How to calculate ROI for your brand building campaign

When it comes to brand building, the facts speak for themselves:

• Companies with poor branding pay 10 percent more in salaries.
• Consistent brand promotion results in a 23 percent increase in revenue.
• Consumers make a purchasing decision based on brand 77 percent of the time.

With facts like these in your pocket, it’s easy to make the case for working on building your brand and improving your brand character. But hold your horses – how can you build a brand if you don’t know what to measure?

The great business innovator Peter Drucker perhaps said it best: ‘What gets measured gets managed.’

So, to make your brand building campaign the roaring success it deserves to be, you need to calculate the ROI. There are many ways to go about this. Here are some of the best.

Method #1 measuring website traffic

Your website is the digital shop window for your business. Get it right, and you’ll attract more visitors, and over time, win more sales.

Because of its prominence, it’s a good idea to use your website as a measuring stick for your brand building campaign. To calculate the ROI using website traffic, simply measure the website views before and after your campaign.

Method #2 social media growth

Everyone and their dog lives on social media these days, so it’s logical to track your social media platforms to see how they’ve been affected by your brand building efforts.

To calculate this precisely, you can track:

• Engagement with your content (likes, comments and shares).
• Number of followers and subscribers.
• Resulting sales that come in from social media (you can track this with a tool like HubSpot).

Method #3 tracking revenue growth

Few things excite a business director like growing revenue. Because of this, it makes sense to track revenue when calculating the ROI of your brand building campaign.

To find out the overall return of your campaign, track the revenue before and after, and compare it to the money spent on the campaign. For example, if revenue grew by 10,000 pounds, and you spent 1,000 pounds on the campaign, there is a strong ROI.

Do what works best for you and your business

We’ve covered some of the best ways to calculate ROI for your brand building campaign. Looking at your website traffic, tracking social media, and measuring revenue growth – these all work, but what’s important is to find what works best for you and your business.

If you’re a small business owner, tracking revenue might be the most motivating approach. Whereas, if you’re a marketing executive at a large business, you might not have access to the information you need to calculate this. In which case, tracking the number of social media followers might work best for you.

Building a brand is just one piece of the puzzle

Tracking ROI effectively, with one of the strategies we’ve covered, will help you better allocate resources and improve how you go about building your brand.

However, when it comes to growing your business, building a brand is just one piece of the puzzle. Indeed, there are many moving parts to a mature marketing strategy that grows your bottom line.

To find out how mature your marketing really is (it often surprises people), download our free marketing maturity matrix. It’ll tell you exactly where you’re at, and what the next steps are.