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A long time ago (long enough since Nickelback still had hits), my marketing director asked me what value my brand-building programs were bringing to the company.
My answer to him was always the same: “Good things.”
In mid-2024, brands are desperately trying to grab their audience's attention with every piece of content. In the age of the “For You” feed, that's no easy task.
But the pursuit of short-term attention and performance all too often comes at the expense of the long-term goal – building and deepening brand trust.
Brands often focus on the short-term perspective because they know the metrics associated with it (page views, click-through rates, comments, etc.), but linking performance metrics to brand building is far more challenging.
I see this all the time with my clients. There's the nonprofit desperate to measure the impact of its brand on stakeholders. There's the AI startup trying to measure how its content impacts its audience reach versus its competitors' buzzword-filled treatises. There's the corporate brand trying to maintain relevance in an evolving industry.
Yet despite the difficulties in measuring it, brand awareness remains the most frequently cited content marketing goal year after year in the CMI study “Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends for B2B Content Marketing.”
In this respect, brand awareness is like exercise. We know it is healthy in the long term, but the incremental changes it produces are difficult to see.
And that's why brand-building programs are difficult to justify in a performance-oriented culture.
Everything is a vanity metric
When you think about it, aren't brand awareness metrics by definition “vanity metrics?” After all, we're asking the world, “How attractive do you think we are?”
Anyway.
It's not that there are no metrics for brand marketing. Countless articles, courses, best practice guides, and tech products claim to help you connect transactional data to brand value.
Most of them encourage marketers to look at growth in direct traffic, earned media coverage, social media shares, or even brand recall surveys to measure the increase in our brand equity.
But here's the problem: Anyone who advocates 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 resistance is justified. More traffic is not proof that the brand is better recalled, whether unaided or aided. It could mean that a piece of content suddenly ranks well for a non-branded search term.
Here's an example: About three years ago, I noticed a significant increase on my consulting website (contentadvisory.net). “Oh, my brand is growing!” I thought.
However, upon further research, I discovered that the majority of this traffic was going to an 8-year-old blog post that suddenly started ranking for the phrase “meaning of ‘Purple Duck’.”
I still don't know why that phrase suddenly went viral, but the people who searched for it weren't interested in the content of the blog post or my consulting services. (Google it at your own risk.)
So, increased traffic doesn't always mean that brand value or trust has increased. Traffic can have anything to do with a topic but nothing to do with your brand. It can also mean that people are scrutinizing your digital content because they don't trust your brand.
Simply put, many of these vanity metrics may have nothing to do with increasing or decreasing brand value. And ironically, some may even run counter to value.
But how can you develop a better brand marketing business model when transaction metrics are not optimal?
Transactions are easy; triggers are difficult
Before we get too far, I want to point out that there are many ways to measure whether brand building with content is working.
The key is to give the effort a goal, get those involved to agree on the measurable goal, and then design for verifiable measurability.
In other words, you need to measure your fitness level first, then get everyone to agree with your fitness assessment and determine how much change equates to “good progress.” Then you can create a training plan to improve your fitness level.
For example, a financial services 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 to trust in the brand's competitors and the mainstream media that covered financial services.
A year later, we conducted the same study again. This time, we surveyed the same type of audience, but added a portion of the brand's customer base – subscribers to their blog and thought leadership platform.
The company outperformed its competitors, so its branding efforts (such as TV, print and online advertising) were successful. And the subscriber segment rated my client's brand as more trustworthy than some of the mainstream financial news sources.
“Wait a minute,” I hear you say. “You've proven that brand building with content works, but the question is still, 'So what? What value does it have for the company? What happens as a result?'”
Then answer: “Good things.”
You might still upset the CFO, but it's a sensible response.
By investing a percentage of your efforts into branding, you build trust. And trust is a safe commodity that can manifest itself in many ways. You may not be able to capture every single transaction that results, but good things will happen.
Think of it this way: Could you accurately measure how much running on the treadmill, taking 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 overall efforts 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. But measuring the trigger that motivated the transaction is complex.
Accept “good things”
People have spent their entire careers developing business systems that ensure consistency. They are trained to focus all their energy on eliminating operational conflict and anything that hinders consistent, predictable and harmonious processes.
And many see measurability as the basis for that predictability. The old saying, “If you can't measure it, you can't manage it,” comes from this mindset. This cliche sometimes morphs into the idea that if you can't measure it, it doesn't matter. And that's nonsense.
I have learned in 32 years of marriage that when I do good things for my wife, I get good things back. 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 best 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 profit. But you won't try to quantify that.
So how much brand building should you do?
My answer? Enough. If you do enough, good things will happen.
Updated from an article from May 2022.
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Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
