The Brand Measurement Framework That’ll Win You Bigger Marketing Budgets
Five years ago, a CMO told me his measurement system for brand marketing: Nothing. He doesn't have one, on purpose, because he simply believes brand is the right thing to do, period.
And while I agree with the sentiment—brand is the right thing to do for building a high-growth, sustainable, defensible business—I have come to a different conclusion.
Brand is essential, which is why we should be measuring it so that we can improve our brand marketing, make the case for additional resourcing, and show the path to financial sustainability that all strong brands natively create but struggle to prove.
Brand marketing can often feel intangible, like more of an art than a science. But in reality, measuring your brand’s impact is not only possible, it’s essential. If you want to secure budget, justify long-term investments, and prove your brand work is moving the needle, you need data to back it up.
Here’s how to measure your brand’s impact and reach and why these metrics matter in the grand scheme of your business strategy.
How to Measure Your Brand’s Impact
#1. Brand Awareness: Aided and Unaided Recall
Brand awareness isn’t just about vanity metrics; it’s about whether your brand is top of mind for your target audience. The main way to measure this is through aided and unaided brand recall, which is a simple survey sent to members of your target market.
The two survey questions I use look like this:
- Unaided recall:When you think of [your product category] products, which one comes to mind first? [Fill-in-the-blank]
- Aided recall: Which of the following [your product category] products have you heard of? [Multiple choice, and respondents can choose as many as they’d like]
(It’s important that you ask them in this order so as not to prime your survey respondents with the multiple choice options first.)
Surveys and brand lift studies like this can help measure how your awareness has grown over time, how it has ebbed and flowed within certain geographies, and how well different slices of your target audience recognize and recall your brand name.
Whether you’re a B2B or B2C company, running this survey every six months (at a minimum) will give you a good pulse on how your brand is doing and will give you clear goals and targets for your brand work.
#2. Brand-attributed Revenue and Signups
Brand isn’t just about recognition—it should drive tangible business results, too. After all, when it comes to budget conversations and resource allotment, the marketing departments that drive growth are the ones most likely to get what they ask for.
Measuring revenue attribution requires a bit more data instrumentation across your marketing organization. Here's where I start:
- Use UTMs to classify traffic according to any brand campaigns you are currently running.
- Look at the percentage of signups, purchases, or inquiries coming from branded keyword search.
- Use first-touch attribution to understand how many conversions originated from brand-focused content, based on the referral URL (e.g. social media or PR).
- Conduct post-purchase surveys to ask customers how they heard about you and tie back these responses to your brand and growth channels (this is a great way to measure podcast contribution, for instance).
#3. Brand ROI
Finally, if you want to justify investment in brand, you need to connect it to the businesses’ financial viability. This means looking at your brand spend through the lens of efficiency, often measured with ROI (return on investment).
The calculation is simple: how much revenue you generated compared to how much you spent to generate it. Often times the nuance of brand spend is best captured in ROI-adjacent metrics like these:
- Customer lifetime value (CLV) uplift from brand-aware vs. non-brand-aware users.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) differences between those who engaged with brand content and those who didn’t.
- The long-term revenue impact of brand-led campaigns.
How to Measure Your Brand’s Reach
#1. Brand Reach and Impressions
Reach and impressions tell you how many people are being exposed to your brand on a given channel. But volume alone isn’t enough—you need to track growth over time and correlate spikes with key campaigns or initiatives.
Therefore, in addition to reporting on the aggregate number of eyeballs your branded content receives, you’ll also want to layer insights into how these impressions are scaling across weeks, months, and quarters, and how specific brand activities are able to move the needle with impressions.
In a perfect measurement world, this top-of-funnel measurement of reach will be part of the full-funnel calculation where you can assess reach’s conversion into traffic, traffic’s conversion into signups, and signup conversion into revenue.
#2. Brand Share of Voice
Share of voice (SOV) measures how much of the conversation your brand owns in your industry compared to competitors. You can track this through:
- Social media listening tools
- PR and media mentions
- SEO visibility and organic keyword share
Since share of voice is often linked to market share, increasing your SOV can be a strong leading indicator of business growth and is a particularly valuable metric in the eyes of the C-suite and investors.
#3. Brand Traffic
Website traffic from branded keyword searches, direct traffic, and referral sources like PR placements or social media mentions can help you gauge brand strength. Be sure to build reports that look at your web traffic as a split between branded and non-branded traffic.
- Growth in branded search volume shows increasing brand interest.
- Higher direct traffic means more people actively seeking you out.
- More referrals from brand-focused PR or partnerships indicate rising credibility and awareness.
Why Measurement Matters
#1. Show the Value of Your TOFU Work
Top-of-funnel (TOFU) marketing often gets sidelined because it doesn’t drive immediate conversions. But measuring brand impact shows how awareness leads to long-term growth. When you track brand health metrics alongside business KPIs, you can show the connection between brand and revenue.
#2. Brand Campaigns are Always Competing for Resources
Brand marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it competes for budget with growth marketing, product marketing, sales, and other business functions. When you can show that brand investments reduce acquisition costs, increase conversion rates, and improve retention, you make a stronger case for continued investment.
#3. Justify Long-Term Strategies
Unlike performance marketing, brand marketing plays the long game. If you want leadership buy-in for sustained brand investment, you need data to illustrate the payoff. Measuring and communicating brand impact ensures you’re not just asking for resources—you’re showing why they’re essential for long-term success.
Brand isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a business driver. The better you measure its impact and reach, the easier it becomes to advocate for the resources, budget, and time needed to build a brand that lasts.
What’s Next?
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