the data in the table to choose the right colours. These will change as more data is added in over time.

Once you’re done, you’ll get something like this:

And, well, that’s it. This is obviously very top level, but you can instantly see how things are. In the above example, December is looking pretty good with all greens, while January was looking pretty bad. You can also see when some metrics are looking unhealthy even if others are looking good. This can be really handy for evaluating past performances.

There is a big caveat to this though. You need to be careful with some metrics for the time periods you’re covering. Sentiment and share of voice are usually fine, but others not. Essentially, you should be expecting your brand awareness to grow over time, so comparing yourself to figures from two years ago won’t make sense. It’ll also mask bad results as the average is being skewed.

In this case there’s two solutions. One, only include a certain time period, like the past year. Or two, just look at percentage change. This means you can see any recent changes quickly. Unfortunately percent change means it’s hard to compare to historical data and removes context. It’s often worth including this along with the raw numbers, plus only considering a certain time frame.

Of course you could set up the table differently if you like. Simply tailor it to your specific needs and metrics. From there you can get an overall view of your brand health with a simple table and take action accordingly.

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If you want to go a bit deeper than Instagram’s own analytics offering, this list is for you.

Instagram has been expanding its marketing options for some time, and accordingly the number of brands marketing on Instagram has grown from 11.5% in 2013 to 32.3% in 2015.

Furthermore, it is one of the best platforms to advertise on – a Forrester report has shown that engagement with brands on Instagram is 10 times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest, and an astonishing 84 times higher than Twitter.

Luckily, there are several Instagram analytics tools available to help brands understand what resonates with their audience and how they can optimize their content output.

Top 7 Free Instagram Analytics Tools

1. Simply Measured

Simply Measured offer a free Instagram report in exchange for following their Twitter account, and the level of detail on the report makes that a great deal.

It’s available for users with fewer than 25,000 followers, and the data is available in easy to read charts, or raw numbers. You can also download the data into Excel to analyze it further yourself and create custom charts and graphics.

The report shows a wide range of engagement metrics, including most engaging tags, the best day and time to post, most popular location and even top filter, and highest engagement on sites outside Instagram.

Top posts are displayed and sorted by engagement. You can discover your most active commenters and the most common keywords in the comments.

2. Social Bakers

Social Bakers offer a free Instagram analytics tool. Although the offering is fairly basic and doesn’t offer too much insight.

You can see what your top posts are, most used hashtags and tagged accounts, plus general stats on your number of posts, and followers. There isn’t much here overall. It might be worth logging in to have a look around, but it’s unlikely people will regularly use this.

3. Squarelovin

Squarelovin is an admirably in-depth tool for a free analytics platform. It displays metrics on recent posts and growth, a monthly analysis, and a history of your posts broken down into year, month, day, and hour.

There are tabs that show engagement with your photos, both average and top posts, and an optimization tab that shows your best and worst times to post.

You can also manage your Instagram account from within the platform, creating albums, and liking and commenting other posts.

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4. Union Metrics

Union Metrics offers a free account checkup, covering the last month. The report is generated using a few of the algorithms from their paid analytics platform.

While the report isn’t exactly comprehensive, it does a few things well.

The focus is on picking out a few metrics and posts to compare them with your average, helping you to identify any patterns and themes. You can refresh the report every 24 hours, allowing you check how newer posts perform against the average.

The report shows you how many people have interacted with you and your top fans.

The times you have posted over the last month are shown on a graph, and the best day and time to post is displayed, including details of how much more engagement that time receives compared to your average.

Hashtags are given the same treatment, plotted on a scatter graph to compare the most likes and comments per post.

5. Quintly

Quintly is a dashboard tool that covers several social networks. It comes with a standard dashboard that can be customized with widgets to suit your needs and track the metrics that matter to you.

The tool provides Instagram analytics for followers, both of your profile and that of your competitors, with detailed follower statistics. You can analyze your Instagram content, the interactions generated from your photos and videos, plus details on filter usage.

Quintly also covers Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and YouTube. There is a free tool for Facebook analytics and a 14-day free trial for Instagram and others. Paid plans then start from €129/month.

6. Iconosquare

Iconosquare offers a 14 day free trial of their complete platform. This allows access to the analytics, as well as some other useful and interesting features.

There is an extensive range of analysis on offer, which starts with an overview of activity in the last seven days or the last month.

A tab for content shows distribution, density, tag and filter usage and geolocation. The engagement tab shows growth history, the source of engagement and most popular media.

The optimization tab covers posting times, average media lifespan, tag impact, and a breakdown of filter impact. Finally, for analysis there is a community tab, showing details about your followers and followings.

In addition to the analysis there are ‘snapshots’; shareable images based on your Instagram data. You can view your media, likes, and followers, and manage comments.

There’s also a feature that allows you to create a profile cover from your latest 50 photos, and a widget to showcase your Instagram photos on your own website.

7. Pixlee

Pixlee’s free offering will give you weekly reports on your Instagram accounts.

There’s a decent amount of data available, from your top performing content, influencer information, along with follower growth and hashtag tracking. One of the better options on this list, we recommend giving it a go.

Measuring beyond the basics

This list showcases tools that provide a great starting point for Instagram analytics, and will be suitable for individuals or small businesses.

Having said that, the average internet user has 5.54 social media accounts. Brands have to be active across multiple sites, and indeed 91% of brands use two or more social media channels. Therefore you will either need to find a tool for each social site you use, or find a solution that covers multiple social networks.

Brandwatch features Instagram channels, meaning you can track detailed metrics for your accoutns, and that of your competitors. If you’d like to discover why Brandwatch is rated number one for customer satisfaction, please do get in touch for a free demo.

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Social bookmarking websites are sites on which Internet users share their web pages, articles, blog posts, images, and videos. There are a number of advantages to submitting your content to one (or more) of these sites. For one thing, they help to increase your brand awareness.

The more people who have access to your great content, the more likely that your content will go viral.

These sites also help to get your blog posts indexed more quickly and increase your website traffic. Any SEO company will be familiar with this strategy and use it as part of its marketing strategy.

Popular social bookmarking websites

1. Twitter

Let’s start with the big one (and one people might not associate with social bookmarking too much). Twitter is an excellent tool for this and you can achieve it in a couple of ways.

First, simply posting links, images, and content with your account means you’ll have technically bookmarked them. You could then go back through your account to find things again.

On top of that you can also use the ‘like’ button for certain tweets. Many people use that too bookmark interesting things they find and go back to them in the future.

2. Pinterest

Pinterest goes for the “show, don’t tell” approach to marketing, and with 70 million users, it has been very successful. Most of its users (80 percent) are women and 42 percent of US adult women online have an account.

Over half of daily users consult the site before making a buying decision in a store, and the average order for visitors referred by the site is $58.95.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is one of the bigger social bookmarking sites. Whenever you bookmark something you can add extra details to is, such as what type of content it is and its subject.

It comes with a great toolbar to make this process simple. It also allows users to enter their own interests and be shown relevant content submitted by other people.

4. Dribble

Dribble is an excellent (and beautiful) bookmarking site aimed at designers. Not only is this a great place for inspiration, it’s a great place to get traffic to your site if you’re a designer, or have a design team.

A nice idea for gaining some traction would be to encourage your design team to get involved. If they have some downtime, see if they’ll put something unique and interesting together to go Dribble. It’s a perfect way to showcase your team.

5. Pocket

Pocket is a really nicely designed social bookmarking site. It comes with an app to Pocket stuff as you go, saving you returning to the site all the time. You can also search by interest to find interesting things.

This means adding your own content to the site offers an extra avenue for people to find it. With well over 22m users that’s not to be sniffed at.

6. Digg

Digg has changed a lot over the years. Previously it was more like Reddit where the front page was curated through the users of the site. Now this is done by editors, but it retains its bookmarking function.

Digg can be a great place to find new content and organise it through your profile. Be careful, it can get quite addictive though.

7. Reddit

Reddit is the self-styled ‘front page of the internet’. Users submit links to stories, images or videos that they find interesting and other Reddit users can either upvote or downvote these submissions.

By upvoting, commenting, or downvoting, you can generate a list of bookmarked content. It’s also an excellent way to promote your own content. If you want to do that, check out our piece on subreddit analytics.

8. Slashdot

Slashdot runs user-submitted news stories (with appropriate links) on Linux, computer hardware, devices, games, cloud, mobile, storage, security, management, book reviews, and more. See submission guidelines for details.

9. We Heart It

We Heart It is a bit more specific. It mostly sticks to visuals – including images, GIFs and videos – alone and also acts as a social network too. But it now allows you to submit articles in a similar way to Medium. We Heart It positions themselves as a place to find inspiration.

The site has 45m users, so it’s worth looking into using it. You can submit your own stuff and see some nice levels of traffic come in.

10. scoop.it

Scoop.it caters to professionals, business and non-profits, and corporations. The site has well over 1 million registered users so while not the biggest site on this list, it’s still got a substantial audience. Choose from a free or one of the paid plans, depending on how many topics you want to post about.

If you are going to use social bookmarking sites as part of your marketing strategy, don’t ignore the ‘social’ part.

Do be a good online neighbour and “pin” other users’ content, RT other users’ content that is interesting, and participate in discussions.

The more generous you are, the more you will find that other users will return the favour with your interesting content.

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