Whether you’re a B2C or B2B brand, building brand awareness is essential to make you stand out from the competition and draw in prospects that will go on to become loyal customers.

With effective branding, you can build trust with your customers and generate positive associations with your business before they’ve even started doing their research into your products and services.

In our State of B2B branding report, we surveyed B2B marketers from a wide range of industries and company types to discover just how they’re measuring the success of their brand-building activities, and what their budget allocation is like. You can read the full report, or read on to discover just a snapshot of our findings.

• ​​Measuring the outcome of brand-building
• Metrics for measuring brand performance
• Budget percentage for brand building
• Sufficiency of budget allocation
• State of B2B branding report

Measuring the outcome of brand-building

First, we asked our respondents if they actually have any process in place for measuring the outcome of their brand-building.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of respondents (80.0%) reported that they measure the success of their brand-building activities. Of the minority who don’t, we found that 66.7% of them rated their brand compared to their competitors as a 5 or less, compared to just 8.8% of those who do measure their brand-building activities.

Metrics for measuring brand performance

We wanted to know how exactly our respondents are measuring their brand-building performance. We presented them with a list of options for common ways that marketers can measure their brand performance.

Here are the results.

The biggest share of the results for the metrics our respondents use to measure their success is Sales performance (45.8%), and the rest shared between Branded search volume (25.0%), Share of voice (12.5%), Web traffic (8.3%), Social followers (4.2%), and Other - which included Share of search - (4.2%).

“At Populate, we have regular marketing and sales meetings to make sure that what we're doing is working. We frequently check key metrics to make sure they're improving. Whether that's hits on the site or leads coming through.

Budget percentage for brand building

Branding doesn’t work without the budget to make it happen. We asked our report respondents how much of their current marketing budget is allocated specifically to brand-building activities.

The results show a wide breadth of responses, with almost all options selected by some respondents aside from Up to 100%, demonstrating that none of the respondents’ marketing departments are currently dedicating all of their marketing budgets to branding.

The option with the highest percentage of respondents was Up to 30% (28.8%), followed by Up to 20%, Up to 40%, and Up to 80% (14.3% respectively). So there doesn’t appear to be a general consensus among the respondents as to what is the appropriate amount of budget to be spending on branding.

Sufficiency of budget allocation

We asked whether our respondents felt they were receiving enough of the marketing budget to put toward their branding efforts.

It was an even split on whether respondents felt that their budget allocation for branding was sufficient for their needs.

Unsurprisingly, most people who believe their budget is sufficient had higher allocations, and those who don’t believe it’s sufficient had lower budget allocations.

When we queried why those who did not believe their budget allocations were sufficient weren’t able to allocate more, we received a number of responses, including:

• Growing business
• Leadership priorities
• Spending cap
• Branding isn’t considered important
• Lack of KPIs
• Time and resources
• Priorities are elsewhere

State of B2B branding report

Want to discover more of our findings, including how marketers are building their brand awareness and what metrics they’re using to measure that awareness? Download the full report today!