The Million Dollar Question - What’s the ROI of branding and how is it measure exactly?

Most of you agree that a strong brand is important for the company’s success. It boosts sales, reduces marketing costs, attracts talent and gives free publicity. Steve Forbes has even said that “Your brand is the single most important investment you can make in your business”. What people think and associate with your brand can either accelerate or hinder the overall growth and performance of your company.

But how much and to what extent exactly?

Well the main reason it’s so damn hard to measure is because there isn’t a standardised way. It involves tangible and intangible factors, so it’s difficult to have an objective standpoint and it requires thinking both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Companies use branding to create an emotional relationship between customers and a specific product or service. This is because the quality of your product or service isn’t the only factor that determines the level of success your company will achieve. You also need to worry about how your company’s brand is perceived by your customers, prospects, and the industry overall.

Brand awareness

Building brand awareness helps audiences to recognize, recall, and relate to your business. But it’s not only the awareness that we want to achieve every time. It means that before you define the metrics you should determine your tangible and intangible branding goals first.

Tangible factors are quantitative values, such as revenue, profit (or loss), and sales numbers. Intangible factors are qualitative values, such as consumer awareness of your brand. Acquiring new customers is one of the primary goals of marketers. It can also be increasing your brand recall, recognition or your brand, generating direct web traffic, lifting brand conversations etc.

Metrics

Those metrics for both the goals and the ROI of your brand should combine: ✔️Knowledge Metrics that measure the popularity of your brand. ✔️Preference Metrics that measure how your customers perceive your brand and your company’s position within your industry. ✔️Financial Metrics that measure both internal numbers and the numbers compared to your competors.

Knowledge Metrics and visibility of your brand could be for example: ✔️Media coverage and earned media (that was not paid for) ✔️Website traffic and visits ✔️Google search volume data ✔️Brand mention tracking ✔️External links ✔️Video views ✔️Content downloads ✔️Company locator search ✔️Reach of your social media content

Preference Metrics: ✔️Customer satisfaction score ✔️User demographic ✔️Surveys on brand awareness and reputation ✔️Internal and external surveys ✔️Questionnaires to existing customers ✔️Reviews to you and review sites ✔️The success of advertising campaigns ✔️Engagement score

Financial Metrics: ✔️Revenue ✔️Sales ✔️Ordered ✔️Leads ✔️Number of new customers

Summary

Tracking those numbers is important but it’s not all to be concerned about. You still need to know if your product or service differentiates, and what drives your brand’s strengths. So once a year, determine the value of your brand in anticipation of selling your company. That’s a good metric too.

To sum it up, I unfortunately have to tell you that there is no easy answer to this million dollar question, but I guess we can all agree that having a great brand is important for any business to be successful.

So let’s keep changing the world one brand at a time.