Hi there 👋
We’re investing a lot in brand marketing at Oyster, which has allowed me to dust off some of the Buffer brand strategies that proved so successful back in the day. No, it’s not a transparent salary dashboard (at least not yet). Instead, we’re doing cool things with PR and community and events and so much more. You can read below to see how we’re measuring our reach. We’re also measuring lagging indicators like brand awareness, share of voice, sentiment, and much more — all of which I’m happy to explain in future emails or anytime you want to message me to chat.
Wishing you a great week ahead,
Kevan
(ᵔᴥᵔ)
Thank you for being part of this newsletter. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world and my time at Oyster, Buffer, and more.
Say hi anytime at hello@kevanlee.com. I’d love to hear from you.
Brand reach: How to measure it, where to track it
“A measurement framework for brand marketing” may as well be “a family portrait with me, Bigfoot, and the Loch Ness monster.”
Can it exist?
Is it even possible to measure the ethereal presence of a brand, an area of marketing that is notoriously — and intentionally — magical?
Yes, of course! (Famous last words.) We’d been doing it for years at Buffer. We’re installing one at Oyster with our new brand director. Let me show you how we do it.
There are four components:
Brand reach (explained in this article)
Brand awareness
Share of voice
Sentiment
In this particular article, I’ll walk you through the brand reach component. I’ll save brand awareness, share of voice, and sentiment for later issues. If you’re especially keen on hearing how these work, drop me a note, and I’ll be happy to prioritize it.
How to calculate brand reach (more here)
There’s not a lot of industry best practices about measuring brand reach, which is the number of people who see you and hear about you. Because of this, our Buffer brand marketing team came up with an aggregate reach number that you can track across all your various awareness channels.
For our purposes at Buffer, here is the definition we used for brand reach:
Reach = The number of people who come in contact with the Buffer brand
The way we approached it was pretty straightforward:
What channels do we own that allow people to find out about us?
How can we best measure the size of these channels?
In some cases, like your blog, this will be obvious and easy. In other cases, like social media, this may be ambiguous and open to interpretation. And ambiguity is okay. The thing about brand reach is that you will never know for certain an exact number of people who come in contact with your brand. The goal of measuring is to set a baseline, track your progress, and understand how you're doing.
If you're keen to grab the spreadsheet template, here's a quick link. Much more info below.
Hopefully the instructions in the spreadsheet are pretty self-explanatory. The spreadsheet runs from a Week-Over-Week tab that collects data from all of your primary brand channels. Simply update these stats every Monday for the week prior.
This list of brand channels will be unique to your company. We had a list of channels at Buffer that differ in some ways to what we have at Oyster. Even at Oyster, I expect the list of channels to evolve over the next few quarters as our marketing footprint grows.
Here then is a look at some of the main brand channels you might consider adding to the spreadsheet. If you can think of others, feel free to drop me a note!
Website traffic
Sessions (Google Analytics):
A session begins when a person first visits any page of the website; the session ends when the person navigates away from the website, closes the browser tab, or after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight. A single session can contain multiple pageviews, events, interactions, and transactions.
Users (Google Analytics):
The total number of both new (new to the Buffer blog on a specific device) and returning (returning to the Buffer blog on a specific device) users that have had at least one session within the selected date range.
Users is a smaller number than sessions, because a single user may have multiple sessions within a given window of time.
The more accurate way to report the brand reach of a website would be to use "users" instead of "sessions" since you’re trying to count the number of people who interact with your brand.
Branded keyword traffic (Google Search Console)
The number of clicks from a search result containing your brand name or variations of your brand name
If you’re tracking overall website traffic, then you don’t need to also track branded keywords. The overall traffic number will include brand traffic.
But if you want to get super specific about the precise impact of your brand, then this keyword metric can be quite useful. If nothing else, you should at least be keeping an eye on it and hoping to see it rise over time and to rise in conjunction with events and campaigns. At Oyster, branded keyword traffic for us would be any folks searching for keywords like `oyster hr` and clicking over to our website.
Blog and content marketing
Content marketing was super important for us at Buffer and is super important for us at Oyster. Because of that, we can choose to report on the blog traffic separately from the website traffic. It even had a total separate GA instance at Buffer.
Definitions will remain the same:
Blog Sessions (Google Analytics):
A session begins when a person first visits any page on the blog; the session ends when the person navigates away from the blog, closes the browser tab, or after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight. A single session can contain multiple pageviews, events, interactions, and transactions.
Blog Users:
The total number of both new (new to the Buffer blog on a specific device) and returning (returning to the Buffer blog on a specific device) users that have had at least one session within the selected date range.
And again, if you’re being particular, “users” will be the more accurate measure of brand reach.
Social media marketing
Social Impressions:
The number of times our content is displayed within a social media feed, no matter if it was clicked or not.
Social Reach:
The total number of people who see our content within a social media feed.
Impressions also count multiple views by the same person to a single piece of content. For example, if one user saw the same piece of content twice, that would count as two impressions.
Reach does not count multiple views to a piece of content. For example, if one user saw a piece of content ten times, that would count as one reach.
We track reach and impressions using the native analytics from the social networks and the analytics from Buffer.
Social Engagement:
The cumulative total of likes, comments, shares, and clicks to a single post or a channel as a whole.
For example, 50,000 engagements on LinkedIn in March 2022 would mean: 50,000 total likes, comments, and shares to all LinkedIn posts in March.
We can get these numbers natively from each social network or from the Buffer dashboard.
Ambassadors:
Social metrics from key individual accounts within the company
Of course, you’ll track all of these key social metrics for the main brand accounts, but at Oyster we’re also acknowledging that our there are several key individuals at the company who have an outsized influence on the Oyster brand. Because of this, all their social impressions and engagement are counted as well. The easiest way to do this is to manage them all into a single social media management tool like Buffer.
Multimedia
Video Views:
The total number of times a single user or users watch videos posted to Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Each channel defines a “view” differently:
Facebook: Defined as a view of three seconds or more (does not need to be 100% in-view. I.e., can be playing above or below posts. Video plays until post is fully out of view in feed )
YouTube: Defined as a view of 30 seconds or more
Twitter: Defined as a view of three seconds or more (does need to be 100% in-view. I.e., it requires a user click-to-play. If user scrolls away, video stops.)
Podcast Downloads:
The number of downloads to unique devices (Desktop, iOS, Android) as reported by Libsyn or your podcast app of choice.
Downloads are only counted once per account. For example, 14K downloads means that 14,000 unique users downloaded our episode to their device.
Community and engagement
Slack community:
The total number of members in the Slack community.
At Buffer, we also tried tracking daily active users (DAUs) and monthly active users (MAUs) but didn't find those stats to be fully reliable.
Social media conversations:
the total number of replies and/or conversations the marketing team engages in
We used Buffer to manage our social media conversations (any time a person reached out to us on social media to have a chat), and there are particular folders that marketing owns. We added up the totals from these folders.
Press
PR
Reach is calculated in PR tools like Meltwater or Cision, which give the total monthly reach a publication in which we were featured. We take 2% of that number (for the percentage of audience we can estimate we reached, this is a PR industry acknowledged percentage) and then divide by 4 to get the weekly number.
Example: FastCompany’s Leadership section reached 37,000,000 people in a month; we were featured there once. Two percent of 37,000,000 is 740,000 reach for the month. Divided by four we have 185,000, which is the reach I would report for the week we were featured.
Syndication:
The total views that our syndicated content has received. This is based on Meltwater’s reporting and uses the same formula as PR.
Campaigns
The total cumulative reach (see above) for all one-off projects and/or campaigns that we run as a team.
These are different than areas that we own such as: social media, PR, community, podcast, video, etc. Campaign totals include all metrics within a given time period: blog sessions (Open and/or Social), social media reach, PR, etc. We would then subtract those numbers from their respective areas.
For example, if a campaign reached 50,000 people on social and received 50,000 sessions to the blog, that would count as 100,000 total campaign reach - and we would subtract 50,000 from social reach and open blog sessions for the time period.
—
Again, you can get this free brand reach template on Google Sheets. It's based on the one we used every day at Buffer and the one we’ll be adapting to use at Oyster. Just make a copy of the spreadsheet to edit it yourself ("File > Make a copy"). About the spreadsheet:
You only have to update the individual channel numbers each week.
The charts and graphs are updated automatically.
That fancy graph is called a waterfall graph.
Misc.
Substack has an app, which means this Kevan Lee newsletter has an app. What!
If you download the Substack app, it lets you read this newsletter in the cozy confines of an app interface built for reading and away from the travails of your inbox. Plus, you can discover a bunch of other cool Substack-ers in there. Here’s one that I found this week that you might like:
Cool new feature from LinkedIn: You can add career breaks to your work history
List of cold email templates. Would any of these get you to reply?
About this newsletter …
Hi, I’m Kevan, a marketing exec based in Boise, Idaho, who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Vox, and Polly. Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. Not yet subscribed? No worries. You can check out the archive, or sign up below:
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