#03: B2B Brand Strategy + Measurement

This episode is brought to you by Zttle. We're halfway through 2025 and one thing's clear. We've been feeling this firsthand for sure. Events continue to be one of the highest performing marketing channels. Niche meetups, conferences, curated dinners, networking, breakfasts, everyone's all in. Everyone's leaning into in person. Events have become a core part of our playbook here at Exit 5. So far we've hosted two virtual sessions. We do them twice a month. We do one large virtual event, sometimes two a year. One in person meetup. And we're deep in the trenches right now planning drive our annual conference coming back to Vermont in September. We use Zuttle to help us run a smarter event strategy. They help us with driving, registrations, managing invites, automating, communications, reminders, analytics, tracking. They do it all. They have a salesforce integration that also makes it easy and simple to report on pipeline and revenue from events without having to pull an op. So you'd know exactly how your events performed. On top of that, the differentiator with ZTTL is how their team is insanely good at supporting us. They always go above and beyond for us and that's how we've been able to keep the momentum going with 12 events this year already and just a small little team here at exit 5. So if events are a part of your marketing strategy like they are ours, you should check out Zuttle to see how Companies like Zillow, CrowdStrike and Iterable are using the top event platform for business events in 2025. Head over to zuttle.com exit5. That's z-u- dash dash l.com exit5 to learn more.

Hey, what's up? This is Dave Gerhart and you're listening to DGMG Radio. Alright, what's up DGMG Radio? Today, the thing that I'm going to talk about is, or talk my way through on this, on this podcast is brand, how to measure brand. I think this is a question that comes up a lot and I want to talk about that and provide something useful because I think that a lot of people overthink it or overthink what it needs to be and why. And this is also very relative to the stage of your company. So like Procter and Gamble, you know, for one of their product lines, they're going to measure brand awareness and brand much differently than I would say most people listening to this podcast. I would say that most people listening are working at some type of startup, probably, you know, less than 50 million. I would say most people, probably less than 10 million in revenue that are, that are listening to this, just given the, the background that I've come from. Okay, anyway, first let's talk about what I mean when I talk about brand in this context. So there's branding, right? And branding is colors, logo, font, you know, visual identity. That's not what I'm talking about. You can work with a great creative agency, they can come up with that. There's a bunch of different ways to do it, which is think about brand archetypes and you can, you can look that up. I think it's Joseph Campbell that came up with that. There's different archetypes for like, you know, what, what type of brand are you? There's a bunch of questions you can ask. You can go through an exercise. Are you like a challenger brand, a hero brand? I don't know them off the top of my head, but I think there's like 12 archetypes. What I'm talking about is your brand as in your reputation. Like, oh, I, I walked in, you know, like, what's something, something that's on brand for, for one of your friends? Like, oh, she left without saying goodbye to anybody. Oh yeah, Brand for her, right? That's how I think about brand. And so brand to me, when I talk about is your reputation. So the things that I've done is like, like when I talk about working on brand at Drift and working on brand at Privy, that was really increasing the awareness and attention that the company gets. And if you can increase the awareness and attention that the company gets, more people are going to hear about the business, more people are going to go to the website, listen to the podcast, sign up for the email list, hopefully tell their friends and buy the product. Right Now I just think that you don't have to have it perfectly measured at any of those stages. Actually, before I get into the measurement, let's go back to the brand piece of it. Okay, so brand is increasing your awareness and attention by building a reputation, right? More people are gonna know your name. And I think the way that you do that today is mainly through content, right? Like that's how people, that's how we consume things in our lives as people. Like, we're driven by content, right? We're reading, we're read, reading reviews, we're watching YouTube videos, we're on social media, we're getting emails, we're on people's email lists, we're flipping through websites, we're watching things from quote, unquote, influencers, whatever that's no different than in the B2B marketing space. And so I think of brand as using those channels to increase your awareness and reputation. And a couple like that's why I love podcasting because it's like having a radio show for your own business, right? Podcasting, YouTube channel, blog posts, articles, all that stuff. And this can even be like we're doing an event and the event, the goal of the event might not be specific like sales roi. It might be increase the awareness and reputation. So I think a lot of people believe in the why for doing those things right. But here's where this, here's where this gets messed up. I think as a marketing leader or marketing organization you have to be able to articulate what is your strategy to help the company hit the business goals. And so that like, I think when you get into planning, sometimes it just comes down to like, hey, we're this year we need to focus on, we need to deliver $2 million in new pipeline. And here's our, here's our plan to do it. And the plan is very just like all direct response campaign driven. But like so often like how about like how would it affect your pipeline if more people heard about you, more people knew about you and more people got to know like and trust you and that's how they end, ended up getting to your site and finding out about your business. And so whenever I've done like annual planning for marketing, I don't just have a, a strategy that's like the direct response revenue strategy. Because there is some element of this. Like if you sign up to deliver $2 million in pipeline, you need to be able to show like a bottoms up model of how you're going to get to that number. And so like hey, these are the events and here's how much pipeline we're going to generate here and from these channels. But like I've always had some other, another bullet on there that's like become, that's like related to the overall company company strategy and mission. And so like at drift it was like you know, become the leader in conversational marketing. And so that, that's not, that has to be worked into the marketing strategy. You can't, you can't as a business say we want to be the leaders in conversational marketing. And then in the marketing plan only have very tactical like sponsorships and webinars and like you have to do things that are going to help increase the perception of you as the leader in conversational marketing. And so as the marketing leader, whoever, whoever's Bringing this strategy, you have to then articulate, okay, well how are we going to go do that? Well, there's actually four things that we want to do this year that fall under this umbrella. Like this is, I guess this would be like the okr. Like the objective would be to become the leader in conversational marketing. Right. How we think we're going to do that is we're going to launch a podcast and we're going to release three episodes a month for the year. We're going to write a book. That book is going to come out in July and it's going to be this level of content and it's going to feature this many people. We're going to sponsor this key event. That's number three. And number four is we're going to host a private conference for our, for our top 50 VIP customers, blah, blah, blah. Those are like, those to me are like four brand bets that you're putting into the marketing plan. And you're also going to do the demand generation stuff on top of that. But you're going to go focus on like this gives you a guide for like, hey, how are we going to go, how are we going to go like work to towards this goal of becoming a leader in conversational marketing. We're gonna do these four, we're gonna like do these four pillars. And so then in addition to the day to day, like always on campaigns that the business needs to be running, you now have some structure for how you're gonna go and create a brand. Then it comes to the measurement. Well, you can measure each of those channels individually. And so now that you've articulated this in your strategy, this is why this is important. When you can articulate your strategy. Like, if I'm the marketing leader, I'm like, hey, exec team, we have a company goal of becoming the leader in conversation marketing. We're going to go do that. Okay. And then you go do that and you come back 12 months later, they're going to be like, well, how did we do? Show me the measurements, show me the spreadsheets. That's a way different conversation. That's when you get into like the craziness of measurement. That's a way different conversation. When I, than when I go first and I present, hey, our company goal is to become leader in conversational marketing. One of the, you know, outside of the revenue goal, the company goals to become leader in conversational marketing. We're going to lead that effort here in marketing. And here's four ways that we're going to go do that. We're going to write a book, we're going to do this event, we're going to sponsor this thing, we're going to do this other thing right. And how we going to measure that? Click. We want to get 100,000 downloads of our podcast, right? We want to generate, we want to have 100 conversations at this, at this trade show, whatever that we're sponsoring. We want to make our book a number one bestseller in the Amazon category for marketing books. And we want to, I don't know, do one other thing. We want to put up 20 billboards on the west coast in September around our big conference that we're doing. Right? Those don't all have to have this hardcore ROI sales measurement on it. You're talking to the rest of the executive team and the company about the strategy, but how you're going to increase the company's perception. Here are the four levers you're going to pull. Then throughout the year, like people, the goals are those milestones are when you're going to go and do those things right? And you can measure each one of those channels. But like, I think when you have that conversation, when you're presenting, like, here's how we're going to, here's how we're going to grow the brand and you're able to articulate your thoughts about the company's perception and awareness. Like, and then you can step up and do that. That's great. That changes the conversation completely. You're not focusing on like the direct attribution on all these things. But here's the payoff on this podcast. I would say that for most companies, probably up to 10, 20, even 50 million in revenue, like, how do you measure brand? It can be this simple. Are more people coming to your website than were before, period, like via organic channels? And I saw this firsthand at Drift, firsthand at Privy, which is like, we're doing a bunch of things, yes, that are driving that traffic, but overall it's 30% up, like 30% more organic traffic this year. And I would. Even if you spent, even if a big portion of that was focusing on organic search, I would make that same argument that organic search is like the ultimate measure of brand if someone is googling you directly or a related thing to your product. And so I think for so many companies, like just looking at quarter by quarter and year by year growth in organic and direct, that'd be the other bracket. Organic and direct traffic is a good enough proxy to say, are these efforts we're doing to increase word of mouth, to get more awareness in the market, to get more people to pay attention to us, are they working? Well, if all of a sudden a year later direct and organic traffic are up 30% and you didn't just go and spend a million dollars on SEO, right? And you know that you, you know that that wasn't the driver then damn. I think you're, I think you're thinking about whatever you're doing in the brand world to increase your awareness and perception is working. So don't overthink it. Don't fall into the trap. You can manage that conversation with the CEO and the CFO by presenting your strategy on the brand first, like I laid out. And then the measurement conversation is, becomes much simpler. Now you can, you can definitely do more, more complicated ways of measuring. You talk to somebody like Bill Macytis who was at Slack and Zendesk and Salesforce, like as you scale and you're pending your appetite, you can do like brand awareness studies within your customer segment, aided versus unaided, like for brand recall. And you can just pay like 5, 10 grand to survey Monkey and they can do that for you. And that can be another interesting benchmark. You could also go and you could also like, I guess if I was doing this again, what I would probably.

Do is if I had the budget.

Because at the same time it's like everybody wants to measure this, but then when you say, hey, let me get, let me get 30 grand at, you know, when we're only doing 3 million in ARR. Let me get 30 grand to spend on a brand, brand awareness survey. Get out of here. You don't, you don't need that. But if you have the budget, I think one way you could do it is benchmark it. Like, hey, we're about to go do all this brand stuff. Benchmark the brand awareness with a surveymonkey report like before and then come back since six months later and do it after. But I'd bet you that at the same time you would also see the correlation with organic and direct traffic. Okay, I just wanted to give some framework. I hope this is helpful. It's also a rant. It could be not coherent when you listen to it later. But if there's one or two good nuggets from this, I hope that that's meaningful. And the one thing that I would say is just focus on direct, like two things, two takeaways. Number one is be able to articulate your strategy for growing the brand. Don't just say we're going to Grow the brand. One, you need a goal. And a goal would be like become the leader in conversational marketing. And then you need a strategy. And the strategy is here are three or four objectives, things that we're going to do along the way, and those can be activities. They don't have to be like hardcore ROI benchmarks. They can be, hey, these are the four pillars that we want to make investments in this year to help achieve this goal. And then the last piece would be, simplest way to measure is increase in organic and direct traffic. That's what you should be looking at, particularly direct traffic. Right? If more people are just going to drift.com, privy.com in their browser, in their browser directly. Well, guess you know, how do you think they heard about you or they needed to hear about you order to do that? It's not, it's not through some, some search. Okay, this dog is going nuts. I'm out of here. Oh, if you like this podcast, send me a message. D.

Today's episode is brought to you by Ahrefs. You probably know Ahrefs as an SEO tool, right? I've been using Ahrefs personally for over a decade to see how we rank and see what's driving traffic to our site. Content marketing has always been a big part of the playbook. I use their product at Drift, at Privy, and now we're using it at exit 5. But, but over that time, Ahrefs has evolved a lot and they're not actually just an SEO tool anymore. They're a full on marketing platform built for marketers like you and me who want to grow traffic, understand our audiences and make smarter business decisions. In the AI search world. Their marketing intelligence lets you see what's driving traffic to your site, to your competitors, understand top performing content, paid keywords, backlinks, and you can even understand how much or your organic traffic would be worth. Put a actual dollar amount to all that organic traff that you're driving. They've also got tools for AI powered content and keyword research. 24. 7 Site monitoring, real time analytics, backlink tracking, brand mentions, you name it, you can do it all in one place. With Ahrefs, it's really a marketer's dream. If you're a marketing nerd like myself, one of the coolest features in my opinion is their new brand radar tool which allows you to explore what people and AI says about your brand, topic or niche. You can do this to do amazing research to help understand what's actually happening in AI search today and just what the conversations are online about your brand. Plus you can try their free analytics tool to show you how many visitors you're getting from AI search like ChatGPT or Perplexity. And look, as a firsthand user of this, so much easier to use than something like Google Analytics. I love it. We use it on our site. I've used it for exit 5 and we just found out that over the past 30 days we've got 105 visitors to exit 5 from AI search, 95% of that was from ChatGPT, 5% of that was from Perplexity. But it's really cool to understand and this is the way that search is going and shifting. So Ahrefs not just an SEO tool anymore. It's a legit marketing platform for anyone serious about growth in today's AI driven search world. If you do any type of content marketing at all, you gotta go check them out. Go visit ahrefs.com that's a h r e f s.com today. Go check them out. Today's episode is also brought to you by Paramark. It's July 2nd half of the year is here and hey, before you know it, 2026 planning and everything's going to be here. But let's be real, most teams are still guessing when it comes to what's actually working in marketing today, which channels to double down on, which campaigns are worth running again or not, and what's just noise, what's actually contributing to pipeline and what's not. It's Messy. This is B2B marketing and that's exactly where Paramark comes in. Paramark is a marketing attribution platform that shows you what's working and what's not so you know exactly where to invest your next doll. Use marketing mix modeling and incrementality testing to give you a full picture of performance across every channel, tactic and region. And it's built by a marketer, made for marketers and right now they're hosting a special office hours on helping you with your second half of the year. Planning, forecasting and putting your best foot forward for the rest of this year and into 2026. It's not a sales pitch from them, but this is your chance to get real help from their experts that are at the intersection of marketing and planning. Bring your data, bring your questions, your roadmap and the Paramark team is going to help you figure out what's driving results, where to cut and where to invest moving forward. So stop guessing and you can plan smarter. Right now with the team at Paramark, but you got to grab an office hour spot. I highly recommend doing this. Pranav is awesome. The rest of their team is great. They totally get this space. You should go check them out. Go to paramark.com officehours that's paramark.com office hours.