How to Effectively Measure Brand to Show Business Impact
Measuring brand activities is hard, but tying it to impact shouldn't be
When I speak to brand marketers, the number one question I get is how should they measure brand. There are many ways to measure brand activities, and it’s not easy, but there are ways to prove the efficacy of your brand activities and their evolving impact to your bottom line.
How to measure brand activities to show business impact
First and foremost, the only thing that matters to the CFO, board and shareholders is tying your brand activities to their impact on the business.
If you can add brand metrics into your KPIs, OKRs, or OSPs (however you are tracking progress), then it makes it much easier to bake in goals which are not necessarily directly tied to revenue, but rather tied to impact.
There are many brand metrics you can track, but all brand activities should impact how a prospective buyer perceives your brand, purchases/uses/engages your product or brand, or have a financial impact on your bottom line.
I like to approach brand metrics through the lens of impact we want to track as a company, and then look at the big buckets under those impact metrics and see how I can bring to light the overall impact my brand activities are having on the business.
Perception
The number one complaint from sales is “no one knows who we are” and that’s because you lack brand awareness or there is a perception about your brand in the market
Brand Awareness
You should have a good idea of what your brand’s market share (your total sales in relation to your industry estimated market size). For example, the ABM market in 2024 is $920,000,000 ($0.92 billion), and a certain well known ABM platform is currently at $240,000,000 ARR, which means they have a 26% market share.
Measuring market share is simple math, but measuring how aware someone is of your brand can be hard, especially if you have a niche market or an overly crowded category. But competitive analysis is far easier now with brands like Klue, AlphaSense, Crayon, or various AI tools. (e.g. I used Perplexity for the ABM market above).
One way to measure and get a baseline for your brand awareness impact is to look at incremental lift from direct web traffic or Google Trends data to track lift in your brand name in search over time.
Brand Reputation
What do others (non customers) think of your brand when you are not in the room?
This is your brand's reputation and we often measure it with social listening tools to gather sentiment, or analyst reports to see who they group us with (brand association) and where they place us. Which brands do others recommend to their colleagues when asked for a recommendation?
While brand sentiment tools are meh, to measure impact, you can do so with surveys or look at your branded search volume. Another good way to measure impact is through a third party market research firm (ideally one who has access to dark social).
Purchase/Usage/Engagement
Your goal is to increase product usage, repeat purchases, engagement with your brand. Your business is trying to create a flywheel of loyal customers who talk about you positively when you’re not in the room and recommend you to their colleagues unprompted.
Brand Loyalty
To measure brand loyalty, you could look at how often someone buys from you within a given period (dtc) or looking at their renewal rate (b2b), or if they’re interested in doing customer marketing/testimonials for free; or maybe even looking at your referral web traffic. These are all good options, but Net Promoter Score and surveys are the best ways to track brand loyalty and it will show up as impact to the business through your Gross Retention (revenue lost from existing customers due to churn or downgrades). This also is a clear indication of whether or not you have product market fit.
Brand Engagement
I once had to track our brand’s engagement on LinkedIn, which is nearly impossible to do. But the board was concerned we weren’t loud enough like our competitors. So we looked at competitor ranking in LinkedIn’s metrics quarter over quarter. The problem with this was not only are LinkedIn’s metrics garbage, but it literally was a numbers game. We started at the bottom and worked out way up. The more high quality posts we did combined with follower ads, allowed us to climb the engagement chart.
Share of voice is measuring your brand’s mentions in social and the internet. There are lots of tools out there for this. At Fountain, we used TrendKite to measure share of voice from media coverage and SEMRush to look at web traffic compared to competitor web traffic.
Earned media is when other people talk about you and you didn’t have to pay for it. It’s the best kind of engagement. For example, customer marketing is great for this if you can get customers to talk about your product online without paying them for it, like Clay or Common Room do.
Financial
How much is your brand worth? If you were to slap your logo on a product or service, does it give it credibility?
Brand Equity
Brand equity is “the commercial value that comes from consumer perception of the brand name of a particular product or service, rather than from the product or service itself.” For example, Apple puts out a new cell phone, you’ll probably automatically think it’s better than if Sony came out with a new one. Apple is able to charge a premium for their products while still maintaining a loyal customer base and slow steady growth.
Measuring Impact: Easier said than done, I know, but…
Obviously, the easiest way to measure impact is to tie it to revenue by adding “how did you hear about us?” question to your intake form OR add it to your CRM and make it mandatory so someone has to tell you how they heard of you. But I know this is easier said than done.
Below is how I’ve worked around this when those things were not available to me or sales didn’t want to cooperate.
First, let’s separate brand activities into activity buckets and assume the goal is to get people to your website with all of these activities.
Out of Home (OOH) - billboards, taxis, public transportation, bus shelters, outdoor digital screens
PR/AR - Press releases, thought leadership pieces, analyst relations
Paid Media - radio, podcasts, display ads
Field Marketing - events, trade shows, public speaking opportunities
Influencer campaigns - you pay someone to promote your brand to your prospects
Experiential - personalized immersive experiences with one’s brand
Other - promotions, campaigns, contests, giveaways
How to measure OOH brand impact
When I’ve measured OOH in the past where I didn’t point to a specific URL, I’ve often launched OOH ads in specific geos then tracked the incremental shift in website organic or direct traffic from those geos in Google Analytics. I would also offer up the amount of impressions (eyeballs) said adverts were receiving, based on what the vendor provided me. Then I’d show the lift percentages on a map. (People love maps with data on them!)
How to measure PR/AR impact
First, as far as PR goes, most of it is measured by reach/eyeballs. I think reach is a worthless vanity metric, because what you really want is to reach them and motivate them to take some action, such as go to your website. But the more your brand is mentioned in the press and where it’s mentioned (national vs trade publications) the higher quality of the impact.
To measure PR impact you’ll need to tie it to revenue or pipeline. You can look at spikes in web traffic from mentions in the press, or leads/conversions from PR campaigns on the website using utm parameters. Here’s an example from a product launch PR event:
Getting in a HypeCycle, Magic Quadrant, or a Wave report is when you know your analyst relations brand work has paid off. When this happens, you’re in the consideration phase, you’re in RFP discussions, you’ll see the brand impact in your net sales.
To measure you can track the number of engagements with analysts per quarter. If you brand is part of a category you can track placement and movement of your brand quarter over quarter. Gartner allows you to see how often someone has searched for your brand and at what stage of the buying cycle. Forrester lets you track the questions their customers ask about your brand.
How to measure Brand Paid Media impact
Paid impact is easy to measure because it’s very trackable. You can easily see if a Google Ad or a social ad led to pipeline or ARR. But for brand paid media such as podcasts or radio, you need a dedicated URL or promo code to tie sponsorship ad clicks. But if you’re a guest on a podcast for thought leadership, to measure that impact you could ask the podcast to share total # of downloads, shares, and listening length.
How to measure Field impact
Field events often are only measured for their pipeline and revenue impact. You should get 4-7x pipeline for the amount invested in an event. But there is also a brand component which is overlooked.
At a previous company I spent an entire year having a presence at AWS events just so our target market would know who we were at the 40,000 person AWS re:Invent event culminating at the end of November. Here’s how I showed the overall impact of the event.
How to measure Influencer impact
If you don’t have an influencer management tool to track their impact, then your best bet is to leverage utm parameters or tracking codes/tags to masure referral traffic. You could also look at the engagement on those specific posts. A vanity metric could be the number of new social followers your brand gets from the influencer campaign. But tracking this back to referral traffic that leads to revenue will be the best indicator if your brand influencer campaigns are worth investing in long term.
How to measure Experiential impact
Experiential brand impact can be measured by social followers, purchases, web visit spikes, organic word of mouth, feedback surveys, and overall sentiment. I’ve used quotes and feedback surveys to showcase sentiment. Then tied the experience to overall revenue.
At SparkPost I created the first every OptIn email intelligence conference. It was a 2-day experience at the Carmel Valley Resort & Spa. Guests arrived and were given a choice of an activity of axe throwing, candle and soap making, yoga, or a hike. Then we had dinner and played night golf. The next day we had inspirational speakers, a few educational sessions, and we ended with a semi-famous Netflix magician who led us into a happy hour that had everyone buzzing for days.
Summary
Measuring your brand’s activities to the overall business impact is what’s necessary to get budget for brand activities. Doing so shows (not tells) the impact to your business’ bottom line, to investors, to the CFO. If you just show fluff numbers like how many people your brand campaign reached or how many followers you have and you don’t go the step further to tie it to impact on the business, you won’t get the budget or support you need.
Want more? Watch the #BrandBuilders LinkedIn Live session I did here.
