S2 E16 - Measuring Demand Creation

All right, welcome everyone to Stacking Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Cassidy Shield today. I'm excited to be talking with Victoria, Daniel, and Miles. Welcome everyone.

So the topic we want to get into today, I'll start by saying, it's going to be about brand and about brand measurement. And the reason we want to get into this topic with this audience is we get a lot of questions about this. So if you think about what we do in B2B marketing, we're big advocates of creating demand for companies, and that's why companies hire us. There's no real good way to measure that today.

So we've created the same call on our pipe measurement framework. We're talking about self-reported attribution. We talk about hybrid attribution. These are all topics that we've gone through on this podcast.

You can listen to other episodes and we'll continue talking about these as we move forward. But one of the things that always comes back to this is like this notion of brand and brand equity and brand measurement and brand lift. And the reality is we don't really, it's almost like a taboo world in B2B, SaaS, organizations and marketing. But I want to get into that with this audience because it is part and parcel and fundamental to the creation of demand for a company or a category.

And so I thought no better way to do that today than with all of you. So why don't I start then with Victoria? And kind of the opening question I want to get into to kind just frame this for the audience and get all of us talking is why don't we see brand and brand measurement being something discussed more in kind of B2B marketing? My head always immediately goes to the comparisons with B2C and that's only because I started there and you see so much conversation around brand almost to a fault in that world.

So it is interesting to look at B2B, SaaS as a total kind of other end of the spectrum. To me, it comes down to a few different reasons. And I think about it as sort of push factors and pull factors. So pushing people away from brand and pulling people towards other metrics instead of the brand side of the spectrum.

So on the push side, we've talked about this in the past in the prior conversations. There is a definite perception of complexity costs resources required to understand what metrics do I measure? How do I measure? It's not as simple and straightforward as just the number whether that's profit or revenue at the end of the day.

It's something that feels a little swishier and it feels harder to wrap your head around especially with valuations, investors, and stakeholders involved. You want hard and fast numbers that we've talked about plenty because sometimes we've been a metrics are measuring on the performance side but they're at least tangible. They're pretty easy. You don't need to be talking to customers.

You don't need to be doing research or pulsing trackers on a quarterly basis, understanding brand components. But then that dovetails into the pull side where it's easier, it's quicker, it's faster, it's more straightforward. There's lots of technologies in the Martech stack that capture all these different metrics around clicks, likes, impressions, all the way through to leads and then different steps along your pipeline that feel more tangible. But I think where it really comes down to it, again, be to see it very heavily on this.

There's an emotional, attitudinal leading indicator side of any sort of behavioral conversion and conversion side of the spectrum. So it is important to think, where can you get those leading indicators that help especially in this environment start to signal where demand is still existing even if we're not actively capturing it or just feel like the business is performing like it is in the kind of payday of the market. It also feels like if it is discussed in the B2B world, it's on like in large B2B enterprises. Like at some point you've graduated to this world where you can now talk about brand and before you get to that world, either maybe that's when you become a public company or something, you have a private entity with venture dollars, like there's no room for this conversation.

At least that's kind of an impression I get. But let me turn that to Miles and Daniel. You guys are on the ground for a lot of companies. What is the reality of the conversation day to day with marketers around this topic?

And I was sitting here just hovering my mouse over the mute button. I really want to talk about this. So before we get into brand measurement, you guys both alluded to something. Brand doesn't really even get talked about too much in the software industry or the technology industry because this industry is so fast moving.

And so you begin to speak about Cassie, how you almost graduate to brand and it happens when you get to this enterprise level company. Well, especially in SaaS, all these companies are trying to grow so quickly, get investment funding so quickly. And when you're so focused on the short term, you can't focus on brand because it is typically a long term commitment. Now long term is subjective, refined labs we created demand.

We grew to 130 people in three years. Three years can be long. It can be short depending on what you're looking at. But a lot of companies don't have the runway for three years to do something like this.

And now I'm going off on a tangent. But because you're so focused on capturing demand and basically dollars and dollars out, you don't set what brand actually is for the software companies and set up a measurement framework or prove that it can work. But we all know it can work in technology as it does with every other industry. So I think I took that in a completely different direction.

So I'll bring it back to either Daniel or Cassie here to get me back on the right path. But that's something I really want to throw in there. I too was jumping at the bit to nail the mute button and get into the conversation. I think we've had some really, really great behind scenes discussion around this topic.

And but to kind of really reiterate what I think Miles and Cassie are both talking to you as well. I feel that most marketers don't really get the chance to set their sights on brand. And as a result, it is kind of this abstract concept for a lot of marketers, especially folks in the performance paid media area. I made my liking to two of my notes of like when you were trying to explain cloud to somebody back in 2010 and they were like, but I don't get what is the cloud what?

And I feel like brand often gets that same level of consideration, which is why you'll see everybody from marketers to graphic designers who specialize in brand. I don't think that going through the steps of actually building a brand is something that a lot of paid media folks get to really touch very often. So I think that's part of the challenge as well is just that it's hard to actually know how to optimize to brand or how to market brand when you don't really understand that it's core what makes for a good brand and that journey towards becoming a core and core brand. I think also elicits of this role reaction from people when you're talking about like company size and things like that, where you really do like, you think of like a Salesforce and you know their brand, but there are a thousand other companies that do a similar thing that haven't established their brand the same way that Salesforce has.

And I think that part of that is marketing. The part of it is also really strong branding, which is something that I just think is overshadowed a lot of the time. I also think that performance marketers struggle because there's not really a framework for us to hang our hats on the value of brands because it is such an abstract concept or because it is something that's so hard to qualify and quantify. People say like I'm working against, you know, if I come into a role and I ask what are your expectations of what I'm able to achieve in the first six months, you're going to, you're not going to say we're expecting you to increase brand awareness.

You're going to say we're expecting you to generate X number of leads or optimize to this or that metric. It's not really something where there's a framework for marketers to step into. I think it in most organizations. So I think it's really that and it also suffers from just that lack of effective metrics that really performance marketers or paid media folks can really point to in a very measurable way that feels doesn't feel separated and segregated from the other aspects of the work that we're doing in order to create this place of picture to say like we can actually optimize against this as a whether you want to call it a signal or performance indicator, a metric, whatever, different tag you want to put on it and how much value you want to put into it.

I think that's really where things need to go is finding a way to come up with better quantifiable metrics that we can use to quote unquote justify our jobs or make the case for why the efforts that we're putting in are often effective in a way that just doesn't currently exist and it hasn't really been accessible to most paid media folks for the last number of years. I wanted to kind of jump in on something here and that is you gave the sales force example, you gave the Victorian I'm coming your way with this one and that is if the paradox really is if I'm talking to a CEO or a founder of a company, they want to build a legendary company, they want to build a legendary brand, they want to be known as being unique and different and category defining, they want to be the next sales force. Like that's in their mind, but there then is this disconnect between kind of that picture of the world and kind of desire of why you started the company and then like day to day like how do we actually make that happen? And to your point both miles and annual like by and large at the performance marketing level like we're not focused on this because we need to focus on things we can measure short-term results, etc.

So maybe Victoria, how would we define? How should we define brand because I think this is also a messy bit of this and that is like what is the definition of brand and kind of the spirit of what we're really trying to do which is build a differentiated and great organization? The definition and then the model and the framework piece of it is just the continual issue that marketers can't market themselves as a notorious issue like a brand metric, having figured out how to create the model that people can turn to. Google went and did it with you know page search, there's all these metrics, you can debate them all day but they exist, someone took a stab at how you measure performance and that there's nothing cohesive on the brand and then to your point around how you even define brand equity.

We know it has to do with how people think and feel about you. There's an element of salience, do you come to mind when people have a certain need as a solution to that need? There's what you see in foreign people's minds but it is miles and annual, have both touched on its that long-term drum beat that really underpins what makes your business different and it's kind of the pillar you stuck in the ground around what you're offering to the market. That's not just functionally better but there's functional, emotional, sometimes social, there's experiential components that all combine to actually deliver value.

The analogy with that came to mind for whatever reason with the Salesforce example versus the SAS side is when you think about big successful brand as the end goal or business as the end goal, it's sort of like training and whether it's a professional athlete or not, you can measure your steps all day long and you can walk a hundred thousand steps a day and work really hard and you can capture that metric but then there's also the efficiency and there's everything to do with how your body has been your muscles are able to process and you give in food, you consume that a bigger long-term engine is focusing on because they're not just thinking about the steps on a day-to-day basis that eventually you might get knee damage from all of that excessive movement, you can work out six hours a day but at some point you need to feed your body and there's kind of a lot of analogies you could go to here but it ultimately comes down to the highest efficiency input that are going to translate to the end goal which is obviously dollars which will translate to success which will translate to scaling off in growth, can't do an analogy there but it can't come to mind so I went with it. So what would be helpful that maybe what we could try to get done on this call is around creation of demand and what that means kind of from brand awareness and equity and measurement. So Miles, you have this look on your face like you have an answer to this. So there's two things on the cover here, there's special technical elements of how we can measure creating demand and brand affinity early on, some signals but before I get into those different kinds of metrics that you can look at all these metrics we should use as signals and so my take is that we should not try and quantify the success of brand because when I say it's a human emotion it's how we perceive a company and trying to quantify that is nearly impossible so I think when we look at the efforts of brand we can look at early signals and obviously being generated from that but anyways that's we'll go down another rabbit hole with that as far as the metrics right now there's really two ways two really good ways to create demand and build that brand digitally.

There's social primarily for talking about SaaS we're talking about LinkedIn and then podcasting is a really big one right now. Notice how I did not mention SEO, the link controls are going to come after me for that one but yeah that sounds more forward SEO is a great tactic but at the best for creating demand right now. So as far as I'll say you're creating demand building brand affinity with a platform like LinkedIn there's a few things that you can look at. You can look at number one Google trends and this is outside that platform you can see if actual your actual brand term is trending up on the month quarter of a quarter you can look at website brand growth from organic branded, paid search branded and direct traffic those are all brand-aware channels and if those increase it's a good signal that you're creating demand.

Obviously we have self-report attribution which is a gimme in this context so I'm not going to hammer that one too much because we all know that but when there's also the in-platform metrics and so there's the quantitative and qualitative stuff and of course if you're less post-selling then so we've experienced this at a personal level we see our follower count increase we see our engagement rates increase so we have that data that shows that what we're doing is resonating and growing up following but as you guys know volume is not everything and so looking into the actual quality which is going to be sourced again from self-report attribution but with so underrated it's actually going into these platforms and seeing what people are actually saying and so going through the comments going through the DMs and if it is trying to get by and from leadership I've taken screenshots of comments and screenshots of DMs from executive individual or a VP or director level individual saying like hey this is really good I love following this content so that gets a little technical on the social side specifically LinkedIn podcast very similar we can look at lessons or downloads or subscriber volume but those are metrics that I look at was the clients that we work with but an important note I do not look at this and present that on a biweekly level brand is a long-term initiative and so I look at monthly and more importantly quarterly when we take specific actions I'll look at the daily or the weekly if you launch a specific podcast for example and certain metrics increase that's a signal that's non-mooz-metering about that that worked with our target audience and resonated but you really have committed to the monthly and the quarterly a lot of these marketing teams that I've worked with run the brand play but after two months right and it's definitely a long-term commitment so I'm gonna pass it all along to you guys you guys are yeah I wanted to get into this with uh why don't I want Daniel to pick this thread up around measurement in kind of the context of how to use it in light of what we also talk about quite a bit in terms of pipe measurement frameworks and when we think about a modern way to measure the creation of demand we think in terms of high intent leads, pipe qualified meetings, pipeline generation, revenue, sales velocity those are a lot of the things we report on whether clients on a monthly quarterly date are unified pictures. Well to start don't think that miles or anybody else can say podcasts and I was expecting to have nothing to say on the matter that is I think for me was the catalyst of a lot of this conversation thinking about in pitching a podcast to a client and how what do we measure was kind of really what set me down this brand measurement, radical I think that right now you know as we outline like it is a big challenge and in terms of tying it to the pipe framework and things like that I think miles put perfectly in that like these are directional indicators these are things that can be those short to medium-term indications that things are working to give you a really great example of this like I put together a podcast strategy for one of our clients and there's a company called PodSight which is now on my Spotify that does like a quarterly benchmark report and they basically said that like you have to invest 55,000 strong results from a pipe standpoint you know that this is going to be a high quality conversion at the end of the day because we're going to have the opportunity to really introduce and familiarize ourselves with the brands and there's all the stats and metrics that have come out in the last number of years about like the efficiency of podcast advertising and the way that resonates and all of the pieces of why it works or why it can work but you know to get a 55,000 buy-in is a big task it's not a small ask so that's kind of what I'm on this position thinking about like some of these indicators and like my mentioned you know you can look at web traffic but I think that one of the things that's really underutilized is really looking at like brand lift as a whole and it's funny because the thing that really pointing in that direction was the PodSight support from Q1 in this year when they talked about like their data set included over 500 B2B companies and they saw a benchmark of 70% at brand lift for those companies when they were advertising on podcast so thinking about it in that sense of like we know that in the long term we think that this is a valuable piece of the strategy because it's going to be a lag time as people are maybe your new audience or different things like that that kind of factor into the process of the way that buyers go through their buying process so you know that you're not immediately able to turn on you know a 55,000 podcast strategy and automatically have a bunch of new pipeline day two that's not how that works so really thinking about like looking at what is the brand iteration and some of those other pieces that Victoria was speaking to earlier are the ways to kind of close some of the loop there and I think that podcasts especially make an interesting piece of it because from an attribution standpoint it's something where there's never going to be a closed loop to be able to directly say like we know that most people are not going to go to their computer and immediately remember the vanity or all that you're using to track your traffic or things like that but where you can make the difference is pulling more people into the top of the funnel and putting them into that process so I think that's really where it can factor in and I think that there is a shortage of that in the short term but I think that as more channels that become harder to quantify come into the mix for marketers you know things like Quora or all of these other kind of B2B unique use cases it's going to become even more important because if someone sees a great answer from you on Quora or they see a great post from you in the community that they follow on Reddit or some of these other places where again you know we love talking about dark social and how that drives people into the funnel like if someone sees a post on Reddit and it's super insightful and they immediately go okay I want to check this out further and then they go organically your site or when they go through paid search or whatever you don't know that that's where it's coming from so you know I think that being able to just gauge how frequently that something like that is happening with something like brand lift is a huge opportunity that's being missed currently and can tie into pointing in the direction of like really viable pipe that can generate from out of from those platforms. I'm going to talk into the ring here because I'm thinking about this coming from a bit of an academic perspective admittedly but also having worked with more the enterprise B2B's and past roles because we're talking about the capture demand stage in particular there's also the create demand element which we've touched on there's also retain and keep demand and so when you think about brand as the collective set of associations and you know as you said exactly miles per sessions a individual has of your entity your company your offer whatever it is there's the experiential elements there's the things people are saying about you there's a dark social you know side of that conversation but along each of those stages of from the moment somebody is problem aware to you know that we talk about solution aware they're brand aware they're considering the brand they're going through the buying process they're then being captured as a you know demand but then you're retaining them over time there's all these different elements that you know again in any of the work that I've done from a research perspective there is that combination of the behavioral what you're seeing people do so that could be posting could be you know any number of things there's the attitudinal so how people feel and then how you build a model which again when you're a salesforce you have a luxury in the budget of a hiring offender and be like the time to build these models that say trust contributes 50 percent of the decision and empathy is you know three percent or whatever and those are the things they're going to drive but at the same time those are at some point a leading indicator that signals you that you are building the types of associations that are actually whether someone is claiming it or recognizing it they're actually like the calculus that's going on inside their head when they're making a decision again acknowledging b2b is different than b2c but i'm speaking to b2b examples here so all that rambal i guess to say that brand is a lot of different components of it so it certainly is different than the performance side but even just watching things like mentions on social or share of search only gets you so far to map that whole read on how you're showing up from an association perspective to your users i was gonna ask you this question Victoria where do things like share a voice here of search aid in a native brand recall some of the classic kind of b2c metrics around this is there any place for those in like the modern kind of modern digital world are they all kind of just dinosaurs of the past well and that's where i think about i do this one is or yeah i think there's a place and they're just a different type of metric than b2b and certainly b2b's as comfortable life and has historically defaulted to i spend a lot of time thinking about again how branding and the research around brand equity has totally muddled waters and disincentivized anybody from even trying to step a toe in because it feels so complicated and it feels like you know we were debating or just discussing today are there seven different metrics for brand equity can't our husband's philosophy if so it's another philosophy it's not about selling a model it's actually just one of the like three metrics you need to know when it ultimately comes down to as you said there's recall salience so do you remember the brand do you remember the brand in the context of a certain need do you have an affinity for the brand in a positive direction that makes you either strongly inclined or somewhat inclined to pursue a relationship with them and then it gets down into art would you consider them would you prefer them and then we start to get them to the capture stage of do you intend to actually engage with them do you actually reach out and you know establish a dialogue with them but you can get there's a few different layers where you can laugh at things like trust and empathy and you know experience but those can be leading or component indicators of things like affinity which then translate to behaviors which then translate to dollar value so there's a place for them but as you start to need to find those lovers a poll that's when companies tend to turn to them versus early on that would be and how maybe it's got to go miles like how do you think then in terms of proxies for that gartner force or g2 kaptera like obviously you spend money to hack these systems but do you find that in this kind of sass world we see these entities these quote third parties being used as proxies for brand or not i'm just trying to kind of gauge kind of things that i've heard and kind of see what your reactions are kind of day in and day out yeah as far as those vendors quite honestly i don't think they're the greatest proxy or indicator of brand performance because as you guys know it's almost like pay-to-play space we see the same thing when we go on like then when they release their top 10 voices on like then and they'll have 100 followers and just paid to be in position number one and it's very similar games to these vendors and so i prefer to own the data and own the brand and look at things like i said website brand growth and quantitative and qualitative insights within these platforms of course i'll do it back to you okay i see if you have a comment on that i was going to take it somewhere else but i'm gonna hold my horses here yeah why don't we try to like framework this out so let me kind of start and i'm gonna let's see if we can take this conversation and turn it into what should be measured so i'll take the easy ones obviously revenue growth to me is an indicator of strong brand so as you're revenue growing the next one i would think of is inbound kind of hand-raising pipeline growth and this is something we obviously is near and dear to us but if you think about people who are kind of raising their hand to come in and talk to you if that is growing in as strong as a percent of your overall kind of pipeline i would consider that a an indicator of like a strong a strengthening brand now let's go back further up so like vaniel u miles got into this idea of like all right if people coming to look and check you out come in your website walk us through again like how would you think about that in terms of you're putting a dashboard together they're gonna review on the quarterly basis like i would say more people coming organically to our website is a positive indicator of brand strength but can you could walk through that measurement again if you don't mind yeah i think it's funny because i kind of actually want to go back in a way to a little bit of what you talked about with some of the metrics that may be c-mart hey we've been looking internally at some ways to kind of re-codeify some of those things like share a voice into some of a combination of the metrics that we do have available from like normal traditional kpi is a digital marketing standpoint to figure out that it serves as a really great directional strategy piece as well you know understanding where your market fit is understanding what your share voice and industry is understanding what your competitors are all things that even at the performance marketing level can be super helpful so you know we've been working on trying to kind of figure out what does that measurement exactly look like how can we determine you know through our social pieces or through our page page search channels like how does that actually work and one of the things this is super anecdotal but really funny to me in this conversation is that i was doing an audit for page search for one of our clients i'm looking back to January one of this year and 62 percent of their leads or their conversions in five form have come from brand campaigns so clearly dominating in that sense where even just the variety of non-brand terms that you could be searching for that would get somebody to your solution the thing that you do and not your brand and who you are are trailing behind the who you are and the brand piece and that one you know like i said super anecdotal but looking at things like that or great directional indicators of okay we're seeing that people are coming to the brand page and whether that is influenced because they're seeing our page or dead and those pieces are always going to be the dots that are hard to connect which is why we love self-reported attribution here too to further include the pieces that we talked about i think in our mandatory here i mean every episode that we do we have to talk about all the things we love but i just think that it really does give you that level of it's also that well data piece because a lot of metrics can feel kind of two-dimensional so a lot of the quickly rate or engagement rates or different pieces that we're putting together or we're kind of seeing when we're doing our reporting and when we're doing our optimization do fall flat of being able to capture that brand element but looking at an indicator like what percentage of your your brand you know your in platform conversions for google our brand is like a good place to start of saying okay we know that the majority of this is working and being able to point some of those things and i think there are a lot of metrics out there that either our team is already working to try and figure out or other people are trying to figure out that i'm really interested in how do those things layer over the top of some of those more two-dimensional metrics that are very much this is what the platform is seeing and not actually was this click related to somebody who was trying to get to your side or was this somebody who's now slagged and they accidentally wind up on your page like you know those pieces give you that very flat this is how we interacted with in this moment but being able to look at how is the brand succeeding overall we'll give you that extra layer of qualitative to be able to say like we can show that the efforts that we're putting in on all these channels are working because of xy and z and you know at a very small size as we work to figure out these metrics even further i think that like even just that ratio of google ads is like a pretty good indicator of like okay we can see that there is health there that this brand piece is working because people are coming to the brand not to the solution nor to the product that was so good and the guest of your asking for a framework and an incredible job at explaining that i've got a framework for measuring brand for the some of the clients that we work with and two point it starts at the high level so that goal with brand is to move people through our pipeline at an accelerated velocity and basically to generate more money right from there there's the next layer which what daniel sir talked about and that we have discussed are things like going to the website whether it be through paid search brand or organic brand or traffic i covered those else i'll use google trends like i mentioned earlier that that details the trend of the brand name but then the next layer down goes into specific metrics of the actual channel that we're trying to drive brand and one thing that i think there's a little bit of a misconception around is that brand almost has to be on the channel so we have to be everywhere right and to i think in this era to effectively create brand yet you need to stick to your channel and when you stick to your channel whether it be podcast or linked in nine months i know i'm sticking to my grands on those two channels the indicators of success within those channels are going to be specific to that channel and so that's usually my third layer if you will metric spaced around the channel and it can be both quantitative things like followers engagement and then qualitative screenshots of comments and ads but something that's really important is you want to select carefully select those metrics before you start any brand efforts and set those expectations because i'm sure you know obviously been in sales and a bunch of different roles so you have a more holistic view of the company and kind of know what marketers tend to do and what i've seen is that with these brand initiatives metrics and expectations are not solidified in the planning phase and then as it continues markers are trying to prove something works and then they include more and more metrics and try and create this facade that it's working when in reality it's not working and you need to pivot and you need to change but we try and convince ourselves that it's working and it's doing both us as marketers of the service and not helping the company grow so i hope you guys thoughts on that yeah i like it a lot and one thing that i've heard we've dabbled with i'd love to get your thoughts on this including victorian that is could we even take it a step further like this framework that went from sales velocity and revenue to website traffic to in kind of in-platform and channel but when we're in-channel one of the things i've observed is we've we have the audience that the brand is trying to target in the channel and so you could maybe layer on kind of the classical to your point miles before i get started i'm going to survey as a proxy this audience and figure out like how where are they at me they're not going to run this strategy for six months i'm gonna go back and ask them hey do you know who i am more than you did six months ago i mean in that kind of a would that be a way to connect some of these dots between kind of the traditional way of doing it and a more modern way to do it but in a systematic way where everything's connected versus i think the point where you're going to going with miles was the brand team's off doing something completely different and then trying to figure out how to justify what they're doing versus at the end of the day what we're trying to do is build a business and so there should be one single framework for doing that and the more measurement you can have into that early and early indicators the better so i don't know if they're toward it seems like today's technology is not that hard given you have the expertise on this to survey customers and prospects about your brand but like yet it doesn't happen very often yeah that's exactly the fundamental philosophy behind brand trackers which again sales force thinking if they've got the budget and the luxury really of hiring an agency to do brand tracking when it can actually be as straightforward as yes there's you know research rigor around the right way to make sure that you're talking to the same people order to order versus the difference in awareness being because you should say you're talking to but they're very lean ways to do this but the other piece that becomes interesting when to both your point and miles when you think about the brand theoretically off in their own world then there's kind of a market in the activation where things need to connect is why things are working so even if you're seeing that you're at a baseline level of awareness and you get bombarded platform with you know any sort of creative that's where i think the brand piece really adds value and again brand doesn't do a good job of advocating for why these quote unquote swishy metrics or you know things that they're measuring around how people are feeling or why they're engaging with you translate down the funnel we talked about this in our last podcast Cassidy but if you go back to who the consumer is and what they care about and how they're making decisions then you get a lot more insight on the why around why they're making the decisions they are and how you can win with them and so it becomes just as much like are you increasingly aware of us over time but we did the work and we know that trust or great ROI the beat of beat is actually more straightforward on the drivers of choice but things like you know trust credibility ROI those are the things that matter and we know that matters to you we messaged against it in a way that you know showed our personality and conveyed what we do have our perceptions around trust and value increase because then that means not only are you just aware of us but that we're actually more likely to get farther along that funnel again with a more kind of like lubricated slide down to the bottom of the funnel it's you because we know that we've done the work to kind of clean up the pipes and make sure it's easy to get to us because why is a key piece that I think that you know we can feel squishy to just look at those types of perceptions but focusing just on mentions or citations or whatever that can get a little too behavioral and it's not actually pulling on the drivers of the choice in the decision over time. What's interesting and I love Cassidy you brought up actually going to the market and asking them about your brand and being that recall what's interesting is as you build your brand and as the responses get better like you're saying Victoria there's more trust and and people are more aware of your brand the response rate actually increases and that's another good signal and you're at the beginning of building a brand the response rate is probably not going to be great from your market because you're just another company and a mix of the G2 grid and as you build that brand yeah better responses and a better response rate which is another good signal that you are doing a good job at creating demand and building brand affinity.

I have a metric in my head and I want to kind of press on it maybe to annually can respond to this why is it not as simple as the change in sales velocity divided by the change in acquisition costs meaning the end of the day am I increasing my revenue at a faster rate than my cost structure to gather that revenue. I mean isn't this kind of a is it ultimately what we're trying to do with like building a stronger brand is like I think the revenue is faster than costs to acquire. Yeah I mean I think that drives to the core of the goal but I think really where all of the layers of the onion come in is all of the different approaches to this and it's something that I really appreciate about even just like seeing the way that Chris approaches the problem or a question like that and all the things that he's doing talking about like yes that should it should be that simple but the reality is it's not because there's a million different pieces that are going to get pulled into that conversation and sometimes rightfully so because I think that you've shown me an executive who's going to say okay we can look at it that's simply and as long as this is happening you have carte blanche to do whatever you want and you can really lean into brand as much as you want and whatever else and I'll probably tell you to wake up because I don't think that exists and I think that we've become so tied into this idea that there has to be an attribution a data point a perspective on every single action that goes into the strategy that at the end of the day yes that is the perfect goal the metric itself wouldn't tell the whole story but at least we give you like a good baseline of yes this is what we're trying to achieve but I think that it's always going to be more complicated than that and no one's ever just going to say okay well we're making money faster than we're spending it so cool and those investments I think that you know you can look at all of the different metrics that do kind of layer on top of that to really give you the the qualification there around like all the things we spoke about on this podcast we're also going to come into the mix and I think there's going to come out of this you know once this conversation gets the more steam I think I'm on the broader B2B SaaS space someone will find a way to go break that into a new metric to add a little bit more of that qualitative piece to it but yeah I mean I think that's ultimately the goal but I just don't think that measurement is ever going to be truly that simple which is why we're looking for all of these ways to gain direction around all of the pieces that we are putting into the marketplace to at least say like we're seeing ultimate success from this you know top line metric from this endpoint of what we're trying to get to and then this is one of the things we think are driving that so we can lean into those further yeah I would love to kind of circle that back to Victoria if I were to hire a brand consultancy today to come in they would try to they would claim that I need to measure every single brand touchpoint like I hear this all the time you can read slides on this and you know and I've heard this before like there's this kind of back of what Daniel was saying like there's this fallacy that we somehow are going to be able to measure every time a customer engages with us and that that magically then can turn into attribution or some kind of strategy to kind of drive brand lift how what is that a true perception I have and if so like what should be the advice instead when we think about kind of tying a brand campaign strategy to kind of the fundamental system of measurement that we want to do to drive the business doesn't make sense yeah I'm thinking about your perception and I think it's in part true but I think it's part of the problem where we started this conversation around why especially any B2B SaaS company and you start out when we dealt with this on the B2C side and NSF it feels like you have to have a process that you layer on into every stage of the journey and you've got to have an NPS after every touchpoint when it doesn't have to be that there's probably an efficiency play there where you if you have a CX team who is thinking about how to service versus sales versus you know someone else further upstream translate to brand value or business value they're thinking like let's measure every touchpoint it doesn't have to be that complicated back to where we said before can it be as simple as a quarterly read among your target audience around awareness levels I think that's definitely very feasible and it's more important piece and I beat this drum a lot whether internally or to my friends who I want to hear about my perception of brand metrics it's a metric that matter and you've got to make sure that you know the model that your decision maker has working in their brain whether they realize it or not and the calculus that they're doing to make a decision so if you break that down you know be laying the money on the table is driven by X factors which is indicated and through X behaviors which is driven by X feelings like those are the feelings that you can pull the level right in your creative that translates to engagement on a post which translates to infinity over time which translates to the dollar being laid down on the counter so I think over complicating again is the issue that branding and this industry has created for itself it you've got to get down to like a couple of core metrics that measure the attitudes and perceptions people are having about you make sure that there's an app to what you know matters for their choice find the symptomatic behaviors as we spend a lot of time talking about that reflect that there's positive momentum and there's affinity for you and then just keep nurturing that relationship over time to capture them. I like that so I want to wrap this up with just pieces of advice we have for the audience that they can take away and start focusing on it sounds like other words in your mouth they choreate just want to pick this topic up next week that to get to this point of the brand values you want to measure what you want to be stand for it requires you to be very good at customer insight and be very good at your positioning and messaging vis-a-vis your competition and in your market so would you say then start there and kind of do that really well and then kind of figure out how that ties into your measurement framework or start with the measurement framework or some other piece of advice you'd recommend for the audience.

I would say it goes back to the customer understand if you're going to do the research understand who they are and make sure you're positioned correctly you can add like two points to your conversation or your survey there that understand how they're making choices there are also troves of research around how it would be to be buyers and make decisions so you can just tap that but I would say the first place to start is going to be actually the consumer and then you can figure out a couple of diagnostic brand metrics leveraging best practices from the industry or the research to marry into your model. Perfect Daniel how about you what do you recommend what do you the keen advice you're giving our customers what would you give to those listening. Well I want to piggyback off those victorious points from before about like know what your leadership is looking for in terms of metrics and in the instance where I think a lot of our listeners probably will be as maybe their leadership doesn't even know what those metrics are looking like and it's up to you to define them and this all customer is the end I'll be all in driving all of this and then looking at the channels that you're looking at for your mix and really understanding where your customer exists where you can reach them the best and what metrics will best apply to those channels is a really good strong way to back into I think being able to kind of say okay this is the channel this is what we're using to measure currently here's how we can work into a framework of measuring brand on the channel or the country to the channels making to the brand piece and I think at the end of the day like it's really really always going to be super hard to quantify but every team should have someone like Victoria that has the ability to push marketers to think about it in a different way and the same work that you're doing to help us guys like with all of this we're working through this together as a group and I think that that exposure if you're a leader give your team the chance to spend some time learning these things to go through the same process that Miles and I are going through right now get your hands dirty in the research piece in the what are the pieces of brand analysis that we're not touching on a day-to-day basis because we're in platform doing optimizations or what else and if you're someone who's looking to go in that direction and you can't get that buy-in from leadership type into your network I know Victoria has been super helpful for me in this process and I'm sure that you all have people that you're connected with or can find people in the space that can give you really really good insights into how to upskill yourself to be able to think about all this and I think it's part of becoming a really well-rounded marketer that is often missed and is a huge area of opportunity as the landscape continues to shift to really take into that the qualitative piece and the brand awareness understanding and what are the drivers of that based on the strategy that you're putting together. Yes, well said.

So Daniel, why don't you give us an example, you talked to this example offline of just how you kind of lean into a platform from a brand perspective and kind of what that evolution might look like. Can you share that? Yeah, I think that getting the measurement piece of this down gives marketers an opportunity to really add another tool to their tool belt in the sense of if you can understand what role a channel is having in influencing your brand growth and you can look at how to expand your budget or how to expand your footprint on that channel. There's a huge opportunity there.

So really the anecdotal answer that I would give you is in terms of rent it. We have a client that I've been running right at four for the last six months, seven months and the next step in what we could do for Reddit looks like it could potentially be a subreddit takeover, which is really where you position yourself in a specific subreddit. There's a lot of other ways to apply. You can do AMAs and things like that.

There's all sorts of opportunities that are paid opportunities but give you the opportunity to showcase your brand and thought leadership and all different things but they come with a much larger price tag and so it's why would we deviate from what we've seen work if we don't know what the return is going to be because we can't quantify the brand piece. So I think that figuring those pieces out will help you lean into the channels that you're seeing success on further whether it be a Reddit or something on Reddit or something like that. That's a little bit more outside the box to even to LinkedIn to justify expanding the region to more areas of your product or all the different ways that you can kind of scale a channel having a good gauge for how is this impacting our brand pieces that we've spoken a lot to will be wildly beneficial for those at the end of the line that are actually on the execution side and those that are trying to sell that strategy at the line as well. Yeah, we're a lot about that tangible example and it kind of ties back to something Miles said earlier and that is a misperception that we need to be on we need to be everywhere as a brand versus like being in one or two spots in like dominating in those channels.

I think he just walks through a great way to think about in one channel where you're having success almost how you double down and kind of continue to innovate in that channel so I love how your community and lean into it. I love it. That's a nice thing to start in and with that I'm just gonna say starting with my customer. If you understand where people are you also may realize that half of those channels you're thinking of considering are totally irrelevant because that's not for your for whatever reason your body rates but always comes back to the customer.

It comes back to the customer. Miles any last thoughts? Yeah, my final piece of advice which is ironic because we just spent an hour talking about brand measurement but do not over complicate brand measurement. Don't ever over complicate it.

Set your metrics, commit to those and then don't convince yourself that it's working. Building a brand is really hard right if it was easy everyone would be doing it so it's really hard try and figure out what is not working learn and pivot and figure out what is working if you continue to try and convince leadership in yourself that it is working by looking at different data different metrics like I said earlier you're doing everyone into service so be honest. I told my kid the same thing. I love it.

In all wrap with something I said from the beginning and that's the paradox and that is I often hear from marketers that in their company brand doesn't matter and it's not the reality. Go talk to your founder your CEO. It's the most important thing he or she thinks about every day and obsesses about. That is how do I build a world class company that everybody knows about where it's easy to get customers.

It's easy to get employees so brand matters tremendously. I think the piece that we're missing and hopefully this discussion help further that is how do you connect the knob between the vision of the founder and the CEO and leadership team and what they want to achieve in the market to your marketing and to your measurement and how does that kind of drive the business forward and that's the piece I think that is missing in the marketplace. It's not that brand is important. It's just that the way people think about it today and the way they measure it today is flawed and not effective and so hopefully we're able to shed some light on that and I look forward to what Daniel and Victoria and Miles continue to create and evolve in this space because I think we'll be leading the way and how to actually measure that in a modern way.

So thank you everybody for joining this episode. Any last parting thoughts before we wrap it up? We're good. Anyone has thought on this?

We'll talk to any of us. We'd love to continue with the conversation and hear how you're thinking about brand and your business. You may or may not already but we're very active and involved on LinkedIn. So yes feel free to connect with everybody that you heard from today.

We'd love to talk about this topic in more detail. All right. Well, that's a wrap. Thanks everybody for the latest episode of Stacking Growth for Out.