Tag Archives: Marketing Bands

ROI of Branding

Jim answers questions from fellow Drillers

Topic Overview

Hi again folks, Jim Novo here.

Speaking of questions, you folks are starting to toss in some real zingers. We’ve moved on from the “How do I calculate Lifetime Value” type of stuff to some real mind benders, and this month’s featured question is a heck of an example. Speaking of questions, I always hide the identities of any organizations or people involved, so don’t be afraid to send them on in. Help yourself, and help others as well!

Branding is a much misunderstood topic and it’s beat to death in the forums and trades. I pretty much run in the other direction when it comes up, because I’m a numbers kind of guy and the branders out there never seem to have any numbers to back up their position. That said, there are ways to numerically quantify the value of branding …


Q. Jim, I send a monthly corporate custom-published magazine (content mix of product and broader lifestyle interests) via email to my house e-mail list – how do I measure ROI on what is a purely brand loyalty vehicle?

A: Thanks for sending in such an easy question – Geesh Louise, doesn’t anybody have easy ones any more? I assume you believe over the longer run, those receiving the magazine will either convert to customers, increase their level of business with you, or bring business to you through referrals.

If you have new business “source tracking” in place (where did the business come from?), it should be fairly easy to determine if the business came from someone who is receiving the magazine, or from someone not on the magazine list. Assuming you are also able to track where the non-magazine business comes from, you can look at expenses versus business generated and find out if the magazine is at least as efficient as other ways of generating business.

Hot links to product offers would be a perfect way to do this, and you can test varying offers by Recency to maximize the profit of different customer segments. Under this scenario, the magazine is not only branding, but selling merchandise. So you don’t have to worry about the “ROI of Branding,” the ROI comes from sales and you can easily quantify the ROI using merchandise profit versus the cost of the magazine.

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Measuring Social Media Value

Jim answers more questions from fellow Drillers

Want to see additional questions & answers from fellow Drillers?

Here’s the blog archive; the pre-blog email newsletter archives are here.

Q:  I’m a social media consultant, facing the interesting challenges of measuring success, and wondered, what are your thoughts on social media measurement and life time value? The two seem to go together, but if anyone has thought about it, you would have.  Would love to know your thoughts.

A:  Just to be clear, the following is specifically about social for use as a Marketing platform, not as a utility or a way to keep in touch with people.  Interacting with other people can create a lot of value – emotional value for the participants.  There are obviously lots of great uses for social platforms and I’m sure there is more to come in that area.  The question is: does any of this make sense as “media”?

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Marketing Bands: the Numbers

(A post by post index of this Marketing Bands Series is here.)

Just wanted to add a quick piece about the results of Optimizing the Bands (see Band Model) – this is the Marketing Productivity Blog after all!  Thanks Moe for the reminder. 

As we Optimized, there were changes in budget allocation by Band, and as a result there was an increase in Net Customer Value – the goal of the Optimization program in the first place.  For those of you not following the whole story, the budget remained constant, we simply allocated it to the highest and best use through testing.

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