Research Shows Brand Impact to Revenue Growth and Marketing ROI

Highlights

  • Brand research shows that Business to Business (B2B) marketers with active brand management programs delivered 18 percent more leads to the salesforce, 21 percent higher contribution to the sales pipeline, and 21 percent higher marketing ROI than marketers without these programs.
  • The research also found that Business to Consumer (B2C) marketers with active brand management programs achieved 4 percent higher year over year revenue growth and 21 percent higher marketing ROI than marketers without these programs.
  • The Best-in-Class marketers (i.e., the top 15 percent) were 2.2X more likely to invest in brand management programs than their lower performing peers.
Johnny Grow Revenue Growth Consulting

Brand Research Shows Impact to Company Revenue and Marketing ROI

Your brand is the customers perception of your company or its products. While few executives dispute the power of company brands, measuring perception and quantifying the value can be tricky.

So, we designed the survey for the Marketing Transformation Report to compare marketing, sales and financial results among those companies that invest in brand management with those that do not. The goal was to determine if companies investing in brand management outperform those that do not.

Brand Research Approach

To determine if brand investments correlated with company revenue growth and financial results, we started by filtering a subset of survey participants. We wanted to initially exclude participants that did not engage in active brand management. So, we extracted participants that allocated at least 10 percent of their marketing budget to brand management programs.

We then divided the subset into B2B and B2C participants.

Brand Management Programs

For the B2B participants we measured the volume of marketing acquired leads, the percentage of the sales pipeline sourced by marketing, and Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). We then did the same measurements with the participants that did not invest in brand management.

For B2C participants, we took a similar approach but compared year over year revenue growth and ROMI among those with and without active brand management programs.

Brand Research Findings

Here's what we found.

For B2B industries, the percentage of total leads sourced by marketing groups that performed active band management were 1.86 times higher than marketers without these programs.

The percentage of the sales pipeline sourced by marketing was 2.4X higher for brand marketers and ROMI was 1.9X higher.

Brand Impact to Leads, Pipeline and ROI

B2B industry marketers with active brand building programs achieved 1.9X higher marketing ROI than marketers without these programs.

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For B2C industries, the marketing groups with active brand management achieved 4 percent higher year over year revenue growth and 21 percent higher ROMI than marketers without these programs. That's nearly double the performance among the two groups for each of these measures.

B2C Brand Impact to Revenue Growth

Does this mean branding is the sole driver behind these impressive revenue achievements? Probably not. But the impact on these collective measures is consistent and much more than small single digit differences. The results show linear performance differences which suggest branding is an instrumental component in company financial performance.

Companies wishing to dive further into this business development opportunity should consider adopting a brand measurement system and applying brand impact reporting for precision program measurement.

A Missed Opportunity by Most

One of the reasons the Marketing Transformation research report acquires a large data set is that there are some programs that are less frequently adopted by participants and that reduces our sample size for those topics. Brand management is one of those topics.

Only 39 percent of survey respondents engaged in active brand management. When we correlated these participants with overall marketing performance archetypes, we found that 86 percent of Best-in-Class performers (i.e., the top 15 percent) had active brand management programs.

Brand Management Programs by Archetype

That adoption rate fell to 55 percent for Medians and 26 percent for laggards. Clearly, no matter how you segment the research, brand management programs are shown to correlate with company revenue growth and be actively used by the most successful marketers.

If you are looking for practices used by the Best-in-Class performers, consider the branding best practices.