A long time ago (that’s how long it’s been since Nickelback had hits), my marketing director asked me how valuable my brand-building programs were to the company.
My answer to him was always the same: “Good things.”
In mid-2024, brands are desperate for every piece of content to grab their audience’s attention. This is no easy task in the age of the “for you” feed.
But the pursuit of short-term attention and performance all too often comes at the expense of long-term success – building and deepening brand trust.
Brands often default to the short-term view because they understand the metrics associated with it (page views, clicks, comments, etc.). Linking performance metrics to brand building is far more challenging.
I see this all the time with my clients. There is the nonprofit organization that desperately wants to measure the impact of its brand on stakeholders. There’s the AI startup trying to measure how its content impacts its audience share compared to its competitors’ buzzword-filled treatises. There’s the corporate brand trying to maintain its relevance in an evolving industry.
Yet despite the measurement difficulties, brand awareness remains the most common content marketing goal cited in CMI’s B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends study year after year.
In this way, brand awareness is like practice. We know it’s good for long-term health. But the resulting incremental changes are difficult to discern.
And that makes it difficult to justify brand building programs in a performance-driven culture.
Everything is a vanity metric
Aren’t brand awareness metrics “vanity metrics” by definition? After all, we ask the world, “How attractive do you find us?”
Anyway.
It’s not that there aren’t metrics for brand marketing. Countless articles, courses, best practice guides, and tech products are designed to help you connect transactional data to brand equity.
Most of these encourage marketers to look at growth in direct traffic, earned media coverage, social media share, or even brand recall surveys to measure the increase in our brand equity.
But here’s the problem: Anyone who has advocated for more money on brand marketing (or content marketing as a lever to build a brand) will tell you that these metrics won’t get you very far.
And the backlash is justified. More traffic does not prove that the brand has more immediate or assisted recall. This could mean that a piece of content suddenly starts to rank well for an unbranded search term.
Here’s an example: About three years ago, I noticed a significant increase in my consulting website (contentadvisory.net). “Oh, my brand is growing!” I thought.
But when I researched, I found that most of that traffic was going to an 8-year-old blog post that was suddenly ranking for the term “purple duck meaning.”
I still don’t know why this sentence suddenly went viral, but the people searching for it weren’t interested in what this blog post was about or in my consulting services. (Google it at your own risk.)
So more traffic doesn’t always mean that brand value or trust has increased. The traffic could have everything to do with a topic and nothing to do with your brand. It could also mean that people are scrutinizing your digital content because it not Trust your brand.
To put it simply, many of these vanity metrics may have nothing to do with increasing or decreasing brand value. And ironically, some might be against it.
But if transaction metrics are suboptimal, how can you build a better business case for brand marketing?
Transactions are easy; Triggers are hard
Before we go too far, I should note that there are many ways to measure whether content brand building is working.
The key is to put a goal behind the effort, get stakeholders to agree on the measurable goal, and then design a verifiable measurability.
In other words, you need to first measure your fitness level and then get everyone to agree on your fitness rating and determine how much change equates to “good progress.” You can then create a workout plan to improve your fitness level.
For example, a financial services company client wanted to increase brand trust among their existing investors and financial advisors. To measure the increase, we first conducted a trust survey to compare trust in this brand with trust in the brand’s competitors and in mainstream news media covering financial services.
A year later, we conducted the same study again. This time we surveyed the same audience, but added a portion of the brand’s customer base – subscribers to their blog and thought leadership platform.
The company performed better than its competitors, so its branding efforts (e.g. TV, print, and online ads) worked. And the subscriber segment rated my client’s brand as more trustworthy than some mainstream financial news sources.
“Wait a minute,” I hear you say. “They’ve proven that brand building with content works, but the question might still be, ‘So what?’ What added value does this offer for the company? What happens as a result?’”
Then you answer, “Good things.”
You could still frustrate that CFO. But it’s a sensible answer.
By devoting some of your efforts to the brand, you build trust. And trust is a bankable commodity that can be expressed in many ways. You may not capture every detailed transaction that results, but good things will happen.
Think of it this way. Could you accurately measure how much running on the treadmill, taking your vitamins, or getting enough sleep contributed to your fitness improvement in a given week? Probably not.
But what happened after you decided to invest some of your total effort into your long-term health? Good things.
You can easily measure more traffic, more votes, more engagement and more downloads. Measuring transactions is not difficult. However, measuring the trigger that motivated the transaction is complex.
Accept “good things”
People have spent their careers building business systems for consistency. They are trained to focus specifically on eliminating operational conflicts and anything that hinders consistent, predictable and harmonious processes.
And many view measurability as the basis for that predictability. This mindset is where the old saying comes from: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” This phrase sometimes morphs into the idea that if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count. And that is nonsense.
In my 32 years of marriage, I have learned that when I do good things for my wife, there are good things in return. I could easily measure the transactions, but I don’t. How could I connect them to the value of the good things I get in return?
Think for a moment about the love you feel for a special person in your life. Maybe it’s your partner, your mother, your father, your children or even a dog. How much love is there? Have you measured it recently? If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count, right?
Sometimes the most accurate answer to the question of what results from brand-building activities is simply, “Good things.”
Yes, more sales, more savings, better customers, more trust, more brand value and more profitability. But you just won’t try to quantify it.
So how much brand building should you do?
My answer? Enough. If you do enough, good things will happen.
Updated from a May 2022 article.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute