Brand Building is Hard to Measure. Here’s How You Do It.

This article is a summary of our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 11. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 
 

In season one of our Designing Tomorrow podcast, we explored the tension between transactional marketing and a brand building approach. That episode — We’ve Got to Stop Marketing Like This — generated a lot of good feedback. Many told us they’re committed to building a brand, and they understand it’s a long game. But they also asked a crucial follow-up question: how do we measure whether or not we're being successful in our brand building efforts?

It’s a fair question. Transactional marketing — with its short-term urgency and conversion metrics — is easier to track. Did test A convert better than test B? Great. But brand building isn’t about the short-term. And because of that, it’s much harder to measure. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth measuring — it just means we need a different framework.

How We Get Stuck in the Transactional Marketing Trap

The rise of digital marketing brought with it an influx of tools that promised precise data and real-time feedback. Suddenly, marketers had access to granular insights: click-through rates, bounce rates, conversion funnels, and more. For many, it felt like a dream come true. If you think back to the early Mad Men days of marketing and advertising, there were ways to measure the effectiveness of campaigns — but in a significantly less detailed and nuanced way than the tools that we have today.

But this dream quickly became a trap. As privacy laws began to evolve and users demanded more control over their data, cracks in the system started to show. Analytical marketing — so reliant on tracking and personalization — started to look less like a breakthrough and more like a crutch. For users, it often felt transactional, disrespectful, and sometimes straight up dishonest.

When we're talking about the tools that are at our disposal to do marketing, they offer up all of these really fun and somewhat trapping metrics where we put way too much weight on those metrics to evaluate how well our marketing is doing. Those metrics can be powerful when combined with a broader strategy that goes a little bit deeper into the impact of the marketing itself. But it's no wonder that we've gotten to this place as social impact leaders and marketers. We've been served all of these tools as social impact leaders and marketers and that’s influenced the direction we've gone.

Why Brand Building is a Long Game Worth Playing

These analytics tools are a blessing and a curse because they have led to a hyper-focused approach on micro transactional marketing tactics. Especially for social impact brands, a broader brand building approach is the way to build true authentic relationships with your supporters and constituents long-term.

What does a brand building approach look like at a high level? It's focused on a long-game approach. You're looking at building equity for the brand long-term. It's more of an investment in branding versus a shorter term conversion-focused campaign. You might employ shorter term conversion-focused campaigns as part of a larger brand building effort, but at the end of the day, what you're really trying to do is create a true, authentic, respectful relationship with your customers and supporters. That means you need to treat them well — just like any other relationship.

If you go too far in the transactional approach, you might get short-term results. You might hit your fundraising goals (you might not also, let's just put that out there). 

We've all experienced campaigns where it's like "We must hit this donation amount by the end of the week or the world will burn down." or "Are you still even a supporter? You haven't given in 300 days." — all of these urgent, negative, almost gamified marketing campaigns. That's what we're trying to steer people away from when we move towards a brand building approach.

We can't unintentionally hide behind the short-term wins that our metrics might show us — these traditional digital marketing metrics. We can’t hide behind a singular good win and make the claim that our marketing is working, that our marketing is effective when in reality it's just a blip on the radar and is not telling us anything real about how our brand is developing or strengthening over time.

Why You Can’t Always Trust Your Data

Analytics can be misleading in certain cases. So you have to be careful about how you interpret that data. 

A very simple example: Let’s say you're running some paid campaigns on Google search and you're doing a bunch of brand building efforts in the background. When you start to look at how traffic sources are coming to your site and you see, "Oh wow, 30% of our traffic is coming from our paid ads on Google. That's great, we should keep doing those." But then you dig a little deeper and you realize most of those paid ads are actually branded terms. People who are already aware of your organization, who are just searching for you and they see your paid ad because you have some branded search campaigns going — which you should have. But now all of a sudden it's like, well, what do you attribute that traffic to or that conversion to?

Is it really because of Google ads that you got that traffic or is it because you put a placement on a podcast and someone heard you there, they searched your name and they saw your ad and they clicked it instead of scrolling down? That's just one small example of how this data can be quite misleading.

Other times we've seen examples where the attribution on the software will say someone came in from Google ads. But if you ask someone how they found you, they'll say, "Oh, a friend told me about you guys. So I searched for you." You have to be more nuanced around how you interpret the data. The analytics data is helpful — you should look at it — but you also need to interpret it wisely because it can be misleading if you just take it at face value. This is becoming more and more true as more privacy laws get enacted and this data starts to become less and less reliable.

Rethinking Vanity Metrics

A lot of brand building is going to happen outside of your own channels through social media, and a lot of it will happen through owned channels as well. Let's talk about things that are typically referred to as metrics of engagement or metrics of success or sometimes even vanity metrics. I'm talking about things like number of followers, number of likes, and comments on social posts, number of reposts, or shares.

We’ve started to come around to the idea that these are not necessarily vanity metrics because these are signals that you are actually attracting and converting attention. If you get a ton of engagement on social channels, but that engagement doesn't ever translate to impact, of course that is a problem — and that's largely what people are referring to when it comes to vanity metrics. But on the flip side, even subconsciously when we see organizations' posts or individuals' posts on social channels and we see a lot of engagement, that builds credibility and reputation for that individual or organization's thoughts.

Metrics like number of followers, likes, etc. — when used as leading indicators of something else that might be happening — can be powerful. If we're orienting success around making those metrics themselves rise, that's a red herring. That's a bad path to go down because ultimately it's about the impact. Sometimes that impact or the conversion of those followers can take a really long time.

Timescale: An Overlooked Variable

This whole conversation around measuring success ultimately comes down to a question of timescale. How long does it take for someone in your space, for your organization, for your audience to go on this journey from becoming a follower online to a real participant or a real change maker or contributor to the cause in some way? For some organizations, that can be quick. For some of our organizations that can take years. So when it comes to these metrics, you just need to have a really good sense of where in that journey does that moment of engagement happen.

Vanity Metrics can be Leading Indicators

The terminology of leading indicators is really good for some of these vanity metrics. The fallacy though, would be to just ignore them and say, "Well, those metrics don't matter." But those metrics matter a lot more than they used to. 

We've used that as an excuse for some of our work that didn't get the engagement we were looking for, saying, "Well, those aren't the numbers that matter. Don't pay attention to those. Let's look at some of these other more important numbers." Actually, these numbers do really matter because they are a signal — not the only signal, but a signal — that your content is breaking through.

As your efforts to break through become increasingly important, that is one that you really need to be paying attention to and starting to think from a standpoint of curiosity: 

• Why are we not getting engagement? 
• Is it because we're not consistent enough? 
• Is it because we are not putting out content that actually resonates with our audience? 
• Is it because we're on the wrong channels for our audience? 
• Is it because we haven't done enough work framing and packaging our content in a way that's compelling and scroll-stopping? 

There's a lot of reasons why you might not be getting engagement, but these "vanity metrics" are actually a good way to start to measure whether or not your brand building efforts are starting to move in the right direction or not.

Why We Keep Saying Marketing is a Long Game

In the transactional marketing world or philosophy, timescales are short. You run a small campaign, you do testing over 30, 60, 90 days, and you look at results. 

When you're talking about someone becoming a supporter of your organization, they may follow your organization for years before they make their first donation. They may make their first small donation and not make a major gift or another gift for another couple of years. If you only look at your efforts in smaller increments, then you're going to lose sight of these larger trends.

There's a common saying that 95% of the market is not in a space where they want to buy or donate. A lot of brand building is focused on putting out content to nurture and build relationships and credibility and reputation with those people so that when they are in a position — where they're ready to participate or donate or buy — you're top of mind and you are the first, if not the only choice that comes to mind for them.

Journey Mapping: A Roadmap to Understanding Impact

This whole conversation brings up a tool which might be considered a little corporate, but it's real and effective: journey mapping. The idea is to think about an individual in all the ways that they touch your organization online and in person and otherwise throughout the course of the life cycle of what an ideal customer or participant or constituent might look like.

This is a really good exercise for any organization to do, to identify where the pain points, the drop off points, all the points where a customer or a participant or constituent might lose trust or might lose interest. This metric around followers or people who are sharing or liking online oftentimes falls early on in that journey or happens multiple times throughout the journey. So you as a leader need to understand where in the journey that metric takes place and what are the steps that need to happen after that touchpoint to make sure that you don't lose that person.

Measuring Success on Your Owned Channels

We've talked about engagement metrics on social media. These also show up on your own channels as well — primarily email and your website. With email you can similarly measure this, though the measurements are imprecise, especially with new privacy laws.

What should you be tracking? The common approach used to be open rates and click-through rates. That's becoming a little bit of a red herring because of these privacy laws — especially with Apple somewhat recently blocking some of the metrics around that — these analytics are no longer as accurate or valid as they used to be.

A really good new one that a lot of people are starting to suggest is Reply Rate. How many people are actually replying to your emails? That's also a sign of whether or not your emails are being crafted in a way that feels personal and conversational instead of, again, more transactional. We’re not saying you should ignore open rates and click through rates, but just take them with a grain of salt.

Similarly with website traffic, you can use tools like Google Analytics and other analytics platforms to see how people are using the website, how long they stay on the website, and how they are getting to your website. You should absolutely be looking at that stuff. But again, you have to be curious about interpreting those results because they can be misleading.

One very quick example: A lot of traffic will say "direct" on Google Analytics, which used to mean they typed your URL into their browser bar to visit your website. Who does that today? Very few people do that today. What actually happens is a lot of people have privacy settings that means they searched for you organically, but Google doesn't know that, so they just lump you in the direct category. That’s just a small example of how these analytics are not always fully transparent or accurate. You have to understand how they all work.

A Radical Idea: Actually Talk to Your Audiences

If analytics aren't the only way to measure engagement or impact, then how else can and should we measure brand building? 

Social impact leaders often feel like marketing is this thing that they do separate from these conversations. You have to use these analytic tools and talk to your team about this. But at the end of the day, we need to just talk to the people who we're trying to reach and ask them how they are finding us. What channels are they following us on? A good signal of success that we've seen is more anecdotal reports around, "Hey, I've been following your stuff. I've seen your stuff on LinkedIn, I've been reading your emails."

Again, anecdotal data is not necessarily the only or the best way to get an understanding of whether or not your brand building efforts are working or not. But we would argue that it is a very effective way to see if people are consuming your content, if your ideas are being spread in the way that you want them to be spread.

Directional Data vs Predictive Data

There's this concept of a directional piece of data and a predictive piece of data, and both have their places. Directional data is essentially something that gives me the sense of whether I’m going in the right direction or going in the wrong direction. It doesn't need to be empirically statistically significant. It's just a quick way to understand; Am I on the right track?

Predictive data is the opposite — this is data that I can rely on and I have a certain level of confidence that if I make decisions in line with what this data is showing, I feel confident that the results are going to be similar to what I saw. Both types of data serve important purposes in any organization.

What we described in talking to your audiences is directional data. Am I on the right track? If I go talk to five of the people in my target audience who I'm really trying to resonate with and even three of those people say something that concerns me, that's enough to know that I'm directionally on the wrong track. I might need to evaluate how to adjust. I don't need that conversation with a follower or a fan or an audience member to be predictive. I just need to understand enough if I need to change course. For that reason, it's a quick and easy way to validate and test the content that you're putting out.

A lot of the feedback that comes in is unsolicited. You're not asking people (and we’re not saying you shouldn't or can't have these conversations — you absolutely should). But in our experience, what happens is people go out of their way to tell you, "Hey, I saw the last email that you sent. It really resonated with me. Thanks for sending that." or "Hey, I've been following your stuff on LinkedIn. I really like it. I'm finding a lot of value in it."

The really interesting thing is a lot of these people that tell these stories aren't actually engaging with that content online. They're not liking things, they're not commenting. We have to remember that 90% of people on the internet are lurkers. They are not actively publishing. They are not actively even engaging with your content. Sometimes if you're feeling discouraged around low levels of engagement, just remember that for every one person that's liking, there are five or 10 people who are actually liking it in their minds, but just aren't pressing the like button or writing a comment or resharing it.

When Others Start Noticing: The Authority Signal

Another signal of success that your brand building efforts are paying off is an increase in requests for interviews or being referenced as a source of authority or credibility in earned media publications. People are noticing you and they are referencing you. They're linking to you, they're asking you for interviews because you have built up reputation and awareness for your brand.

It's important that the sources that are reaching out to you for commentary or thoughts are the sources that your target audience are paying attention to. That's the only situation in which that signal really matters. If you suspect or know that your audience is actually listening to the person who asked you for an interview, then that's a great signal. You may also get requests for interviews for sources that your audience is not paying attention to. So it's important to stop and ask yourself, if this is going to get to the people you want to get it to.

You want to get attention from the right people, from the right publications, from the right sources. But any amount of outreach to your organization that's relevant broadly to your organization is a good signal that you are breaking through. People are noticing you. You are on the radar. People are thinking of you when they're trying to publish content around your issue area or your space.

The Most Important Metric of Successful Brand Building: Bottom Line Results

This will be a little different for different types of organizations, but bottom line metrics like funds raised or amount of sales or number of advocacy letters written or amount of volunteers secured — these are the business critical metrics that really matter for moving your mission forward.

Simple things like asking people some direct questions: 

• How long have you been following us and where have you followed us?
• Where did you first hear about us? 

You have to take this with a grain of salt because people have selective memory. Sometimes they won't remember.

One way to get around that is to include a simple field on your donation, sales, or volunteer forms that say, "How did you hear about us?" Because that's in the moment, people are more likely to remember. People will take the time to fill those out. They generally want to help you. This is a way to just get a little bit more data around how people are actually finding out about you, where they are following you, and which of your brand building efforts are really paying off.

Objectives and Key Results: A Measurement System

OKRs (as they are called) force you, as a social impact leader, to put your goals in words first to state your impact or state your financial goals in regular old words. And then you have to ask yourself, “How do I know that I accomplished that thing?”

If we're talking impact, for example, let's say the impact that we want to have is to make sure that 100 middle school students get advanced science education. How do we know we're going to get there? Well, that one's pretty easy to measure — there's a hundred kids that have gone through the program — or not. But then we can break that down even further and say, what are the leading indicators to give us a sense that we are on track to achieve that hundred student goal?

Maybe it's the number of teachers that you've engaged or the number of parents that are involved, or the number of schools that you're in conversation with. You can break this down infinitely. 

The most important thing here for a brand building effort is that you go into the project understanding very, very clearly how you're measuring impact. You have a sense of the leading indicators that give you the signal that you are on your way to having that impact. If the brand building doesn't serve those leading indicators, then that's probably a signal that you're not doing the right kind of work. Ultimately, at the end of the day, as an executive who is going to decide whether or not to invest in brand building, those steps need to be really clear before choosing to make the investment in the first place.

When to Stay the Course. When to Pivot.

How long do you let your brand building efforts play out before you say, "You know what? This just didn't work." — either this whole approach in general, this particular campaign, or this particular channel. If you can tie these back to metrics in a way that is coherent and you can look at directional data, you can look at leading indicators, you'll start to get some early signals of success and be able to know if you think this is going to play out but it just needs another 30 or 60 days.

Set a timeframe that is reasonable at the beginning of these efforts. Have it as something like a kill switch that you decide upfront. Because it can be really easy to have a sunk cost bias doing this work. You've put so much time and energy into this and you keep thinking, "Oh, it's just around the corner. It's just around the corner." — and it's not just around the corner. All of a sudden you've been putting efforts in for two years and not getting results. That's obviously not good. So there's a balance with trusting the process, giving it time to play out. But also, it's not just blind faith. You have to see results at the end of the day, or it's not actually driving the outcomes that you're looking for.

The timescale thing is critical, especially in the social impact space. Your impact can take years. 

Take an education organization who focuses on young children. The hundred middle school science students we referenced earlier — we may not know about the impact on those students for a decade. Have they chosen to pursue an education or career in the sciences, if that's ultimately the impact we seek? It could take a really long time to know.

So as an educational leader in that middle school, you have to ask yourself:

• How do I know that we are headed down the right path? 
• What are the signals over the course of that 10 years that we are moving in the right direction? 

And that's where those leading indicators become so important. Because that gives you confidence that you don't need to pull the kill switch. There's this balance of patience and discipline in this kind of work. There’s not a one-size-fits-all recommendation on that front.

The Path Forward

Brand building is a lifelong pursuit to figure out: How do you know when it's time to iterate? How do you know when it's time to let things play out and take the time that it takes and stay true to course? That comes with experience more than anything.

Some of these qualities of good marketers and good brand builders around experimentation and curiosity go a long way. Stay open and curious to things not panning out the way you expected them to. Think about taking an empathetic audience-first approach rather than a priorities and motivations approach. 

• Where are your audiences hanging out? 
• What do they care about?

Set up an approach of true transparency and listening, those are the campaigns and the marketers and the organizations that end up being the most successful in general — but especially with the brand building approach.

Brand building is hard to measure, but still very worthwhile when done effectively. Hopefully this gives you at least some ideas on how to get started. We would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on measuring your brand building efforts.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.