The real cost of talking about your branding in terms of ROI
When it comes to marketing, we LOVE talking about ROI. I don’t really get this obsession with evidencing direct impact on the bottom line in other industries. In reality, branding and many elements of marketing can be almost impossible to measure results, and certainly results in terms of revenue. Are we actually doing a huge disservice to branding by talking about it in relation to ROI?
Brand building activity doesn’t necessarily equate to an immediate financial return.
In a world of marketing “quick wins”, this can be hard to hear. But you may not see a financial return on your brand building activity within the first financial year. Maybe not even the second. But it certainly doesn’t mean that working on your brand strategy and recognition isn’t worth doing. It just means it’s a long term investment. A strong brand has a cumulative effect that gets harder to attribute as financial years go by.
Just imagine for a second that you were going to put in an offer to buy Amazon. Do you think they’d accept an offer that covered its physical assets? Absolutely not. You’re not buying a business, you’re buying a brand. You’re buying the intangible assets because in the long run, that’s what will drive sales and profits. That’s why Amazon is the most valuable brand in the world.
You can’t accurately measure the unmeasurable.
It’s incredible how we can measure a customer’s online journey so accurately. We can track them from Facebook ad, to website, to content download, to email offer, to purchase. And that’s just one example.
But what’s way harder to track is what they’re thinking and feeling, and how that influences their buying decision. Have they seen your brand somewhere before, but never taken an action online that would tell you this? Did a friend tell them about you before they saw your ad? Would they have clicked on your ad if these things hadn’t already happened? Without an existing awareness of your brand that you can’t measure, you may not get the same result.
Thinking about how and where you can talk to your customer at each point of their journey is a key part of building relationships with your customers. This is something you can plot to make sure you’re capturing the best moments to connect with your audience. I’ve got a customer journey starter template available here.
The intangible impact on everything else.
Something might work really well down the line, because your brand is recognised and trusted. The marketing campaign you recently ran that was a storming success - is that solely because you ran a great campaign?
It might, in reality, have been a total flop if you hadn’t run a brand awareness campaign with minimal results you struggled to measure, three years ago - something at the time a CEO may have said was a waste of money because there was no direct and immediate financial return.
But this is where the true ROI of brand strategy and awareness becomes clear and also really difficult to directly attribute. The purpose of a brand is to communicate so well to your audience, that it supports every other activity you carry out. All of your sales and marketing results get better and better because your brand gets stronger.
Of course, measuring results is important. It gives you insights into your audience that you need to make sure your marketing continues to improve and create results. But don’t underestimate the power of brand over the long term - because your brand investment might not come back to you immediately, but it will come back by the bucket load in the future. Just ask Jeff Bezos.
Don’t have Jeff’s number? You can talk it through with me, instead.