B2B Marketers Stop Measuring Brand Campaigns Only Through Impressions

The Future of B2B Marketing Measurement study shows a growing trend of separating brand awareness metrics from classic lead generation indicators. Lucas Riedberger from Dassault Systèmes puts it directly:

“The value of a brand is important to any CFO. I can explain to them that the money in campaigns has direct value in brand capitalisation. The challenge is putting concrete numbers behind that.”

Different Metrics for Different Goals

Performance marketing manager Valerie Kile from Alma describes their company’s practical approach. “You can’t make a case for a brand in terms of ROAS or CPA. The impact is seen in different ways. We separated it so we optimise the lead budget for ROAS, while we correlate brand spend with efficiency across the entire customer journey.”

This approach with two categories of metrics is also used by Alex Venus from Personio. The first bucket measures brand engagement, and the second revenue-based demand generation metrics.

“I don’t assume that video on paid social is working just on the evidence of CTR. I look at the increase in pipeline and ask if there’s a correlation between that and the engagement we’re generating,” Venus explains.

A Framework That Doesn’t Exist Yet

Guillermo Novillo from Microsoft LATAM sees the missing standardised framework as the main reason why brand marketing value is questioned. “I would love to see more of a framework emerging for how you connect branding to business outcomes. I think that’s something that will start to happen.”

Some companies are taking an account-based approach. One marketing leader describes a practical example: “If we put up a billboard outside someone’s offices and that company buys our solution six months later, then it’s a bit easier to match things up. We can aim to generate account-level awareness metrics, and those are then easier to tie back to when deals happen.”

Practical Measurement Tools

The study recommends several concrete steps. Brand Lift Studies use native surveys on LinkedIn or off-platform surveys via Nielsen to measure the impact of ads on brand metrics. Another approach is tracking the correlation between brand investments, movements in the pipeline and closed-won deals – always taking into account the length of the buying cycle.

Riedberger from Dassault Systèmes is testing this in practice:

“We’re working with LinkedIn to integrate brand lift studies into our measurement. That will give us more of a KPI to gauge the efficiency of brand campaigns. Impressions or actions on the website don’t capture the full picture of what’s going on in people’s minds.”

The key is getting buy-in from different stakeholders on an internal framework that captures the brand’s value to different areas of the business. It’s not just about marketing – it’s about how the entire organisation perceives and measures the value of its brand.