Smaller companies struggle to measure how well their brands are performing. Traditional methods like brand surveys don’t work well in niche Life Science markets where audiences are small and hard to find. Market research surveys are usually too expensive for small companies to afford.

Measuring brand performance is important as it gives valuable information about how companies are engaging with their customers, and how they can improve their marketing to build brand value and stand out.

In a recent online conversation with Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columnist, brand consultant and former marketing professor, I asked him how small Life Science companies can measure their brand performance quickly and effectively. He recommended using ‘share of search’, a metric popularised by Les Binet and James Hankins who showed that it correlates well with share of market and is also a good predictor of future company growth.

Share of search is the number of searches a brand receives in a given time divided by the total number of searches all the brands in its competitor set receive over the same time frame. A 12 month rolling average is usually a good indicator. Share of search for any company is easy to find using Google Trends making it accessible, quick to calculate and free.

If companies have the time and want a more detailed picture of brand performance, they should look at a basket of metrics. This will help them achieve a deeper understanding of the underlying factors that affect brand performance to improve it.

Brand performance can be split into brand presence (where your brand appears) and brand engagement (how much interest it gets). Brand presence is usually within the control of the company but brand attention is a reflection of how customers respond to the brand. Both are useful to understand brand strength. Brand attention is arguably more meaningful because it reflects a greater level of customer engagement.

There are several online tools available that can be used to measure brand presence and attention. The websites shown below are free to access at the time of writing (although some require you to register).

To illustrate how these tools can be used, we analysed 3 small Life Science companies that are active in enzymatic DNA synthesis. They range in size from approximately 50 employees to 250 and operate different business models ranging from technology licensing to instrument sales and service.

We used the following tools to analyse the companies;

Brand Presence:

• Web traffic: spyfu.com

• Media mentions: lite.sprinklr.com

• Digital ad spend: adbeat.com

• Social media presence and volumes: number of company social media accounts, number and frequency of posts.

Brand Attention:

• Organic web traffic: spyfu.com

• Share of search: trends.google.com

• Social followers and engagement: company social media pages – number of followers, likes, and shares.

(Note: the list is not comprehensive but features the most useful, easily accessed metrics and tools available).

Looking at share of search for our three enzymatic DNA synthesis companies, one of the companies has a consistent number of searches (an average of almost 42 searches per week) and dominates the other two with a 56% share of search. To provide a complete picture, we would need to examine all the enzymatic DNA synthesis companies and their share of search but the example illustrates the point that share of search can be used to quickly establish who has brand dominance.

Focussing on organic and paid traffic, one of the three companies analysed had a large drop-off in organic traffic which is concerning. None of the companies appears to use Google AdWords although one may have trialled a limited number of paid search keywords in August.

Media mentions for the company shown on the left in the diagram below average around 250 per month while the one on the right averages about 150 despite the latter having the largest share of search. This suggests that the company on the left is investing in PR which should benefit the brand in terms of a better share of search in the future. The company in the middle saw a large spike in media attention following a recent funding round but this needs to be sustained by investing more in brand presence activities.

Regarding social media, the first two companies hardly use LinkedIn but they do use Twitter, posting a few times a week or a few times a month. The third company, with the largest share of search, also has the largest number of LinkedIn follows (about 6 times more than either of the other two companies) and has nearly twice as many Twitter followers. The company is also very active on both platforms posting several times a week. It’s social media presence is creating familiarity with its audience which is contributing to its higher share of search.

Brand performance as we’ve measured it here is static at a point in time. To better understand whether a brand is gaining ground it’s important to measure brand momentum, the rate at which brand presence and brand attention are changing. If brand presence is growing but brand attention is not (or is growing at a slower rate) then companies should ask themselves if the quality of their marketing activities is meeting customer expectations.

Four key brand momentum measures are:

• Share of search growth

• Web traffic growth

• Social media follower and engagement growth and

• Growth in media mentions (particularly earned media which is free but difficult to achieve and creates greater customer trust).

Smaller companies can get a quick and reasonably comprehensive view of their brand performance using online tools to measure brand metrics to guide their marketing investment. Spending more time and money in the right places will increase share of search and ultimately market share.