B2B Brand
Marketing Guide
Measuring brand impact
Kevin Mason – Strategy Director
Data. We’re drowning in it. There are so many metrics to prove marketing’s effectiveness, and it’s tempting to throw all of them into a thick report to show the science behind what we do.
But if you want to move away from showing how successful you are at measuring to how effective you are at marketing, here’s a short guide to picking the right metrics for the right job and the right audience.
The first cut is easy – decide if the report is for the board or your marketing team. If it’s for the board, the report is strategic and will therefore have three areas of focus:
- How marketing has built brand equity
- The overall impact of marketing on the business
- How marketing has generated business and protected margins
These metrics are important for the marketing team too.
They form the benchmarks for how effective their activity is, periodically. But the marketing team will also generate more frequent tactical reports detailing the effectiveness of all the possible levers they can pull across the customer journey.
These can include reach, frequency, impressions, clicks, cost per click, downloads, opens, likes and shares. They’ll also include conversion rates for landing pages, websites and nurturing campaigns. These are the areas the team will seek to optimise day-to-day in order to impact the strategic KPIs. This level of detail isn’t relevant for the board.
Before we start, we assume that you have the necessary tracking in place to know the source of your prospects, with the ability to follow that tracking through to your CRM and measure what kind of customers they become.
Once you’ve got your tracking in place, attributing customers to marketing is relatively simple to achieve for your direct response activity, but harder to quantify for brand building.
Report section 1: brand equity
Let’s face it, unless you work for a major B2B corporation, most of us won’t have the budget to commission any form of brand research. There are, however, some simple and effective ways to measure your brand’s impact and growth which we’ll share here. Remember, it will take 5-6 months of brand advertising before you start to see any measurable results.
Awareness
One of the simplest ways to track growth in your brand awareness over time is to measure the direct traffic to your website. This figure shows the volume of visitors to your website who typed the address directly into their browser (if they did this, they were looking specifically for you and are therefore aware of your brand name).
To supplement this view, you could use GoogleAds’ Keyword Planner and GoogleTrends to measure the volume of searches for your brand name against that of your competitors in your category and territory. This will give you your ‘share of brand search’ which you can track over time.
This video by Peter Binet sets out how to calculate your share of brand search so that it’s statistically robust, with case study examples. It also shows how, through their research, they have discovered that share of brand search can also provide a leading indicator for market share fluctuations. It should be noted that share of brand search works if you have a distinctive brand name but would be less useful for generic brand names like Shell or Seat.
Finally, you could use social listening tools to track the volumes of brand mentions outside of @mentions and the official, owned channels.
Correlating these three measures against your brand building activity will provide a robust picture of its effect on brand awareness.
If you work for a larger brand and have the budget to do so, you can supplement your brand equity measures by conducting audience research. You can either create an online survey yourself and target it through LinkedIn, or commission a market research agency such as Nielsen. Typically, the brand metrics you would track are:
- Unaided awareness
- Aided awareness
- Brand recall
- Brand preference
- Brand associations
- Brand warmth
- Brand momentum
- Brand purchases
Report section 2: brand commercial impact
Growth
As well as a measurable uplift in brand awareness and consideration, you should expect to be able to measure the commercial impact of our brand campaigning after 8-12 months, depending on the length of your sales journey.
The key measures to assess the commercial impact of your brand building campaigns for board reporting are:
- Volume of inbound inquiries and RFPs – a measure of brand awareness
- Win-rates – a measure of the strength of your proposition and the impact of your brand strength in the decision-making process
- Price margin (discounting trends) - a measure of the strength of your brand to influence price considerations
You should also try to agree and establish an econometric framework to gauge external factors that may impact these KPIs either positively or negatively. Factors may include the economy, geopolitical uncertainty, sector trends, changes in sales teams, supply chain issues and market pricing fluctuations.
You may also want to include the following additional measures, again filtered through your econometric framework.
Average lifetime value
This requires a little more heavy lifting from your CRM data, but it's worth it, as any increases in the rolling average will give a top-line view of how successful you are at generating repeat business.
Market share growth
This is relatively easy to calculate. First, find the annual spend in the category and location in which you operate – most sectors have analyst reports which will give you this figure. Then, express your annual revenue as a percentage of that number. If you’re midway down a crowded market, you might choose to show a share of market relative to your top ten competitors, taking the revenue figures from their annual reports.
Loyalty
Another easy metric to provide from your CRM is loyalty. First, select the customers who have bought something from you in the last 12 months (this timeframe could be longer, depending on the length of your sales cycles).
These are active customers as opposed to dormant ones who may or may not be loyal to you. From this pool you’ll select those who have been with you for over a year – any who have been with you for less time are considered new and won’t have a long enough trading history to demonstrate true loyalty. From this pool you can show the average, longest and shortest length of relationship. Ideally, all three of these will increase year on year.
Trust, recommendation and satisfaction
Your Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) is an industry standard benchmark used to gauge how satisfied customers are with the brand. Survey respondents are asked how likely they are to recommend you to their friends and colleagues on a score from 1 to 10. While this is a useful top-level metric for the board, running the survey also provides the opportunity to dig deeper. Ask questions about what customers are satisfied or unsatisfied with, and why.
Depending on the quality of your CRM data, you can also gain insight into any patterns emerging from different customer segments. There are potential problems with an over-reliance on the NPS® measure, however, as it can suffer from bias if your sample size is too small. It’s wise to supplement your snapshot score by monitoring review sites, social signals and feedback from your customer service team to get a full picture of how well your customers trust you and are satisfied with your products and services.
Anecdotal feedback
Another vital source of feedback about brand impact is your sales team. Regularly check in with them for on-the-ground intel on whether the brand is affecting their ability to open doors and how they’re welcomed and perceived when they meet.
BUT – and this is an important
but – expectations around this data must be carefully managed through an understanding of the time scales involved in brand building. If, say, you’ve launched a brand campaign across a number of channels, you will have planned for it to play out over at least five to six months. If the board is looking for results to show in the first few months, they’ll be disappointed. Any noticeable growth in brand equity will only start to show towards the end of the five-to-six-month period, and any commercial impact will only show after 8-12 months. It’s important they understand that brand building is a long-term, consistent investment in growth which is measured in the balance sheet, but over time there’s a deeper, longer-lasting impact than the short-term direct response activity.
Brand equity is a long-term measure, accounted for in the balance sheet.
ROI is a short-term measure applied to your lead generation activity, and accounted for in your profit and loss statement (P&L).
Key takeaways from this chapter
- Credible board reports stay commercial in focus, typically covering:
- How marketing has built brand equity
- The overall impact of marketing on the business
- How marketing has generated business and protected margins
- Analysing your brand’s ‘share of brand search’ against the competition is a robust technique for measuring brand awareness and impact, and can be a leading indicator of fluctuations in market share.
- Brand can have a measurable commercial impact after 8-12 months of campaign activity, potentially effecting your volume of inbound enquiries/RFPs, win rates and price margin.
- Brand equity is a long-term measure, accounted for as an intangible asset in the balance sheet.
- ROI is a short-term measure applied to your lead generation activity, and accounted for in your P&L.
Key takeaways from this chapter
- Credible board reports stay commercial in focus, typically covering:
- How marketing has built brand equity
- The overall impact of marketing on the business
- How marketing has generated business and protected margins
- Analysing your brand’s ‘share of brand search’ against the competition is a robust technique for measuring brand awareness and impact, and can be a leading indicator of fluctuations in market share.
- Brand can have a measurable commercial impact after 8-12 months of campaign activity, potentially effecting your volume of inbound enquiries/RFPs, win rates and price margin.
- Brand equity is a long-term measure, accounted for as an intangible asset in the balance sheet.
- ROI is a short-term measure applied to your lead generation activity, and accounted for in your P&L.