Measure Your Brand Effectiveness, Online

At Heardable.com, we get lots of inquiries into how companies can benefit from our brand measurement and optimization platform. One of the most popular questions we get asked is: “How can I do better than my competitors?”

With millions of businesses across hundreds of category types it's pretty hard to stand out in the crowd -- let alone beat the other guys. Every brand is fighting to get noticed, yet few have stopped to ask themselves what they really have to say. And if you do have something to offer, how many are listening to what you are saying? Recognition is nice, but being heard is the holy grail of online branding.

A critical first step in boosting your brand visibility is benchmarking where you stand today in relation to your competitors. Heardable.com is a terrific platform for measuring and monitoring how well you're doing against the competition -- and it's a great place for brand managers to start.

We've spent hundreds of hours developing and perfecting our proprietary ABLE engine to better understand what makes brands tick and  and we've discovered 438 unique characteristics that get the top brands ranked above all others. Heardable can help improve the effectiveness of your online brand performance, too.

Imagine for a moment you owned a car wash in Los Angeles, California and you wanted to generate more business but don't have a lot of money to spend on advertising. One way to increase awareness about your company would be to boost your organic traffic by making your brand more visible online.

Here is a quick 5-step overview of what to do:

1) Decide on what you have to say (fresh blog posts discount offers, latest news, photos, testimonials, etc.)
2. Benchmark where you stand by scanning your brand (and your competitors) using Heardable.com
3) Study what elements you can improve upon by examine your subscores and those of your competitors
4) Set a goal for improving your performance (and solicit help from consultants or from free advice online)
5) Scan your brand daily and shart your Heardable Score over time along side your competitors

So let's say your online brand is BurbankPitstop.com, a car wash in Southern California with about 9 other local competitors within a 10 mile radius. And let's say you're looking to become a more effective online brand. A quick scan of your domain name on Heardable.com reveals your Heardable Score as 34 out of 1,000 -- which is just about as low as you could possibly score on our brand effectiveness scale. You have little to no social media presence. Your website is not optimized for mobile browsers. You're not sharing content and you're not even monitoring your site traffic with a web analytics tool. You're making it hard for site visitors do do business with you and your search efforts are sub-standard.

Now let's take a look at the car wash category that you do business in (Note: Heardable subscribers can create their own custom categories we refer to as portfolios). Your top local competitor is LakesideCarWash.com with a Heardable Score of 265 out of 1,000, a score which is 679% more effective than your online brand. That is a staggering difference! But hope is not lost. By studying how LakesideCarWash.com is outperforming you (just scan its brand on Heardable and review its subscore results as you scroll down the page) you can get a good idea of what areas they are beating you at.

Boosting your brand rank is not hard, but it takes the right skills and a focused mind set to succeed. You cannot fix what you don't know is broken -- so do your brand diagnostics first. You will be much more effective if you're armed with deep brand analytics, and the tools, to make the needed repairs.

If you cannot fix thing on your own (don't worry, you're not alone) reach out to a friend or someone you know who can transform your Heardable report card into an actionable game plan to improve your brand performance. Feel free to contact Heardable if you need a strategic optimization plan that's tailor-made for your business. You'll be glad you did.