How to Measure the Value of Brand

Finding the right KPIs and metrics for “brand awareness” may be difficult. But it’s not impossible. At least according to Andrei Faji, Director of Engagement Marketing at PandaDoc.

In this interview, he and Alina Vandenberghe, Co-CEO and Co-Founder at Chili Piper, discuss:

• How to measure success of your top of funnel actions
• KPIs for messaging
• The #1 thing all marketers should do to measure customer experience
• So much more

Read the full transcript 👀

Alina 

Alina Vandenberghe, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Chili Piper. I have Andrei with me today. And we're gonna talk about how to create amazing customers, experience, amazing customer stories to turn into raving customers for life. We're also going to go into very tactical tips around how to devote your energy to activities that work in an economy.

And I'm gonna go straight into it. What has changed in your messaging in the past quarter?

Andrei

So there's definitely been a concerted focus to understand how effective our messaging is with our target audience. In the last six months, we developed a muscle around message testing.

Where we started with that was obviously doing a lot of qualitative research. Looking a win-loss analysis, interviewing people that decided not to buy our solution... all the way to even more advanced testing at scale, where we use Wynter as a platform to do a lot of AB testing with our messaging.

Specifically being able to derive scoring around propensity to learn more clarity of the score. So even within our own team, we have KPIs that are specifically around message clarity. And we have numbers that we want to hit in terms of our overall audience. Being able to understand very quickly and clearly, why should they buy PandaDoc? What is PandaDoc? Especially in a market like ours that has a lot of big players and a lot of saturation

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" Where we started with that was obviously doing a lot of qualitative research. Looking a win-loss analysis, interviewing people that decided not to buy our solution "

-Andrei

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Alina

Are you noticing any changes in your traffic or in how your customers are engaging this quarter compared to any other quarters? Normal?

Andrei

I think like a lot of companies, we've made some decisions around what's actually driving performance?

We rely heavily on PPC and SEO. That brings a tremendous amount of traffic our way. In fact, we've actually seen a huge increase in traffic coming to our website as well, so, which is great on the brand side that more people know about PandaDoc. From a PPC perspective, we've turned off a lot of things that don't necessarily bring a lot of value downstream from a revenue perspective and then focused really in terms of the channels that are driving the best results for us. Why is it working well? Like what are the segment dynamics? Make this channel perform really well and then the messaging that supports that as well.

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" We rely heavily on PPC and SEO. That brings a tremendous amount of traffic our way "

-Andrei

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Alina

How do you measure success for top of the funnel for your content?

Andrei

So purely top of the funnel, we're gonna look at net new website visitors. Audience growth is another one that we care about. And we also really interested in brand engagement. We learned that over 30% of our high intent leads actually come from word of mouth and social.

We have to ask them those questions, because if I look at Google Analytics, it's gonna just say organic search. You know, it's like, "Okay, that's not how you heard about us." 😂

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" We learned that over 30% of our high intent leads actually come from word of mouth and social, We have to ask them those questions, because if I look at Google Analytics, it's gonna just say organic search "

-Andrei

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Alina

Besides pipeline, what other metrics do you measure specifically in your brand role since the top of the funnel is a bit harder to measure?

Andrei

You know, a big one for us is message. I've created a metric that our messaging, when we do focus groups, when we do clarity testing with our message, there's an 80% minimum threshold. Meaning 80% of the audience has to find that message to be clear and compelling. And what we did is we actually put our homepage through a massive amount of testing and scrutiny, everything from the overarching UI/UX layout, all the way down to the messaging.

We said, "Let's start with the messaging first before we change anything else." So we did a bunch of testing, we got some clarity scores that gave us 87% confidence that our message is super, super clear. And then we started rolling that into the homepage. And saw an 8.7% lift in signups.

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" What we did is we actually put our homepage through a massive amount of testing and scrutiny, everything from the overarching UI/UX layout, all the way down to the messaging "

-Andrei

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Alina

I really admire how much attention you pay to customer experience because brand is throughout the full cycle. Yeah. It's not only when people see your logo or interact with your content, it's when they buy a product from you. That experience has to be something that you're proud of. What are the things made a huge difference for you this quarter or the past quarter in improving that customer experience?

Andrei

One of the best things that we did, and I'd recommend everybody do this, especially marketers... is we were secret shoppers of our own tool. So we literally had somebody on our team create a fake alias and go through the entire buying experience from start to finish. They had a fake business, they had a fake name.

All of these things, it was fake news as it at its finest. But we learned literally how many emails they were receiving, how many phone calls they were getting from an SDR. There were also instances when we found that the in-app notification was saying this, but then emails saying that, and they're kind of contradictory.

So like what is actually happening here? And I think it's super important as marketers that we become empathetic to just the high degree of BS that our customers have to go through just to get an answer to a simple question. Or figure out how to use our product. You know, as a brand strategy guy, I don't think about brand through the lens of our colors and our logo.

Of course that's part of it, but that's not the main focal point. Like the brand is like the singular idea, the reputation that the customer has of you, not of what we have of ourselves .And I think going through like a secret shopper experience is very illuminating in terms of really helping you understand if on our website we talk about being super easy to use, if we talk about being like best in class and super sophisticated or flexible.

But if my buying experience doesn't reflect that well, I'm failing on the brand level, I'm not delivering on the promise, and now the customer has a completely different perception of me than I have of.

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" One of the best things that we did, and I'd recommend everybody do this, especially marketers... is we were secret shoppers of our own tool. "

-Andrei

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Alina

You have some techniques for creating authentic customer stories. What are top ones that are working really well for you?

Andrei

I think primarily thinking more like a journalist than a content marketer. A journalist's job is to uncover the truth. And truth largely lies in the eyes of the beholder, right? And realizing that your customer being the hero.

So I think a really key part of generating great customer stories is literally going in with no expectations that you're gonna hear this perfect story with the beginning, middle, and end, but more this evolutionary process around what are their motivations, what are their experiences, what are the things that they wake up every morning and think about, and then really just kind of having an actual conversation with them.

I don't follow a script because when I follow a script, then I feel like I'm trying to push them to answer questions in a certain type of way. Rather, I'll usually ask questions based on something they just told me to try to uncover a layer deeper. And a lot of this can actually be traced back to a jobs to be done f.

I think a lot of times marketers in particular think about the functional elements of jobs to be done. You have a job, you're a director of sales, you have a revenue goal, you have a team to manage, you have a process to follow. Those are the functional elements of your job. But then there's also these emotional components and social components.

The emotional being like, well, why are you a sales leader in the first place? Do you love what you do? Um, do you get a sense of pride out of your. The social benefits being like, you know, generally speaking, how do you want to be perceived by your clients? How do you want to be perceived by your team? How do you wanna be perceived by your boss?

So I think in a lot of these customer interviews, when you try to unpack what their truth is, looking at it not just from the functional side, but also the emotional and social, you combine those three things together and that can actually produce some amazing content.

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" So I think a really key part of generating great customer stories is literally going in with no expectations "

-Andrei

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