Scene: You’re excited to make your favorite dinner on a Friday night. You start with chopping some onions. With these in your eyes (because cutting those can be a real torture sometimes), you slip and cut your finger — you call out to anyone willing to help “get me a band-aid, please!”.

Let’s look at that last line. I used a brand’s name/product name as a verb and anyone around in that scene would have known exactly what I was talking about. That’s next level brand success — when your brand is directly associated to the types of product or service you sell.

Now, the idea is not to compare yourself to any of these giants. Instead, I would like to ask you a question: “does your brand have an echo?”

I could have presented a different scenario and used any of these lines below to make my point.

Put the sandwiches in a ziplock bag.

Google your symptoms.

I need some chapstick.

This cake is pin-worthy.

You get where I’m going with this?

Your brand echo is the effect it has on people. It is a powerful metric to prioritize and monitor as it gives you insight about how you compare to your competitors, about what people think of you, how people buy from you, or how your brand contributes to sales.

The brand echo metric is a hard metric which has some softer metrics within it:

— brand awareness: do they know you exist? Do they know who you are? Do they know what you do and what’s your specialty?

— brand consideration: how high do you rank in they mind when it comes to actually buying your type of products? How close are they to giving you the opportunity to convince and convert them?

— brand sentiment: how do they truly feel about you? Do they believe you? Trust you? Recommend you?

Think of the brand echo metric as a ricochet effect. Every one of your visibility efforts are the first hit of the rock. Which should hopefully contribute to expanding your brand awareness, through building up trust and positioning you as an expert.

The second hit should cause the people targeted to consider entering a relationship with you at different commitment levels. These different commitment levels range anywhere from joining your mailing list, following you on social media, to buying your smallest offer to your biggest offer.

Finally the ripples (I’m not very good at ricochets apparently haha — only two hits) are those lasting impressions and feelings people have when interacting with you and experiencing your brand further.

Finding ways to measure and monitor your brand’s echo, will give you a great advantage on how to connect and better collaborate with your target audience (see last email why that’s the goal).

Running surveys, monitoring social media engagement, analyzing and interpreting Pinterest or email campaign impressions are good ways to see the extent of your brand echo. Making sure it doesn’t stop at the throw of the rock and sink, rendering your visibility efforts (brand awareness) fruitless.

There is no time like the present. Get started today, and ask your current audience how they would use your name in a sentence. What three things do they know you for? And if you would pop up in their mind if asked to name 10 ______ (insert your industry/service type).

Understanding this brand echo metric will set you up for better success in your branding strategies and marketing plan. Giving you insights on where your brand is performing well and where the ripples stop working.