Most founders obsess over closing deals and converting new customers. But, they often overlook the invisible forces that drive steady, long-term growth. A strong brand pays massive dividends and will continue producing sales without paid marketing. But, unlike paid marketing, brand-driven traffic can’t be easily bought or gamed. It must be earned through trust, recognition, and a compelling narrative that sticks.
Many founders dismiss brand-building efforts as too abstract, slow, or hard to measure. The reality is that brand strength can be tracked, and it’s one of the strongest predictors of future success.
How it usually goes
Lemlist’s CEO, Guillaume Moubeche, did a fantastic job building up Lemlist’s brand strength through a strong organic strategy. Guillaume shared Lemlist’s journey very openly on LinkedIn, almost like a public diary for the startup’s growth. He posted frequent updates about milestones (“$1M ARR reached!”, “We hired our 10th employee”) and even detailed why he turned down a $30M VC investment offer. This level of honesty helped build a devoted following of fellow founders and potential customers who appreciated learning from Lemlist’s successes and struggles.
Beyond LinkedIn, Lemlist cultivated a Facebook group (“Lemlist Family”) where users shared tips, and Guillaume would interact casually, further humanizing the brand. In just 3 years, the company grew from $0 to over 10,000 customers and $5 million ARR without external funding or paid advertising. It is now over $25 million ARR.
In this article, I’ll break down the key metrics that reveal your brand's true impact and show you how to build a brand scorecard that makes your efforts measurable.
Key Brand Building Metrics
Many founders take Brand traffic (i.e. Google searches that include one’s brand name) for granted. Because these visits are often difficult to attribute properly, they get overlooked versus cold traffic conversions. But these warm searches don’t pop out of thin air: they are a solid measure of your brand-building efforts and the current strength of your brand.
A study by adam&eve DDB found that the share of the search was a statistically significant leading indicator of market share growth for 10 out of 12 mobile brands and 22 out of 23 car brands. It also found that a change in the Share of Search was a predictive indicator of a corresponding shift in sales over the next 6 - 12 months.
There’s a strong correlation with share of searches and share of market
Direct traffic (i.e. website visits where the referring source is either absent or not explicitly tracked) are equally opaque and a reliable measure of your brand-building efforts. This usually occurs when a user enters the URL directly into the browser, indicating previous familiarity with your brand and thus highlighting the power of your brand-building efforts. If the overall % of your total traffic coming from Brand and Direct searches is going up over time, that is a sign that your brand strength is continuing to grow.
Self-reported attribution (i.e. asking buyers how they discovered you) is another valuable data point in assessing your brand-building efforts. A common way to do this is to have a “How did you hear about us?” question on your web forms or before users complete a purchase. The company Medium Giant added a field for self-reported attribution to their forms, and found that 43% of their leads were referrals from a client or trade association, something their analytics tool totally missed.
Medium Giant’s self-reported attribution
Self-reported attribution has some issues (e.g. many users may misremember how they first discovered you), so it should be taken with a grain of salt. But the results should still be directionally correct. If you see the percentage of answers attributed to organic channels continue to rise over time, that’s a sign that your brand-building efforts are moving in the right direction.
Creating Your Brand Scorecard
Armed with the information shared thus far, the next step is to build your brand scorecard. While each business is unique and will have slightly different metrics that they consider important, the best starting template I have found comes from this article by Rand Fishkin. Below are some of the most important metrics to consider:
Key metrics to consider
How Rocksalt Can Help
Even with a robust brand scorecard, many CEOs and CFOs are still skeptical about the impact of brand marketing on the bottom line. Rocksalt can help here by providing a direct way to tie brand-building efforts to revenue. There are a few steps to make this a reality:
First, use Rocksalt to identify all LinkedIn users who follow your company page, have engaged with your social content, or have attended one of your past webinars. Second, cross-reference this list against the contacts in your CRM and tag any contacts who have engaged with you on social channels with a label (e.g., organic social). Finally, the contacts will be analyzed based on the new data. Please note: Rocksalt will directly integrate with your CRM in the future, automating this entire process.
The most recent engagement from my target audience
A good analysis to start with is to see how many purchasers had some contact with your brand on organic social media. From there, you can assign some weight to estimate the impact of organic social on the conversion (e.g. organic social gets 33% for all purchases) and then assess the revenue impact of your social efforts.
Another great analysis is comparing key metrics such as average order value, lifetime value, and word of mouth for your organic social contacts vs. non-organic social contacts. This can tell you whether your brand-building efforts have successfully created stickier and more loyal customers as opposed to your more transactional, performance-marketing initiatives.
Incrementality Testing for B2B
Cross-referencing your social data and CRM data is a great way to estimate the impact of organic brand building. But, if you want to take things one step further, you can run an incrementality test (also known as a lift analysis). The true measure of your brand strength is reflected by how many sales you can drive purely through brand awareness and word of mouth. In other words, Brand Strength = Organic Sales and Organic Sales = Total Sales - Paid Sales.
If you can afford it, try turning off paid ads for a month, or at least a single ads channel, to assess the change in sales. A geographic test might be a better solution if that is too much of a leap. For example, you have three markets: A, B, and C. Market A, you run $10,000 in paid ads; market B, you run $10,000 in paid ads; and market C, you run any paid ads. Looking at year-over-year sales data by market, you should start to be able to arrive at some reasonably firm conclusions about how that specific experiment affected the sales in each market.
Incrementality testing is sure to uncover some useful insights. The company Thesis Testing ran a lift analysis with their Facebook Retargeting campaign. While Facebook reported a cost-per-lead of $31.59 for the campaign, the lift analysis showed only a 9% lift from Retargeting and a cost-per-incremental conversion of $296.
The result from Thesis Testing’s experiment
At its core, brand-building isn’t just about vanity metrics - it’s about creating lasting momentum that compounds over time. While performance marketing delivers quick wins, your brand keeps customers coming back, referring others, and engaging with your company in ways that no ad campaign ever could.
By building a brand scorecard and tracking the right metrics, you can turn what was once seen as an abstract investment into a measurable competitive advantage. With the right tools - like Rocksalt - you can even tie brand-building efforts directly to revenue, proving once and for all that brand isn’t just an expense; it’s an asset.
