Brand marketing efforts usually get discredited because it's hard to measure revenue. How do you build a business case to invest in it, and what should you do first as a SaaS product?

Great question. I'd say the core of this problem is that Marketing has to play a role over the short, medium, and long term. And often time, brand marketing efforts require persistent campaigns over a longer period of time, so the key is to establish a baseline and come up with a few metrics to showcase along the way. Your end goal is to show that rising tide (your brand perception) is lifting all boats (including the revenue engine that is your GTM team).  That baseline is often best establishe ...Read More

No doubt, the ROI of a billboard is hard to measure. But when it comes to brand marketing, you need to be crisp around the metrics. In marketing you'll either need to solve for awareness, demand generation, or both. Brand typically deals with awareness and that's not a straight $ to $ metric. At Google, we conducted brand surveys for G Suite (now Google Workspace) roughly every 9 months. There we measured aided and unaided awareness as well as qualitative measures around how closely we compared ...Read More

This is always a challenge but in a lot of ways, I think it comes back to understanding that your brand isn't just what YOU say it's what the community says about you. Dave Gerhardt CBO at Drift has a ton of content around this, one thing he says that I wholeheartedly agree with is "What people say about your brand matters a lot more than what you say about yourself. Make sure they have something good to say." Meaning it's smart to invest in your community early and often and to listen to the pe ...Read More

I agree: measuring the impact of brand marketing efforts can be challenging. Below is a summary of the approach we've taken at Momentive to measure our progress against both the Momentive & SurveyMonkey brands. 1) Establish brand KPIs. Are you trying to grow overall awareness? Consideration vs competition? Specific brand attributes/associations? Are these KPIs against a broad audience or specific buyer segment? Get alignment on what your goals are. 2) Create a marketing plan to achieve your ...Read More

I think anyone who discredits brand as a function of growth is living in an early 2000s era of B2B marketing that doesn't exist anymore. The truth is that behind every logo we are trying to sell to as vendors, is a human (crazy, I know). These humans have a job to do, and are trying to self-actualize in their careers by solving business problems, getting recognized, promoted, etc. Your products can help them accelerate up Maslow's funnel, but products aren't the only thing.You can measure brand ...Read More