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

Struggling to measure the impact of your branding and marketing efforts? You're not alone.

Ironically, the more analytics tools we have to measure the success of our marketing efforts, the harder it seems to know what’s actually working. This is especially true of broader brand marketing efforts, which are harder to measure and don’t play nice with our modern measurement platforms that have been optimized for performance and transactional marketing campaigns. 

In today’s episode, we dig into:

• Why traditional digital marketing metrics can be misleading
• The trap of vanity metrics (and how to use them effectively)
• The importance of timescale in evaluating your efforts
• How to tie brand building to bottom-line metrics like revenue/fundraising and volunteer recruitment
• Practical strategies for gathering feedback and measuring impact

We also discuss:

→ The power of directional data vs. predictive data

→ Why the simple strategy of just talking to your audience is critical (and often overlooked)

→ How to set up a framework for measuring long-term impact

Brand building is a long game, but it's essential for creating authentic relationships with supporters and driving real change. This episode will give you the tools to start measuring your efforts effectively.

Ready to level up your brand building strategy? Listen to the full episode now. 

P.S. We'd love to hear your thoughts! How do you measure brand building success in your organization?

Episode Highlights:

• [00:00] Introduction to the topic of transactional vs. brand-building marketing
• [01:06] Why transactional marketing is easier to measure but lacks long-term depth
• [02:20] The rise of data-driven marketing and the issues with privacy laws
• [03:59] The allure and pitfalls of short-term marketing metrics
• [05:24] Urgent and gamified marketing tactics vs. authentic engagement
• [07:15] Misleading analytics and the complexity of attribution in marketing
• [10:38] Journey mapping and understanding the customer’s path
• [13:00] The importance of long-term brand-building efforts over immediate gains
• [16:39] Engaging directly with your audience as a way to measure brand-building
• [22:06] How to measure impact in brand-building campaigns 
• [22:24] Using feedback forms and tracking trends 
• [23:09] Breaking down big goals into measurable outcomes 
• [24:13] How to track progress in fields where outcomes can take years to manifest 
• [25:53] Knowing when to stick with or abandon a strategy 
• [27:03] Importance of empathy and adaptability in brand-building efforts

Quotes:

• "We put way too much weight on those metrics to evaluate how well our marketing is doing." - Jonathan Hicken [03:25]
• "How long does it really take for someone to go from a follower online to a real participant?" - Jonathan Hicken [10:38]
• "These so-called vanity metrics can actually be signals that your content is breaking through." - Eric Ressler [12:12]
• "This journey mapping exercise helps you identify pain points and where you might lose someone." - Jonathan Hicken [13:57]
• "What if we just talked to our audience and asked them directly?" - Eric Ressler [16:50]
• "These more business-critical metrics that really matter for moving your mission forward. So how do you tie brand-building efforts back to that when things are so hard to measure?" - Eric Ressler [22:06]
• "The reason I like it is that it forces you as a leader or as a team, to put your goals in words first, right? To state your impact or financial goals in regular words." - Jonathan Hicken [23:09]
• "You have to see results at the end of the day, or it’s not actually driving business outcomes that you're looking for." - Eric Ressler [25:32]

Resources:

• Designing Tomorrow: Season 1 - Episode 04 - We’ve GOT to Stop Marketing Like This. 
• Journey Mapping 101 - Sarah Gibbons
• OKRs: the ultimate guide to objectives and key results
• Beyond Aesthetics: The ROI of Brand Building

Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:00]:

Jonathan in season one of Design Tomorrow, we did an episode called We've Got To Stop Marketing Like This. And the episode was really all about the difference between transactional marketing and a brand building approach. And we got a lot of really good feedback on that episode. We called out a lot of the kind of pitfalls of transactional marketing, urgency based marketing, these more kind of transactional short-term marketing tactics. And we talk a lot about in that episode how we got there and why that's happening and why we are essentially making a case for a different approach called brand building. And we'll talk a little bit about what brand building is today, but one of the things that we heard a lot from people is, Hey, we like the idea of brand building. We're trying to build a brand here. And we understand that that's a long game, but also how do we measure whether or not we're being successful in our brand building efforts?

[00:54]:

Because one of the things that is nice about transactional marketing and kind of the shiny object and the trap of transactional marketing is that it is objectively easier to measure. Did this thing convert or not? Right? Did test A convert better than test B? And these things again, and we mentioned this in the episode, are important. And I'm not saying you shouldn't be doing those kinds of tests, but the broader brand building approach is objectively difficult to measure. So I thought it'd be good to do an episode where we talk about how you might go about measuring brand building even if it's hard. And I'm curious to hear if you've got some ideas on this. Are you game?

Jonathan Hicken [01:30]:

I'm super game. Let's go.

Eric Ressler [01:56]:

So I think it's worth revisiting just at a high level, how did we get into this kind of transactional marketing trap? And I really think this started with so much more marketing happening through digital channels and that digital channels started to give us a lot more analytical engagement data around what campaigns and what content is actually converting or driving action and what content or campaigns were not. And this was really kind of like the marketer's dream for a long time. If you think back to the early Mad Men days of marketing and advertising where there were ways to measure the effectiveness of campaigns, but significantly less detailed and nuanced way than the tools that we have today. That is starting to change a little bit and it's starting to change a little bit for a couple of reasons. One of the main reasons is that privacy laws are starting to catch up and people are like, Hey, I don't want all of this to be tracked.

[02:46]:

I don't want my third party data to be shared between my social media habits and my buying habits and to get these hyper personalized advertisements that's a privacy violation. And so this kind of analytical marketing approach that we've all become so used to in the marketing field, it's starting to kind of go away a little bit. And in my opinion, that's actually a good thing long-term because I feel like this has all been taken way too far and this has resulted in experiences for our end users or our customers or our supporters that feel transactional, feel disrespectful sometimes, feel straight up dishonest. Have you experienced that as a supporter of organizations or even as a leader of organizations,

Jonathan Hicken [03:31]:

Particularly when you're talking about the tools that are at our disposal to do marketing. They offer up all of these really fun and somewhat trapping kind of metrics where we put way too much weight on those metrics to evaluate how well our marketing is doing. I think now those metrics can be powerful when combined with a broader strategy that goes a little bit more deep into the impact of the marketing itself, which I'm excited to talk to you about today. But it's no wonder that we've gotten to this place because we've been, as social impact leaders and marketers, we've been served all of these tools. So absolutely it's influenced the direction we've gone.

Eric Ressler [04:10]:

So these analytics tools, in my opinion, are a blessing and a curse, right? Because they have led to really this kind of hyper-focused on these micro transactional approaches to marketing. And really I think especially for social impact brands, a broader brand building approach is the way long-term to build true authentic relationships with your supporters and with your constituents. So what does a brand building approach look like at a high level? Again, in the episode that I mentioned in the intro episode four of season one, we talk all about brand building. We continue to talk about brand building throughout the course of all of these episodes to one degree or another. The way that I really think about brand building is that it's focused on a long game approach. We're looking at building equity for the brand long-term. It's more of an investment in branding versus a kind of shorter term conversion focused campaign.

[05:06]:

And again, 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, which means that you need to treat them well just like any other kind of relationship. And I think 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, but at what cost? I think we've all experienced these campaigns where it's like we must hit this donation 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 these kinds of urgent, negative, almost kind of like a gamified marketing campaign. So I think that's what we're trying to steer people away from. When we are moving more towards a brand building approach,

Jonathan Hicken [06:00]:

Which I think is a noble effort because we can't unintentionally hide behind the short-term wins, that our metrics might show us these kind of like now what we would call sort of traditional digital marketing metrics. We can hide behind a singular good win and make the claim that our marketing is working, that our marketing is effective when in reality is just a blip on the radar and is not telling us anything real about how our brand is developing or strengthening over time.

Eric Ressler [06:29]:

The last thing I want to say on the analytics side is that analytics can be misleading in certain cases. So you have to be careful about how you interpret that data. A very simple example is if you're running some paid campaigns on Google search and you're doing a bunch of brand building efforts in the background and 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 bit deeper and you realize, wait a minute, most of those paid ads are actually branded terms. People already who are already aware of our organization, who are just searching for us and they see our paid ad because we have some branded search campaigns going, which you should have branded search campaigns going, but now all of a sudden it's like, well, what do you attribute that traffic to or that conversion to?

[07:20]:

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? So that's just one small example of how this data can be quite misleading. Other times we've seen examples where people will come in, the attribution on the software will say it came in from Google ads, but if you ask someone how they found you, they'll say, oh, we a friend told me about you guys, so I searched you, right? So it's like you have to be a little bit more nuanced around how you interpret the data. So the analytics data is helpful, you should look at it, but you also need to be interpreting it wisely because it can be misleading if you just take it at face value. And I think this is becoming more and more true as more privacy laws get enacted and this data starts to become less and less reliable.

[08:19]:

Now let's talk about other signals of success for brand building. 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. We'll get to that shortly. But let's talk about things that are typically referred to as metrics of engagement or metrics of success or sometimes even vanity metrics. And I've used that term before too, and we'll talk about that. But I'm talking about things like number of followers, number of likes and comments on social posts, number of reposts or shares. These are things that sometimes people will kind of, and I'm sure again, I've been guilty of this before just referring to as like, well, those are vanity metrics because how does that actually translate into impact either through fundraising or through sales or through action? If you're an advocacy based organization, and I've started to come around to 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 I think 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.

Jonathan Hicken [09:45]:

I think that metrics like number of followers, likes, et cetera, 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 you're right, it's about the impact. Now sometimes that impact or sometimes the conversion of those followers or those engagers can take years.

[10:13]:

It can take a really long time. And I think actually this whole conversation around measuring success ultimately comes down to a question of timescale. How long does it take for someone for your space, for your organization, for your audience? How long does it really take for someone 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? And for some of our organizations, that can be quick for some of our organizations that can take years. So when it comes to these metrics like followers, engagers, I think you just need to have a really good sense of where in that journey does that moment of engagement happen and how long does it take in an ideal situation for that person to climb the ladder, so to speak, of impact?

Eric Ressler [11:01]:

Yeah, and I think using the terminology of leading indicators is a really good term to use for some of these vanity metrics. The fallacy though would be to just ignore them and say, well, those metrics don't matter. And I actually have started to come around to those metrics matter a lot more than I used to think that they did. And I think sometimes even frankly myself, I've used that as an excuse for some of our work that we've put out for ourselves or for clients that didn't get the engagement we're looking for and 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. And I think as your efforts to break through your content become increasingly important, that is one that you really need to be paying attention to.

[11:45]:

And starting to think from a standpoint of curiosity, well, why are we not getting the 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 because we're on the wrong channels for our audience is 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 quote vanity metrics I think are actually a good way to start to measure whether or not your brand building, your broader brand building efforts are starting to move in the right direction or not. And I'm glad you brought up the timescale issue because this is one that I think is similarly not discussed enough. And in the transactional marketing world or the transactional marketing philosophy, timescales are short, right?

[12:31]:

You run a small campaign, you do testing over 30, 60, 90 days, and you look at results. And 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. And so 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 kind of saying that 95% of the market is not in a space where they want to buy or donate, and 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 your top of mind and you are the first, if not the only choice that comes to mind for them,

Jonathan Hicken [13:26]:

This whole conversation is bringing up a tool which might be considered a little corpo, but it's real and I think it's effective. It's this idea of journey mapping and essentially there are a lot of resources online. If you just Google journey mapping, you'll find all sorts of templates and stuff. The idea is basically thinking about an individual in all the ways that they touch your organization online and in person and otherwise throughout the course, the life cycle of what an ideal customer or participant or constituent might look like. And this is a really good exercise for any organization to do, to sort of identify where are the pain points, where are the drop off points, where are the points where a customer or a participant or constituent might lose trust or might lose interest? And this metric around followers or people who are sharing or liking online, oftentimes that's going to fall early on in that journey or happen multiple times throughout the journey. So you as a leader, you just need to understand where in the journey does that metric take place and what are the steps that need to happen after that, that touchpoint takes place to make sure that you don't lose that person.

Eric Ressler [14:40]:

Yeah, totally. And so we're talking so far about how do you measure brand building? We've talked about these kind of vanity or engagement metrics on social. These also show up on your own channels as well. So let's talk about owned channels primarily being email and website. So email you can similarly measure this. Again, the measurements are imprecise, especially with new privacy laws. So 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 that 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 transactionally.

[15:31]:

So that's a good metric to look at. I'm not saying you should ignore open rates and click through rates, but just again with a grain of salt, how does that fit into the broader picture that you're seeing? Similarly with website traffic, you can use tools like Google Analytics and other analytics platforms to see how are people using the website, how long are they staying on the website, how are they getting to the 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 is that a lot of traffic we’ll 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. So just again, a small example of how these analytics are not always fully transparent or accurate, and you have to have enough understanding of how they all work.

[16:39]:

So if the analytics aren't the only way, then how else can and should we measure brand building? I have a radical idea to propose to you. What if we talked to our followers and our audience and asked them.

Jonathan Hicken:

Get out of here. That sounds great, and I'm serious here

Eric Ressler [16:55]:

Because this is something that I think we feel like marketing is this thing that you do separate from these conversations and you have to use these tools, 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 are they finding us? What channels are they following us on? And really 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, and this, again, it's not a science, right? Anecdotal or data is not necessarily the only or the best way to get understanding of whether or not your brand building efforts are working or not. But I 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. And so there are ways I think that you could operationalize this. I'm curious if you've ever done this, just your background and approach to really customer first approach to running things.

Jonathan Hicken [17:54]:

There's this concept of a directional piece of data and a predictive piece of data, and both have their places, right directional piece of data as essentially something that gives me the sense that I'm going in the right direction

[18:08]:

Or that I'm 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? The predictive data is the opposite, right? 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 of those data serve important purposes in any organization. What you just described to me 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, if I talk to five of those people and even three of those people say something that concerns me, that's enough to know that I'm directionally on the wrong track and I might need to evaluate how to adjust it to make sure that I'm not getting that kind of feedback. 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. And so for that reason, it's a quick and it's an easy way to validate and test the content that you're putting out.

Eric Ressler [19:15]:

And what I've experienced is that a lot of this feedback comes in unsolicited, right? You're not asking people and not say you shouldn't or can't have these conversations. You absolutely should. But in my experience, what happens is people go out of their way to tell you, Hey, I saw your 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. And 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. And so sometimes if you're especially feeling kind of 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 brains and in their minds, but just aren't pressing the like button or writing a comment or resharing it. 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. So 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. Have you experienced this with any of the brands that you've worked with?

Jonathan Hicken [20:46]:

Yes. And 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 to me, that signal really matters. If I suspect or I know that my audience is actually listening to the person who asked me for an interview, and if so, then great, I'm all in. And I think that's a great signal. You may also get requests for interviews for sources that your audience is not paying attention to. So I think it's just important to stop and ask yourself, is this going to get to the people I want to get it to?

Eric Ressler [21:21]:

Right? And I mean, not all attention is equal, right? So it's like you want to get attention from the right people, from the right publications, from the right sources. But I think in my opinion, any amount of outreach to your organization that's relevant broadly to your organization is a good signal that, hey, we are breaking through. People are noticing us. We are on the radar. People are thinking of us when they're trying to publish content around this issue area or this space. So let's connect this though to the arguably most important metric of success for brand building. This will be a little different for different types of organizations, but this will map to bottom line metrics like funds raised or amount of sales or number of advocacy letters written or amount of volunteers secured, these more business critical metrics that really matter for moving your mission forward.

[22:11]:

So how do you tie brand building efforts back to that when things are so hard to measure? Again, simple things like asking people who are volunteers. How long have you been following us and where have you followed us? Where did you first hear about us? Again, 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 forms for donations or sales or volunteers or whatever the conversion is and 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 out. So this is a way to just get a little bit more data around how are people actually finding out about us? Where are they following us? Which of our brand building efforts are really paying off and starting to track those trends. So that's one way to map your brand building efforts to your business critical metrics. But I'm curious, how do you set up measurements for this kind of work at your organization today and how have you done it in the past?

Jonathan Hicken [23:09]:

Yeah, I'm a big fan of this goal setting system called objectives and key results.

[23:14]:

Again, look it up online. There's lots of resources, lots of companies use it. The reason I like it is that it forces you as a leader or as a team to do a couple of things. One, it forces you 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? And so if we're taking 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 for our community. Let's just say that that's the impact. 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, 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 a hundred student goal?

[24:06]:

So 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, and you can break this down infinitely. The most important thing here though is that for a brand building effort that you go into the project understand very, very clearly how you're measuring impact, and you have a sense of the leading indicators that are giving 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. But 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 for me before I'm choosing to make the investment in the first place.

Eric Ressler [24:57]:

And I think the reason that's so powerful is because we know that especially a brand building approach is a long game approach, and it can be hard to know intuitively, how long do we let this play out before we say, you know what? This just didn't work either. This whole approach in general, this particular campaign or this particular channel. And if you can tie these back to these 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 or of not success and be able to kind of know, okay, we think this is going to play out, but it just needs another 30 days or 60 days. What I would also recommend is that you set a timeframe that is reasonable at the beginning of one of these efforts, any of these efforts, and kind of have it as like a kill switch almost that you decide upfront.

[25:45]:

Because it can be really easy to have a sunk cost bias doing this work where you've put so much time and energy into this and you're like, oh, it's just around the corner. It's just around the corner, and it's not just around the corner. And then 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 the time to play out, but also it's not just like a blind faith thing. You have to see results at the end of the day, or it's not actually driving business outcomes that you're looking for.

Jonathan Hicken [26:14]:

Yeah, the timescale thing is critical, especially in our space, social impact, your impact can take years. Take an education organization who focuses on young children. In fact, the hundred middle school science students that I just brought up, we may not know about the impact on those students for a decade if they've 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. So as an educational leader, 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 eight 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. And I don't know that there's one size fits all recommendation on that front.

Eric Ressler [27:04]:

I don't think so. I mean, again, I think this is the kind of thing that 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 just takes and kind of stake? True to course. That just comes with experience more than anything. And I think, again, some of these qualities of good marketers and good brand builders around experimentation and curiosity, they go a long way because if you stay open and curious to things not panning out the way you expected them to, and not approaching this from your priorities and your motivations, but really from a more empathetic audience first approach, where are they hanging out? What do they care about? And setting 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 with their marketing in general, but especially with the brand building approach. So brand building, hard to measure, still very worthwhile when done effectively. Hopefully today's episode gives listeners at least some ideas on how to start to measure it, and we would love to hear comments from listeners if you have any. Jonathan, anything else you want to add

Jonathan Hicken [28:09]:

That'll do for today. Thanks, Eric.

Eric Ressler [28:10]:

Alright, thanks Jonathan.