Great brand marketing is the holy grail that marketers strive for. The data shows that the most impactful brand campaigns can both have a positive impact on long-term sales and short-term results. Whilst best used in sync with performance marketing, brand marketing has the biggest potential impact on growth.
So, why don’t more businesses spend time and money on brand campaigns. I offer that the main reason is the murky world of attribution. Performance channels like Google Ads, Coupon Codes and Email offer easy ways of linking a click to a sale. Brand doesn’t. This makes is difficult for two key reasons:
- How do you know if your brand ads are actually making a difference?
- How can you convince your business to invest in something that is so hard to track?
Whilst lots of blue chip companies are spending millions trying to resolve these issues, there are ways that smaller businesses can work out if they are successful at growing their brand.
Revenue
It may seem obvious, but the biggest way to see if your brand marketing is working is revenue. The more people who see your adverts and engage with them, the more likely people are to buy. This includes both existing customers and new customers. It’s not perfect. For example, you can’t see where this increase in revenue necessarily came from, or the drivers behind it, but you can map the growth.
How do we even know if our marketing is what caused the uptick? Other factors that affect sales can be seasonality, the weather or even the news that week. I would consider 2 ways to help avoid these affecting your decision.
- Year on Year benchmarks. Look at average revenue over 3 – 6 month periods and compare it to the year prior. This should reduce the bias of any minor, short-term, factors such as weather etc.
- Pre vs Post Campaign. Do the same as the above and measure them pre and post your campaign. Again, rather than focusing on days and weeks, look at months and years to avoid being swayed by small anomalies.
Revenue vs Market Growth
Another key consideration is market growth. If you are in a fast growing market, it may not be your advertising that’s having an impact, but the growth of the market. You can utilise Google Keyword Planner or Google Trends to see the growth over time for your industry, product or market over the selected time. If your sales are outstripping the market’s this could be down to great brand marketing.
Brand Searches
After revenue, our favourite way to judge the impact of brand marketing is to look at search data for your brand and brand-related searches. This is a great method for 2 key reasons:
- It’s free
- It shows that not only have people seen your campaigns, but they’ve also taken steps to engage or research further
How do you track this?
The easiest trick is using Google Search Console. Go into your performance screen and filter for queries that contain your brand name. The chart above will show a daily breakdown of how many times you appeared in front of people for those searches. The only downside to this, is if you don’t rank in #1 or at least the top three for these queries the data may be under-reported.
Another way is to use Google Keyword Planner and type your brand name in. This will show trends in searches over time for the term. It does also include closely related terms, so it’s a good idea to look through the list and remove some of the unrelated words. You can then save the closest related to a keyword plan and track the aggregate over time.
One thing to note. The accuracy of Google Keyword Planner’s search volumes is up for debate. Our research suggests that it can be up to 50% out for certain search terms. So don’t rely on it wholly. I would say that as an indicator it’s great. So focus more on the direction and magnitude of travel, rather than the specific number.
The keyword planner can also be utilised to search for competitors’ brand names, allowing you to create a great measure vs. your competitors. From here use your volumes to create a share of search % and track this over time.
Target Audience Reach %
If you’re using paid social media to grow your brand, Target Audience Reach % is helpful to judge your ability at reaching your audience. First, we define the target audience. For best results, we would do this with your broadest possible audience. For example, if you sell women’s fashion, select women & the general age range you’re looking to sell to.
I would avoid Interest based audiences as they become hard to define and may make it hard to judge your overall audience size. The people included in the audience could vary over time too, depending on the criteria included.
For another example, a local dental practice or restaurant may select the locations where most of their bookings come from and choose all ages and genders. This gives us an idea of the number of people most likely to book in.
From here we keep a note of the audience size and judge our reach number vs. this total. Whilst this doesn’t necessarily show effectiveness of results, it’s a great measure of your ability to hit your target audience with your message.
Audience Surveys
The good old fashioned way of measuring brand marketing is by rolling up your sleeves and getting involved in data collection. Create a survey, covering a few questions related to your market and brand, and get out there to see if people can pick your brand out vs. competitors.
How do you judge success? Do this before the start of your brand campaign and then at regular intervals in between. It’s time consuming, it’s dirty and it can be hard to craft a relevant survey, but nothing beats getting out and hearing from the market directly. You can even take the opportunity to ask different questions about your industry, market or product to get even more value.
This can also be done online through forms sent via email or social adverts but be wary, you may get a wider pool of people than you expected.
Methods to Avoid
Impressions in Isolation
Impressions are a very ‘noisy’ metric. By that we mean that a lot of factors can be behind impressions that don’t factor in quality. For example, Meta campaigns run through the audience network can offer huge impression numbers for a very low cost (I’ve seen as low as £0.23 per 1000 impressions). But these are some of the lowest quality impressions available, as people see them all over the internet but most prominently when on loading screens for games.
Further, impressions alone refer to the instances the adverts have been viewed. In an, admittedly slightly ridiculous example, 1 person could see the same advert 1 million times and you would have 1 million impressions. Not great as an indicator of wide market effectiveness.
Social Media Mentions
In theory, social media mentions could be an interesting guide post to brand marketing effectiveness. The more people who mention your brand online, the more people who’ve heard of you. The big caveat here though, is that most of your market won’t post online. Even fewer people will mention your brand online. Mentions can also be driven by you, by posting to social more, and could be dominated by one or 2 accounts posting frequently.
This is also difficult to produce data for, requiring coding skills to achieve. Essentially, it’s not worth the hassle.