The key metrics for brand reputation during the COVID-19 crisis

How is your  coronavirus performance? Following article will give you and idea what metrics can be used for your reputation management performance.

The effects of COVID-19 are being felt worldwide. During this time, choosing the right brand messaging and executing it at the right time can give greater resonance to your brand. It can also strengthen customer relationships.

As businesses are under increasing pressure and governments urge citizens to stay home, communicating the right message has never been so important. In the corporate world, it’s a balancing act that highlights the essential value of the PR, marketing and communications role for the ongoing operations of their brands.

What metrics can PR and comms professionals use?

Being proactive is key.

We’ve spoken extensively about Reputation Analysis and how this proactive framework provides a benchmark metric brands can follow to understand their reputation. However, as a modern PR, marketing or comms professional, there are numerous measurement metrics that can give important insights about your brand’s reputation.

Brand reputation often influences the actions or choices audiences and buyers make, impacting a brand financially and its ability to grow. It’s especially important throughout a crisis to determine whether your key messages are getting to the right audience at the right time.

Share of Voice

Utilising Share of Voice as part of your PR, marketing and comms toolkit can help you contextualise your media coverage in relation to a particular message, topic, brand or industry. It can also help you understand how effectively your brand is participating in the conversation. Using COVID-19 as an example, Share of Voice can help you identify:

Volume of mentions for COVID-19 over another (and over time) – measure your brand’s visibility in the conversation in your industry in relation to COVID-19.

Volume of mentions of COVID-19 over another as it relates to sentiment – measure your brand’s visibility and the sentiment about your brand in relation to COVID-19.

Mentions

Throughout a crisis, tracking media mentions can help you spotlight spikes in coverage due to expected or unexpected events. Here are some of the key metrics you can use to examine brand mentions:

Brand mentions by media type – track the volume of brand mentions by media type (social, broadcast, print or online)

Brand mentions over time – see spikes in mentions and can be particularly useful when comparing mentions pre-event, during and post-event.

Sentiment related to those brand mentions – understand how your brand is perceived by your audience (and wider audience)

Brand mentions by spokespeople – understand who is talking about your brand and how often

Day to day volume of mentions per entity (example below) – understand how prominent your brand is in various locations.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is one of the key metrics that a PR, marketing and communications professional can use to understand their brand’s reputation. It also enables you to analyse negative sentiment to uncover new ways to improve brand reputation, PR and marketing campaigns.

Key Outlets

Monitoring your target outlets can be a great way to understand whether your message is landing in the right hands and how it is likely to resonate with your audience. Not surprisingly, most campaigns rely heavily on the successful execution of two key elements:

Consistency of the message

Share of Voice across target channels

The below outlet chart provides a visual representation of coverage published by volume. This helps you understand which outlets are amplifying your messages and provides you with more context into how your content or message are being received.

Media intelligence is key

Media intelligence allows you to be proactive. In a rapidly changing environment, it’s crucial to stay across the latest, most relevant news and information. With COVID-19, we are seeing record levels of content across a single issue and a constantly evolving traditional and social media landscape.

Your brand’s reputation is one of its most valuable resources. Using these metrics can provide valuable insights about your brand and help you achieve the best possible outcome for your brand reputation.

If you would like more information on how we can help your brand monitor the media during the COVID-19 crisis, get in touch with us today.