Hello everyone, welcome. Good to see all of you. My name is Megan Bowen. I'm the CEO at Refine Labs.
We are going to talk about the importance of brand marketing in B2B. We want to cover a bunch of stuff today. I also want to make sure we have some time to answer some questions that any of you guys have top of mind. We're going to kick off and talk a little bit about why this matters.
Why is brand important in B2B? So we'll get Matt and Pepsway in on their perspective there. And then we want to get into some more tactical conversations. So we'll go through some common mistakes that we typically see and ways to think about those types of things differently.
We're also going to talk about how to measure, what and how to measure. That is probably one of the most common questions I get is I want to invest in brand marketing. I'm just not sure how I should measure its success and how I can convince my leadership team to make investments and that what I'm doing is working. So we'll talk about that as well.
And then we'll wrap up with some really good takeaways that you guys can hopefully take back to your companies and make the case for brand investments. So let's get into it. Hey Ian, good to see you. I see you got your camera on.
Love that you're here. If anyone wants to jump on camera, I always love seeing your faces. But let's kick us off and just talk a little bit about why brand matters in B2B. And so Matt, why don't you kick us off and share your perspective?
Well, brand matters because you can't get bought. You can't be. No one's going to buy you if they don't know who you are, you know, and a whole point of building your brand or having more brand awareness is to get yourself in the top of the consideration set. And those things tend to be more difficult things to measure.
You know, if we look at things through the lens of brand marketing and performance marketing, performance marketing tends to be a very kind of transactional type of motion that you're going to be. Motion that you do where you're looking to get that result immediately. If you're trying to get a demo, you're doing incentivized gift card demos. You're doing those types of actions.
Those tend to be very transactional kind of plays designed to impact or inbound immediately. Whereas with brand marketing, generally speaking, you're trying to create a wider halo effect for your company. You're trying to become more well-known. You're using other channels as well that tend to give you more spread and tend to get your brand name out a lot wider.
So the reason why it's important is because brand marketing is essentially what contributes to you being well-known. And like, obviously we look at this a lot through the lens of advertising. But if you look at things like what you talked about and you talked about quite a bit, it's things around content appearing on podcasts running events, like your winter event, is a perfect example of a brand marketing play where you're bringing people in and you're bringing people into your site guys. Essentially at the end of the day, the things that matter quite a bit for you.
And those tend to have a halo effect or a mouth effect. And those are the things you're trying to effect you more than anything with brand marketing is you're trying to get more people to know you. And then associate what you do to certain category entry points or, or a JSON-ly jobs to be done that you solve for them. And that's what makes it matter.
It's a longer tail play. It takes a longer time to mature. But it is something that you have to look at as a concerted effort across a long period of time where you're looking at certain leading indicators, which we'll get into. And then the lagging indicators are the things that are going to impact the things that you try to impact more immediately with your performance marketing overall.
So to me, like those, that is why you do it and that is why it's important. And that's why it's something that marketers need to spend time working on, and get alignment with leadership on it as well, because it tends to be something that is not a very one to one thing to necessarily measure. Yeah, you mentioned a really interesting topic that we haven't talked too much about yet at Refine Labs, but talk a little bit more about category entry points, because I think that's a really key concept that's important. And you don't hear our good friend Liam Moroni talks a lot about this and has a strong perspective.
But can you just kind of define that and explain what that means in terms of brand marketing? And then I'm going to give you a pep to weigh in. So get ready. Yeah, so you think a category entry points is like when, where, why, how or like with what people will come into market to think about your brand and like companies create these associations really you're creating memory that gets tied to those category entry points.
I think you think a lot about this in a B2C context and some companies do this like exceptionally well. So like a brand like Snickers, for instance, would be like hungry grab a Snickers. So like you're not you when you're hungry, you create these campaigns that kind of revolve around these category entry points. But even if you look at this in like a B2B context, these look at companies like Shopify or Stripe, we do a really good job of doing that as well.
Like, you know, Shopify, like when they need a customizable e-commerce infrastructure, like, yeah, it's a little bit more technical into the weeds. But like those are the kinds of category entry points that brands like Shopify build. So you associate their product with when you come into market or something like that. So it's an adjacent thing that jobs to be done because it's kind of like people will run into a scenario where you want them to associate your company to what you do, whereas jobs to be done is more of like they're trying to accomplish this thing.
This is how you help them accomplish that. But it's for brand marketing. It's it's better to revolve where it's ideal to revolve around category entry points. But jobs to be done is definitely better than having nothing at all there.
So the category entry points essentially thinking about it through that context of when and where, why, what, how people will come into your people will come into market for something that you sell and ideally going back to wanting to build awareness for your brand. You want them to think of you. You want to be in that consideration set because people will buy from who they know it is risk aversion or loss aversion at the end of the day. They're trying to like they're trying to buy something that is not going to get them fired at the end of the day.
And that's essentially why you're trying to build that's why you ideally would build your brand marketing kind of around those sorts of questions, those sorts of entry points. Awesome. Thanks for that breakdown. Pat, what's your perspective?
Why does brand matter in B2B? What would you add to what Matt just walked through? I guess the main thing is understanding how expensive software is being bought. And I'm not talking like 29 bucks a month hard chart type of stuff.
What chart is actually not 29 anymore 10 years ago, maybe. So anyways, if it's not an impulse purchase, it's a considered purchase. Then depending on the research you read, Google, Bain, Trust, Radius, 80 to 90% of deal, closed one deals, go to top of mind brands. So if you're not top of mind, and top of mind is usually three brands.
If you're not the three brands that come to mind, you're not in the consideration set. And furthermore, of course, they'll do the Google resource, the chat chippy team, they'll extend their shortlist to five to eight tools. Even so, most closed one deals go to brands buyers are familiar with. So that's the brand play.
Yeah, I think you were at an event where you were asking people spontaneously if they could name brands in different software categories. CRM or other categories. Not brand, but I made sure they are the category buyer. So they bought a product in that category, assuming that it is on research, right?
And yeah, people were able to name sometimes zero, well, only one of the bots or two, three. There were a few guys that knew like maybe six, seven. And this is very much aligned with the research on how many brands people able to name. So if you read the healthy brands book by Johnny Jenny Romanyuk, awfully boring book, by the way, awfully boring, but very valuable content on this stuff.
Which makes the case that you need 50% market penetration to be to have unaided awareness for a brand, which means it's always HubSpot Salesforce, the huge brands. We don't have a chance. I mean, we're in different categories. We're not competing with HubSpot.
Thank you. Jesus. But if you were in a CRM category, then game over. Yeah, I think my big takeaway from watching some of those interviews that you published on LinkedIn were even some big name companies that we might be familiar with as B2B marketers.
When you're asking people, they're not even remembering these brands. And these are companies that have invested a ton in brand campaigns or have been around for decades. And so I think it just underscores the importance, I think, of what we're communicating that if you're not investing in brand, you're never going to be top of mind and never going to be in the consideration set. And it does become a non-negotiable in a requirement.
And unfortunately so often, especially a lot of B2B software companies, this is a deferred priority in marketing. Like Matt said, the Prioritize Performance Marketing or other tactics that are deemed more important or more connected to revenue. So let's kind of segue into some of the common mistakes that we see. And what I'd love to do is talk through some of the mistakes that we observe and then how companies should be thinking about this differently.
One of the things that I was kind of just alluding to is it's very common for people to just take a very short-term approach. People are just not willing to invest in some brand campaigns that might not drive an immediate return in that month or that quarter. Matt, share a little bit more about what you see, especially in some of the companies that you've worked with over the last few years. I think a lot of what I see on for brands when it comes to brand marketing is they tend to not find that kind of Goldilocks area of who they want to target.
They'll go super broad and they won't be able to get any saturation or they'll go super small where it's like, well, you're not going to penetrate a wide enough lens of your market where you're going to build any brand awareness or it's going to be with such a small set of people that it's not going to in the long tail really impact your revenue very much. This is honestly part of where I find ABM to be a little self-limiting in terms of using ABM as a brand awareness play because if you're looking at 5800-1000 companies, there's so many brands competing for those same 500-800-1000 companies, you're creating a really expensive play for yourself and it's not something that's going to really build that kind of wider aperture of brand awareness for yourself. So I think part of it is like looking at your go-to-market strategy and how you look at wanting to build your brand awareness and doing brand marketing effectively and you kind of box yourself into some of these plays. Another part is like I think a lot of companies get impatient with it.
So they'll run brand plays and then they won't see something for three months and then they'll immediately do something like change their targeting. So if you're going to go to a different ICP or persona across your product and then that's going to essentially send you back to zero and you're starting the same process over again. So I think some of the some of the errors that I'll see are things like that where you're you're getting a patient with it. You don't set your audience or your segmentation properly.
Because to pass point if you're a small brand, you know, you're not going to go compete with sales or you're not going to compete with HubSpot in CRM. If you're close to CRM who's doing a lot of work on LinkedIn right now, you need to find like that that segment that you can really compete for and close to sort of hone in on that SMV segment where they feel they can really serve them, especially companies that have really sales heavy motion and they're trying to building they're building a lot of their features and their tools set around it. So part of it is just understanding where you sit in the market because the duplication of purchase law going back to some of the Arabic best stuff that that talked about is that what larger brands are going to take off a large percentage of future sales. So the only way you can stand out is the properly segment where you stand in the market and make a really concerted effort against that segment over a long and sustained period of time to differentiate yourself there.
What are some other mistakes that you see, Pat, in terms of, you know, the work that you do with your customers? I think people are confused. What is the job of brand marketing? And if we think about it in, you know, like first principles way, the communications job is fairly straightforward.
It's like, what is it? It's a B2B market research tool. What's it called? It's winter.
When do you need it? Oh, when you, you know, want to know what your ICP thinks about something, maybe you. So you associate, like, what is it, brand name and use case or category entry point, if you will. And that's the job.
So now if we're on LinkedIn, if you run ads and so on, we want to communicate those three things consistently over time. And a lot of companies use, let's say, LinkedIn. And it's not just about posting daily on LinkedIn. You don't want to be just known.
You want to be known for something, you know, because like we've had this, I mean, scandal is a big word, but these things where people are talking about their porn habits and what not the LinkedIn, you know, what category entry points are we building here, right? And so I don't think like, you know, this you want to be consistent in every channel, every medium. So that's the job. And the second thing is the data is very clear that it needs to be an always on job.
It's not that we run a two-week campaign and then brand awareness goes up 10%. It won't, you know, it's you will see meaningful improvement in after six months of continuous, always on campaigns. And when I say campaigns, it's a mixture of social news that our webinars adds, you know, reaching category buyers through various channels nonstop. Yeah, it's interesting because we talk a lot about how the sort of how B2B buying and selling has changed pretty dramatically since, you know, even like the early 90s up until present day and arguably before digital marketing became a thing, a lot of these plays that we're talking about were very common in terms of what marketing was able to execute in terms of whether it was events, whether it was, you know, broadcast advertising on TV or billboards, like all this stuff was very common and expected to be part of the marketing mix.
And then digital advertising, sort of the internet became a thing, social media became a thing. And this, you know, very performance driven, what can we track, what can we measure, essentially overtook marketing teams over the last 20 years. And, and, and companies have just been over optimizing it. It's nice because in many cases, it is easy to measure or easy to say it was a success or not a success.
You can debate those success metrics and whether it's actually, you know, driving business results versus other vanity metrics. But I think we're now seeing the saturation of these digital channels and we're almost going, you know, what is old is new again and continuing to think about these things. I like how you broke it down pretty simple, and I think brand marketing can be relatively simple in terms of who is your audience, what do they care about, what do you want to communicate, where do they spend time, and designing a set of programs to meet your buyers where they're at, communicate your message effectively, create those memorable moments, create those associations with those category entry points. And that can be done with a series of, you know, content strategies, event strategies, organic social strategies, paid can play a role in that as well.
So it also doesn't have to be that complicated yet we still run into a lot of these, these issues, you know, and one of the things that I hear a lot from VPs of Demand, Directors of Demand Gen within B2B SAS companies is I believe in this, I have all these ideas for grand campaigns, but I can't get the buy in that I need from leadership. I'd love for you both to weigh in on this and how you think about building the right business case or presenting the right strategy in a way in order to get the buy in that you need. And there's some ways you've done that, Matt. I think the way you build a business case is you show your leadership how well known you are, you know, and that involves benchmarking.
And that's kind of the boring work that goes into expectation setting for making the case for brand marketing. And you guys just released the upper end measurement tool and I'm certainly I'm curious to get your take on that. But like, you know, one of the other things to do is like just get a sense of your share of search, you know, there's tools like my telescope that can do that for Google, there's new tools coming out that are able to track your AI mentions as well, you can merge those two things together to really get a sense of your standing and your share of search in the market. And you're doing that really against two different things.
One is against your category, like where do you play and how well known are you in your category and like, you know, if you're a small player and you're doing like CRM, you're going to have like 0.2% share the market while a couple people take up, you know, 60-50%. And then the other thing is like getting a realistic competitor set for yourself and say, okay, who do we actually compete with in the market and you're probably going to narrow that down to 345 competitors and then get a sense of your share of search against all of them. So essentially you're looking at the aggregate of how many people are searching for your brand against your three four competitors. And then your benchmarking that, I mean, you can go all the way back four years with some of these tools you can look at 12 months, six months, probably wouldn't recommend looking at it through a lens shorter than that.
But the big thing is just benchmarking just how well you're known against your competitor set and then how well you're known against your category in general. And when you put that in front of your leadership and your sales reps, because the job of brand marketing and I think another error when you look at brand marketing is you're only looking at it through the lens of marketing, like really great brand should actually impact almost all parts of your go-to market, all parts of your finance. It should make it easier to sell. It should make it easier to acquire partnerships.
It should make it easier to do almost everything that's a revenue generating motion if it's done well for you. So when you show that to leadership and you say, Hey, does this check to you? Like, I mean, do we, are we kind of not as well known as these brands and are we finding it harder to sell against these brands, possibly because we just don't have the level of brand awareness that they do that. That'll get now get anyone's ears perked up and help you build the case for brand marketing because ultimately what you want to do, going back to the whole thesis of this is become more well known, get into consideration set and make it easier for yourself for you to sell against the people who you're going to compete against month in and month out for these years.
So that's kind of where that's where my mind goes in regards to that question. Anything to add, Pep? I think the problem starts with folks in various leadership positions, board members wanting to measure brand ROI in terms of like 30 to 60 day money back. And that math just doesn't compute.
And the people who want the 60 day returns, you know, they're intelligent, well-meaning people and they don't want to accompany money being wasted. You know, there's a perception of investing money in brands is like sitting in on fire. So I think job number one is just having an intelligent conversation within the company. You come on with data on how brand is measured and what is the lag effect and how buyers buy.
So you put all that in front of them and then discuss. And the other thing beyond education is, you know, famously, what is it that the CMO of fired every two years or 18 months even maybe. So if everybody is judged by results now, why would they invest three years into the future if they're not going to be there, right? So I think it's also the people hiring the CMO.
I don't know what that is, CEO, the board again. Like they just have wrong expectations of how the work is measured. Now my simplified version of how we should put dollar figures to the brand is very straightforward. Every old revenue that is not performance marketing revenues brand revenue.
And I believe that statement is 85% correct. So you have your direct response campaigns running where you drive traffic to a landing page schedule, then one download a white paper, whatever, whatever, turn those off. And if you maybe in control markets, just in Kansas or California, and the revenue that remains the sign ups that remain, it's all brand. And we can put a dollar figure there and we can deduct out on sales for me if you do that, you know, so we can put a dollar figure and show that, hey, this should work.
See, we're not advertising. We're not pitching anybody. We're still making a boatload of money. In the case of winter, 100% of our revenue is brand marketing.
We're not doing any direct response at all. And of course, I'm a former marketer, so I know how the game is played. The same type of education is just needed among the leaderships of various organizations. I like your take that anything not directly attributable to paid is brand.
It's a simple and easy way to look at it. One of my favorite people has a question in the chat, David, why don't you come on and ask your question. I'm going to go off our run of show. I love it when people have questions and this is a good one.
So let's see, can we get you unmuted? And instead of asking for you, I'll have you ask and we can see who wants to take it. Can you hear me? Okay.
So it's a pleasure to have this conversation. I guess I've got a question on behalf of all the marketers working at small startups. And I set up a context in my question. Imagine it's a BDB startup, technical product, salt IT.
You've got a small team of sales reps, maybe an equally small team of sales reps. So I'm going to talk about the market. I'm going to talk about the market. I'm going to talk about the market.
I'm going to talk about the market. I'm going to talk about the market. Imagine it's a BDB startup, technical product, salt IT. You've got a small team of sales reps, maybe an equally small team of marketing folks and maybe a 50 to 100K price bond.
You're not a leader in your space. You're just starting out. So my question is to try and bring this down to worth is understanding the characteristics that are different between a brand marketing campaign and a demand gene campaign. So if you can help me understand what, you know, there's going to be some overlap and that's also interesting, what's similar.
But I would really like to have you guys speak a little bit about what you feel is characteristically different and present in a brand campaign that may not be present in a demand-gen campaign. Well, perhaps it's just a question of emphasis. I don't know, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you.
Well, a performance marketing campaign drives you to take a specific action right now. And if you're not, if you didn't take that action, it's failed, right? It didn't convert in brand marketing. There's no CTA.
You don't have to do anything. We just want you to take in the message. So the job here is building a memory and the science of memory building psychology tells us how we're building memories and something needs to occur in the brain, which is emotion. No emotion, no memory.
And we like to laugh at all B2B ads are like boring as shit. And they are for the most part, right? And hence we don't remember. They just all blend in.
Oh, the IT, hybrid server, whatever it is, AWS servers. Don't remember. Did you guys see recently this controversial ad by Air? They hired the porn star Bonnie Blue.
Yes, I did see that. Yeah. So Bonnie famously slept with a thousand men in a day. And so in the ad, it's like, well, that's nothing like Dropbox fucked 18 million people in one day.
Something, you know, like that's funny. That's unexpected. You'll remember that. I did not know about this.
I actually still don't know what the company actually does. Probably a Dropbox competitor. Well, like you hear this, oh, it's surprising. I feel an emotion.
Some people might feel disgust, depending on your, you know, values and stuff. So so yeah, so the difference that is it CTA and I expect immediate action or not. So that's really interesting if I could just have a follow up because for years, almost a decade, it's moving quickly. I stopped putting CTA's at the end of emails, for example, because I know that if I as Chris walk away, say they know how to get back to me when they want to on their mind.
So take out the CTA because when it makes sense, they will figure out how to reach me. So that's suggesting then perhaps that my emails have turned into brand marketing more rather than anything else. And I've been doing that for years in my nurture campaigns, those spotty types of emails that you send out on various regular or maybe irregular schedules. So that's an interesting way of describing it because that would open up a lot more different types of motions.
I guess is maybe a good word. It captures a lot of stuff because you took the CTA out. If someone reacts in that moment, that's their choice because that and the reaction could be, I'm curious and just take a look without actually raising their hand and identifying themselves. So that's very helpful.
Thank you. Yeah, I would add a little bit to that answer. I think the difference between like brand and demand or performance marketing is like, you know, with brand, you're going back to what you said, Pep, about, you know, drop box, X amount of people over like that's a category. But right.
Like when drop box asked me over, I want to think of something different. So part of it is just revolving some of that effort back to like that higher level category point instead of getting into like features and things like that, where people were maybe looking in their market for a solution and they're looking for a solve. So they're looking for something very tangible that's going to help them solve that problem as opposed to brand where you're trying to create that memory association a little bit. I also say with with brand, you're you're opening up different channels for yourself.
I think that normally you wouldn't. So organic social, I think is a perfect example of that, where you can use, you're not looking and creating a CTA necessarily for a lot of your brand marketing. Although some companies are like, like paramark, for instance, like, like front of has a CTA almost at the end of every one of his post and like, he's not doing that because he thinks you're done. But he just wants to remind you that he does solve this problem if you're ever interested in it.
But it's really not the point of his content either. And in fact, you do this as well in your emails. And I think I think Winter has some of the best email marketing that I see. Perhaps Pepsi most are probably the only ones I open on a weekly basis.
And a lot of it is just like he's just talking about something that we're trying to solve or that you're curious about that. You don't have a concrete idea for how to solve for it. And then sometimes you put the little PSN or you don't know that essentially acts as a call to action if you want it to be. But it's not necessarily the first point of the of the of the motion or the content.
So that's so that to me is kind of a little bit of distinguishing the difference or even trying to straddle the line a little bit even if you want to. Yeah, we we took old product promo out of our newsletter. Yeah. Because I mean, David, as you said, like they know how to get back to us, right?
So it's all content. I want to I'd rather train you to open up my emails because you find them interesting. And for most expensive, I'm fine figure deals in B2B. It's a considered purchase like I'm not going to convince you to buy now with a CTA, right?
You need to be actively looking to buy. So it's still you should favorite a memory building play here. I love that. Before we move on to measurement, which is a really hot topic, what are some other common mistakes that you guys see?
Anything we haven't covered yet? You know, I think one of the things that I think about a lot is and we sort of have covered this, but maybe not explicitly called it out is people making sure that they have their core marketing fundamentals in place. Like can they define their target audience and their ICP? Have they gone through a positioning and a messaging exercise?
Have they validated that messaging with their ICP? You know, do they have a great website that educates their buyers and makes it easy to get in touch when they are ready to get in touch? I think it's so easy to skip over a lot of these like core fundamentals that are required for a business to be successful and then just jump straight to why I want to run this brand campaign or I want to run this paid program. And so I do think a lot of companies, either they skip over these things or they think they have them right and they've done no validation to make sure that what they're saying actually resonates with their buyer.
Curious to know what you guys think of this. I think it kind of plays into like, you know, at Refine Labs, we've talked for years about the importance of talking to customers and things like buyer research. And I think it still remains a missing piece in a lot of these B2B SaaS companies and a lot of decisions are made and campaigns are planned on a really shaky foundation. Curious to know what you guys think.
Broke plays evolve and change all the time, right? But there are two fundamentals that always are there. And one is know your target customer intimately like the pains and how to describe it and etc. And have messaging that resonance with that category buyer.
If those things are there, most everything you try will work. And if those things are not there, almost nothing will work. That's a great point. And so when people are not seeing the results they want from their marketing, they're usually quick to criticize the plays instead of look honestly at those core inputs that are so.
I think it's success of a company really is the two biggest factors. It's number one being a category that is large. So large lot of buyers who know that they need to buy this stuff. So like email marketing every single company in the world has email marketing, right?
It's a great category to be in. And two have a value proposition and offer that people want. If the offer is boring, you know, they're not going to buy it. And of course, if you have an interesting offer in a large category, there's also a lot of competition.
It's a very complex thing, you know, business, but it's value proposition communicated through messaging, the most important thing. Yeah, absolutely. Matt, you want to add anything before we switch gears to measurement? Any other mistakes you've seen?
Anything to add? I would think one thing I would also add is just not not getting traction organically before you just start to put paid behind it. I mean, organic should validate a lot of your strategic narrative and your POV. That's how a lot of companies, I mean, even LinkedIn right now get started, but there's other great examples of companies that do that on Instagram, so restaurant, tech or stuff like that, where they're, you know, and that's an even harder channel to really look at and measure.
But you're looking at getting getting traction with your organic content to validate, I think largely your POV and your messaging. And then once you have that and you're going to see that through follower growth, through like engagement and like, yeah, you can call those vanity metrics, but their proof that your content is resonating and that people are absorbing it, you know, that gives you great confidence to start to put pay behind it. So all the points that were made previously apply, having a strategic narrative and a POV, having a product that actually works, tapping into emotion, especially at that kind of brand level. And then also just having that kind of, you know, investing a little bit in the production value.
So you look interesting, you know, having having little distinct brand assets, and that can be something as simple as having your founder do a lot of your, do a lot of your organic content within your company feed or with anywhere else. And then once you get that traction, go ahead and putting paid behind it. So I concur with everything that was said before, but I think the other thing is just not, is just giving, giving your organics a chance to gain some traction before you put a paid campaign behind it, because it'll give you a lot of confidence that it's going to amplify a lot of what is already working in a smaller set. Yeah, absolutely.
Let's talk a little bit about measurement. I think we've had an evolving perspective at Refine Labs over the years. I think our focus has always been in demand, Jen, but we have built a position that you both need to sort of capture and create demand. And whenever we use the create demand phrase, really it's referring to brand awareness campaigns.
And not just, you know, paid can be one, one play, but that's just one of many brand plays that you could be deploying. We've historically leaned on, basically, it's interesting with what you said, Pep, in terms of like, if it's not attributable to performance, then it's brand, but we often would point to just a blended inbound funnel. And regardless of attribution, if we're seeing that grow over time, our marketing plays are successful and we're seeing the growth in return. And then, you know, you've heard us talk a lot about self-reported attribution as a way to have kind of some qualitative feedback directly from your customers, validating certain plays.
But we've been spending a lot of time really trying to elevate how we think about brand measurement and try to bring some new things into the mix so that we can better tell the story both to make the case for brand investments, as well as to also measure the impact and the success of brand plays that we might be deploying. I know we kind of talked, we kind of briefly mentioned a couple of these things as, you know, so far in this talk in terms of looking at share of search data, and we briefly touched on sort of like brand lift surveys. But these are two interesting things that we're beginning to use much more often as another way to measure the effectiveness of brand. And so, Matt, why don't you kick us off and share a little bit more about how you're leveraging these types of measurement strategies and how you're introducing them to customers and using them as a way to help measure overall effectiveness of any brand plays.
Yeah, so I mentioned share of search. I do think that that's probably like the first place you would start that or like a brand measurement survey. It's a benchmark kind of where you're at. You can't know where you're going to go until you know where you actually stand.
And I think that that is just kind of a key part of benchmarking, where you all stand at first. So you're looking at growth of shared share of search overall, and that's something that you will look at through like a six or a 12 month lens, something you should do once or twice a year, assuming you have a concerted effort. The brand lift, the brand measurement surveys, and that'd be really curious to kind of see how you guys approach that and how you would recommend people talk about that is the other thing. Obviously we look at blended funnel and you want to look at that increasing over time.
If you really want to get long tail with it, I mean, the other thing you would look at would be your contribution margin and how your brand investment is contributing to your overall contribution margin over time. And that's going to involve working with finance and understanding how your brand marketing budget is working right now to impact your contribution margin. And that is an all funnel thing that sales and marketing. And then looking at that over time over six and 12 months, because again going back to my earlier point, if you're doing brand marketing well, it's making it easier for you to sell.
And that is in your prospecting and that is in your inbound and that is in your partnerships. And so good brand marketing should impact all of those things at the end of the day. So you want to look at those efforts and those expenditures against how well it's impacting your contribution margin on the long end. So that's the other kind of piece of it.
If you want to try to create sort of a financial snapshot of how your brand marketing is impacting those things. And that involves educating and aligning with your leadership. Like you can't just show up to your board meeting or show up to your show up with your CEO like six months later and say, look at how the contribution margin is being impacted by brand expenditure. It's not that's not going to work.
You know, you have to do the groundwork up front to paint the picture form of like, here's where we stand. We're going to do this. It's going to impact this. Let's look at it.
Six months later, let's see if it gets better, let's look at it. Twelve months later, let's see if it gets better. So I think again, it goes back to alignment and just having, you know, having those conversations, they will probably be pretty uncomfortable at first. But you have to have conviction about it and just understand the things you're impacting.
It's not going to be really neatly attributable like performance marketing. So you have to align on those fuzzier metrics that that brand marketing is the brand measurement is supposed to impact for you. Align on that and benchmark and rinse and repeat. I love that.
Pat, I want to hear your take and really would love for you to kind of break down what you guys are doing in terms of experimenting with brand surveys and kind of what you're seeing with your customers there. Because that's something that's really interesting to us and something that we're wanting to sort of bring into our core service delivery with our customers as well and do those on a regular cadence. So share more. Share more on that.
So if data paints a compelling picture that brands in a consideration set get bought and really somebody outside the initial consideration set gets bought. So that means the goal, the lag, lagging indicator of your success of a brand marketing efforts is getting into the consideration set. And so setting that as a goal is kind of like setting revenue goals. Like you don't really control what your revenue is going to be next year.
But you can call a control leading indicators that are much easier to control. So leading indicators lead to the lagging indicator. So if lagging indicator is getting into the shortlist, what are the leading indicators? And this is prerequisite awareness.
Are they, do they know you exist? Right? Aided on Aided Awareness. And Aided Awareness is extremely difficult if not impossible for smaller brands.
You got to be north of a hundred million for sure. Maybe north of a 500 million to have Aided, sorry, unaided awareness to just come be top of mind for people. But Aided recall is much easier. So we can track that.
And then second is not enough to be known that you exist. You also have to be considered. So we just did at winter, we did a brand tracking study in the category of marketing automation tools for meat market B2B SaaS. So for instance, in that category, MailChimp has like a hundred percent awareness.
Everybody knows that MailChimp exists. Do you need market B2B companies considered buying MailChimp? Absolutely not. No, not zero companies considered buying MailChimp.
Another example was Pardot. Still exists very high brand awareness. I want to say some 80% of marketing leaders in meat market SaaS, no Pardot. How many would consider it for their next marketing automation purchase?
It was some 20%. And now it's like, okay, well MailChimp doesn't cater to meat market SaaS. So that makes sense. Pardot, what's the problem there?
It's a perception problem. With all who hasn't heard horror stories of how bad it is, right? So that is that they have a massive PR problem. So you want to track are you increasingly getting into more consideration sets?
And again, if you're a small company, it's harder because, you know, if you're in two percent of the consideration sets, it's very hard to track if you made it from two to four because margin of error is always within the margin of error. So versus like you have 40% now and become 60% very easy to detect and measure. So overall, I think, so what to do, you need to measure consistent progress towards the goal of getting into that final consideration set. And so regularly, so for most companies that it's every six months, you track 80 down 80 awareness, having made progress, you track brand preference.
Are we in a consideration set? And how this, you know, sorry, what that looks like is that the company running the survey, what's their brand and every competitor of theirs in that segment. And maybe it's a matrix type of question. If you were in a market today for a tool like this, you know, CRM, marketing automation, whatever, from rate each of these brands from would not consider, would definitely not consider, would somewhat consider blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, to would definitely consider.
And you get a landscape of who's in the consideration set. And then you want to track your own progress every six months within that. And then final thing. So those are three quant metrics, 80 on 80 awareness to preference.
So three quant metrics and a qualimetric is perception. So what do they think of me? Because brand is not what we say we are. It's what they say we are part of, we go to part.com.
I'm sure it is a very nice thing about themselves. Right. What do the people say? That's what matters, right?
And you want to know, I saw another brand tracking study was a cloud communications category. And a legacy player got just, and when I say legacy player, a company has been around for 20 years in tech, got eviscerated in a brand perception, because the perception in the market is legacy, outdated, old, you know, all this stuff. So if you were to see him off that company, now you know, you like, you need to focus on that, not the next growth play to drive pipeline, right? You have a perception problem.
So you want to, and that's all qualitative perception is qualitative. It's an open-ended question. What do you think of refile apps, you know, and then they tell you, all right? And you might not like it.
You got to deal with it. Yeah. Or we might love it. You don't know.
You might love it. You never know. And that's why you got to ask the questions, because otherwise, I mean, everybody likes their own baby, right? Like, yeah.
Pat, when you see brands that have a perception problem, yet they kind of stay being the market leader, I mean, what does that tell you that they're just ripe to be disrupted or just that is going to be a kind of a lag there for them to start to lose market share when that happens? Like, what alarm bells go off in your head when you see something like that? Yeah. I mean, I think for a fix, actually, we fix the problems, you know, like, look into yourself in the mirror.
Do we have these problems? Are we like old and outdated and slow and do we suck? And it's like, maybe yes. And it's then we got to change.
And then once you have changed, you got to start running brand campaigns with a new communications job where you address the complaint. And I think it was a great B2C example where which pizza company was it that everybody knew that sucked and they said, hey, our pizza sucked. It was dominoes. Yeah.
So basically you do a dominoes campaign. Like we use the suck. Sorry. We fixed it, you know, I would do that.
Normally people that have a preference problem that I see it's normally comes down to the product is just like a scene outdated or the customer service is really bad. And so the thing or the implementation is really bad. That's probably usually the third thing, right? Because for a reason and that's normally one of the first things I end up getting cost on.
So, you know, the first thing is just figuring out what the perception problem is to your point, fixing that and then doing brand marketing around, hey, we fixed this problem to your point exactly about the dominoes example. So, normally when I see those things, usually one of those three things and you can kind of tell early because you'll see people talk about it only then about how horrible this experience is with XYZ or not and like, or even if you want to look at cap territory to reviews, like those will give you a good leading clue as well. Still want to benchmark it, but you know, the clues are out there for you if you want to look. Yeah, we covered a lot.
I know we were running towards the end of the show. I wanted to kind of recap, I think what I was hearing from you guys in terms of measurement because there was a lot of good stuff in here and David teed up a great question to just kind of summarize some of these key takeaways for you guys. So, in terms of what's a measure when we think about leading indicators, looking at things like your branded search volume over time, your share of search over time, Matt mentioned a great tool that we've been experimenting with called My Telescope, really affordable, easy tool to use. Pep, you might be introducing similar tooling and winter to be able to get access to this data really quickly.
It's available in Google for all of us as well. Brand surveys is a really key input and the information that we get and Pep, you mentioned, unaided recall, aided recall, preference and consideration as key components of brand surveys. And then any like any message test results or qualitative input from any buyer, buyer research or customer research that's being done to add more color to kind of the current state and the current baseline. Now, as you're deploying your brand plays and you're hoping to see movement when you think about the lagging indicators of success, obviously want to see increase in market penetration and your target market, you should be getting more customers over time.
You should be seeing an improvement in a rise in your share of search. You should be seeing improvement across your brand surveys. Hopefully you're deploying those every six months or so. And then you should be seeing an improvement to your total funnel, right?
Inbound going up, qualified deals going up, revenue going up, self-reported attribution mentions or just again, another qualitative sort of input that can just help provide and pay that full holistic picture. So, I would say that kind of kind of summarizes, I think all of the different points that you guys just made over the last 15, 20 minutes love it. Awesome. And I think really valuable for people to take away and think about how they can integrate it into their overall marketing strategy.
Since we only have a few minutes left, definitely call out to questions. So anyone on the line wants to come on and ask a question, drop it in the chat or come on and we'll let you speak. But what I'd love to do is have our awesome panelists, Matt and Pep, think about out of everything that we talked about today, what are one or two of the most important takeaways that you want people listening to this to take away from this conversation? To me, the big overarching takeaway is no company is going to break through without having a memorable brand.
You just can't knock through the 100 million barrier unless you have a brand that's well known, that is preferred and that has aided and to some extent, unaided memory. So even though the measurements are fuzzy sometimes, even though it takes a ton of alignment, even though you sometimes are going to be having to put your neck on the line a little bit for some of these programs in order to see them through, you're not going to break through as a marketing leader unless you can hone your brand and break it through. You're going to run performance marketing and grow in the maybe low double digits every year, otherwise. Brand is the accelerant that breaks your company through the noise and you have to figure out a way to effectively invest in, measure and align on it.
That to me is the big takeaway. Otherwise, you're running performance marketing for the rest of your life until that Peter's out and you end up getting laid off. Well said, Matt, what do you got? I would just say two things and let's just remember that the job is to be remembered.
So you're building memory structured in a consumer's mind. So that's one and to do that, you need to create an emotion in the recipient of the message. So try to be non boring. Yeah, 100%.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you guys all for coming. It seems like no immediate questions and we're running up against the clock.
Thank you, Matt and Pep. This was a great conversation. We'll post it to Stack and Grow within YouTube for anyone that wants to check out the recap. And yeah, maybe we should do this again sometime.
We should run a little demand survey on refine labs, read the results and then run it again in six months, see what happens. You can idea. Thanks, Dr. Joinx, man.
I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining everyone. Take care. See you next time.