Brand awareness is the hardest thing a CMO can prove ROI for. But it can be done. All it takes is a multi-tier approach

Although brand awareness is one of the most important aspects of brand building, the intangible nature of this KPI has always been one of the biggest challenges a CMO faces. The CFO and CEO may question their reasons for increasing the budget towards brand awareness and ask to bring direct ROI from it, which is a tall task.

Brand awareness takes time to come to fruition. However, top leadership should know that it is an investment that shows dividends down the line.

It is not for businesses and organizations looking for short-term growth and full-time failure.

The brands that do take on this patient yet rewarding path will face challenges in tracking awareness. Many organizations still believe brand awareness is part of the TOFU. That is a very reductive perspective, and the mistakes brands make in tracking this KPI stem from this misconception.

There is a solid framework that you can use to track the metrics of brand awareness, crystallizing the data you get from it, and providing ROI.

All you need is to understand what brand awareness actually means for you.

Brand awareness is often conflated with people in the TOFU of brand interaction. While the view isn’t wrong, it’s a limited one.

Branding and its related awareness run deeper than the funnel- it’s becoming a mainstay in your audiences’ memory and being thought of in buying scenarios. This type of awareness comes from being synonymous with your offers and having a clear perspective.

But it also comes from exposing your brand to your prospects consistently at every stage of their journey.

B2B vendors must capitalize on brand awareness and invest in it. The buyers have a list, and brand awareness is a foot in the door.

From Awareness to Authority: The Path to Brand Equity

If you had to take anything away from this blog, it would be this: brand awareness actually serves brand equity.

The world is full of things that are taking attention away from your buyers. Whether that’s the allure of a new Rolex watch or a cheaper alternative to your B2B SaaS offers.

Then there’s social media- a constant stream of information that is personalized to empower or feed the fears of your audiences, prospects, and potential buyers.

Digital distractions necessitate brand equity- when your potential buyers hear your name, they should know what you do and have an emotion associated with it. And it also means owning part of their mindshare.

Eliciting a response that translates to knowing, identifying, and possibly sales.

Measuring Mindshare: Are You Part of the Conversation?

Mindshare is nothing but the ability of your buyers to think of you in your ideal buying scenarios.

Let’s run a thought experiment. But unlike Schrodinger, we’ll keep it straight.

Think of brands associated with the following words:

1. Advertising
2. Team Communication
3. Athleticwear
4. Cloud Computing
5. AI
6. Ridesharing

Whatever brands popped into your head while reading this list own mindshare in your brain. They have owned that category in your head. And they didn’t get there by accident; it was all by design.

Through deliberate marketing and gaining brand equity, these brands have made themselves synonymous with certain solutions, products, and offers.

PS: Bonus points if you thought of Ogilvy and Nike for certain words. That’s the power of equity. The brand, its symbol, and its value become one with its meaning in the consumer’s mind.

An organization that can do this gains mindshare, completing the loop.

However, brands without awareness will not even enter this loop. And it’s a long-term loop. Not a short one.

It starts at the very beginning of the consumer’s journey.

One of the best things to come out of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (we highly recommend you check them out) is their analysis of the 95/5 rule in marketing.

It isn’t a rule per se, rather it’s a general trend in B2B marketing. It says that 5% of your intended buyers are in-market to buy and 95% are out-of-market.

Researchers have also realized a crucial problem that matches this stat. Marketing teams have been aggressively marketing to the 5%. And that is a competitive pool with very little attention.

Marketing to the 95% Who Aren’t Buying (Yet)

Why are brands so eager to capture the 5%?

There are essentially two reasons:

1. A company is just starting out and needs sales.
2. Organizations with short-term success plans.

For them, the 95% is a waste of time and money. But here’s where they are wrong.

Selling and Marketing, while part of the whole, are distinct. You should sell to the 5% but marketing must account for the rest of the 95%.

This is the crux of brand awareness: building a relationship with the buyers before your sales reps talk to them and giving them value in return.

This can be through advertising, emails, and social media. This pool of 95% is more open to your ideas than the immediate buyers. And that’s because there’s less pressure on them to buy and more to observe and learn.

This long-term strategic approach builds a brand and improves sales efficiency.

Consumers are more vulnerable than ever.

They have been lied to, and false promises have left them jaded. Buyers’ regret decisions that don’t yield them the ROI they were promised during their interactions with sales.

Now, they have stopped answering calls or, worse, get extremely annoyed when someone does reach them- they have heard the pitch before. Why listen to it again and again?

Brand awareness mitigates this problem. When a brand markets to its audience without the expectation of sales, it builds trust.

Consistently give value, and you will build a foundation in the minds of your buyers for a specific problem you are solving.

Because make no mistake, buyers are choosing vendors based on a single metric: trust. In fact, 71% of consumers buy because they trust a brand.

As millennials and Gen-Z become the buyers of today, brand awareness will be the differentiation factor. And will affect referrals moving forward- referrals are still the lynchpin of marketing.

The Brand Resonance Framework: A 3-Tiered Approach to Tracking

But how will you prove brand awareness when it’s targeting an audience that isn’t in-market? The executives will question your decision.

Your CEOs and CFOs need to know that there is a list of vendors. And entering this list is a long and arduous game. But it can be tracked. Our 3-tiered approach provides a 360-degree view of brand awareness and helps you make sense of the spend and deliver tangible ROI.

Tier 1: Direct Signals (What People Tell You)

Feedback is crucial for brand awareness to thrive. It shows brand perception. But in this stage, it isn’t only about the feedback.

It is also the number of consumers who have provided feedback.

There should be a healthy ratio of feedback to sentiment. F: S.

If you have 10 people sharing their opinion with you and it’s all positive, it won’t matter if the people visiting your website or page are in the thousands.

There should be a good ratio of: –

1. Impressions
2. Feedback
3. Sentiment Score.

There’s a simple formula to this.

Brand Engagement Rate (BER) = (Total Direct Feedback / Total Brand Exposures) × Sentiment Score

Where:

1. Total Direct Feedback = surveys, reviews, direct comments, sales conversations mentioning brand familiarity
2. Total Brand Exposures = impressions, website visits, content views
3. Sentiment Score = weighted average of positive/negative feedback (scale of 0 to 2)

Tier 2: Digital Footprints (What Their Actions Show You)

Feedback and conversations present themselves in different formats. And the digital footprint is a tangible window into these conversations.

These are your:

1. Impressions
2. Click rates
3. Open Rates
4. Dwell time + Page Depth
5. Website navigation
6. Downloads
7. Shares
8. Branded vs Non-branded searches.

These are trackable metrics. However, many marketing teams don’t discover what these data points say about their brands. The data always tells a story. And you can uncover it with this formula.

Digital Engagement Score (DES) = (Σ Weighted Actions / Total Exposures) × Engagement Quality

Where:

1. Weighted Actions = sum of different digital actions with varying point systems (e.g., download = 5 points, page visit = 1 point, share = 3 points)
2. Total Exposures = impressions, ad views, content views
3. Engagement Quality = average engagement depth (time spent, pages viewed, completion rates)

Tier 3: The Digital Ecosystem (What the World is Saying)

Let’s pull up the Edelman report again. 79% of modern consumers (mainly Gen-Z) share feedback and interact with social media.

This stat should excite brand managers. Since consumers are more vocal on websites like Reddit, G2, TrustRadius, and other niche forums.

This gives brands a direct view into the verbal conversations people have about their brand (or lack thereof).

For this, you would need to create a custom scoring model and give it arbitrary scores based on your brand’s needs.

This scoring can be derived from the following questions:

1. Is the consumer having positive conversations?
2. What is the aggregate sentiment of the consumers?
3. What problems are they facing while interacting with your brand?

The formula, while seeming simple, needs a vast understanding of human behavior, scoring, and analysis of data across touchpoints.

This needs a human analyst or an AI.

The formula is:

DEIS=Total Relevant Mentions × Average Conversation Sentiment

Where:

1. Total Relevant Conversations =volume of conversations analyzed.
2. Average Conversation Sentiment= mean sentiment score derived from analyzing multiple discussions, indicating the overall positive, neutral, or negative tone of those conversations.

The tiers, no matter how sophisticated they are, will need to tell a larger story to your CFO and CEO.

Brand awareness does translate to ROI, but it will depend on how you empower your own brand.

1. The creative risks you take
2. The product/service you sell
3. The conversations you’re part of
4. The conversations you’re not.

All of these factors will affect whether your brand awareness campaigns are working. But once the feedback and conversations become the norm, you can prove ROI by bringing it all together.

1. Unifying the tiers.The Composite Brand Awareness Score (CBAS) Formula: CBAS=(w1×BER)+(w2×DES)+(w3×DEIS)

Where w1, w2, and w3 are weighing factors. They are percentages that must add up to 1.0, helping you prioritize your tier based on the outcome of your campaign.

1. Connecting the score to financial value
   1. Value Per Awareness (VAP)= Monetary value assigned to each point of the CBAS.
      1. It can be calculated by Average Customer Value × Lead-to-Customer Conversion rate. (in %)
   1. Total Brand Investment (TBI)= This is the total cost of a particular campaign.
2. Once you have that, you can use this formula to bring it all together.
3. Brand Awareness- ROI Formula: BA-ROI(%)= [(CBAS×VAP)−TBI]/TBI ×100

This will calculate your Brand Awareness ROI based on the financial value generated through brand awareness campaigns, minus the investment cost, as a percentage.

With this framework, you can prove that awareness impacts the bottom line.

And the bonus here is, if the cost outweighs the sale or the graph begins dipping, you will know that your campaigns need tweaking.

Tier 1

1. Survey and Feedback
   1. TypeForm/Survey Monkey- Perception and Sentiment
   1. Qualtrics- Advanced Sentiment Analysis
   1. HotJar/Clarity- On-site feedback and user recording
   1. Intercom- Customer Conversations and support feedback analysis.
2. Review and Social Listening
   1. TrustPilot/G2- Tech/Service review sites.
   1. Mention.com- Brand mentions in real time
   1. Sprout Social/Hootsuite insights- Social media listening and sentiment
3. Sales Listening
   1. Gong/Chorus- Sales call analysis for brand familiarity mentions
   1. Hubspot- One of the best CRMs for customer analysis.

Tier 2

1. Web Analytics
   1. GA 4- The full-funnel tracking of the user on your website.
   1. Hotjar/Clarity- Behavioral patterns on websites/apps
2. Content Performance
   1. BuzzSumo- Content Engagement and share tracking.
   1. SEMrush/Ahrefs/Moz- Branded search volume and keyword tracking
   1. Google Search Console- To track rankings, branded search, clicks, and impressions.
3. Email
   1. Brevo- Crafting and analyzing email campaigns
   1. Hubspot- All Email functionalities
   1. Mailchimp- All email functionalities

Tier 3

1. Social Media Monitoring
   1. Brandwatch – Social listening across platforms.
   1. Sprinklr- Social media monitoring and analysis
2. Forums and Communities
   1. Reddit Analysis tool + Reddit AI – Analyze your brand’s mentions and discussions
3. AI-analysis
   1. Zendesk AI- Analysis across all customer touchpoints
   1. Power BI Copilot- One of the most powerful AI analysis tools.
   1. Lexalytics- Turn NLP into insights and value.

For many organizations, brand awareness is just a campaign. But your buyers have changed, and they will not buy from you unless they know you.

But brand awareness needs to be a constant effort. It’s basically building trust and responding to feedback. If there is no feedback, then brand awareness becomes all the more important.

It is a continuous process of listening to your core customers’ needs and demands and providing a solution through value-based interactions.

Measuring it is the easier part. The difficult part is getting started with brand, design and awareness. All you need is a trusted branding and design partner to bridge it for you.