Measure whether brand attention reaches the buyers who matter

Impressions and followers rarely show whether future buyers will think of you. A five-step method links brand attention to category buyers, memory and commercial signals.

The quarterly report shows record impressions, rising follower counts and a viral post. The CEO asks a harder question: are the people we need to buy from us any more likely to think of us?

Most brand dashboards cannot answer that. They measure how much attention the brand received, not whose attention it was or what it left behind.

Attention is only useful if it reaches future buyers

Professor John Dawes of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute set out the core problem in his 2021 essay on the “95:5 rule”. If business buyers change a supplier such as a bank or law firm around once every five years, only about 20% are in the market in a given year, and roughly 5% in a quarter.

Dawes stresses that 95% is a heuristic, not a precise rule. The implication is still important. Most people who see your advertising will not buy soon, so advertising works mainly by building and refreshing memory links that activate when they do enter the market.

LinkedIn’s B2B Institute, which promoted the idea, also reported that 96% of B2B marketers it surveyed expected to see the main effect of their campaigns within two weeks. That expectation is the root of many misleading dashboards.

Calculate your own in-market share

You do not need to accept the 95:5 figure. Dawes suggests calculating your own.

If your category’s average time between purchases is two years, about 50% of buyers will be in the market over a year, and around 13% in any quarter. If you do not know the interval, a simple survey question, “How often do you buy this?”, will give you a usable estimate.

That number sets realistic expectations. A campaign can increase your share of buyers who are in the market now. It cannot create buyers who are not.

Step one: define the right buyers

Before measuring brand attention, define the audience whose attention matters. That is usually category buyers: people or companies who buy, or will buy, what you sell.

It is not the same as your followers. Followers are often existing customers, employees, fans of your content or people with no purchasing role. A post can perform brilliantly with them and reach almost no future buyers.

For B2B brands, the definition should include buying roles. A finance director and an IT manager may both influence a software decision, but they enter the category with different needs.

Step two: measure reach into that audience

The first question is coverage: what share of category buyers did the brand reach, and how often?

Platform reports can help when they let you filter by job function, industry, company size or demographic. Treat their audience modelling as an estimate and compare it with your own definition of the category.

Look for concentration. A large impression count delivered repeatedly to a small group can look impressive while leaving most future buyers untouched.

Step three: measure memory, not just exposure

Exposure is not the goal. The goal is that buyers associate your brand with the situations in which they need the category.

Ehrenberg-Bass researchers call these situations “category entry points,” and Professor Jenni Romaniuk’s work on them is summarised in a paper published with LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. A category entry point might be “when we are expanding into a new country” or “when our current supplier misses a deadline.”

The measurement is a survey of category buyers. Show a list of buying situations and a list of brands, and ask which brands they associate with each situation. The share of buyers who link your brand to at least one relevant situation is often called mental penetration.

Dawes notes that getting this figure into double digits is a multi-year task. Many established brands reach no more than 20% to 30% of respondents, and market leaders often only about 50%.

Step four: test whether a campaign changed anything

Survey trends over time tell you whether memory is building. To isolate a campaign’s effect, you need a comparison group.

Platform brand lift studies use this logic. Google’s Brand Lift documentation, for example, describes surveying people who saw the ads and people who were eligible but did not, and comparing responses on measures such as ad recall, awareness and consideration. Availability and requirements vary, so check the current terms for any platform you use.

These studies are useful but limited. They usually measure short-term recall among people the platform reached, not long-term memory among all category buyers. Treat them as one input, not the verdict.

Step five: connect memory to commercial signals

Brand measurement earns trust when it moves alongside commercial indicators. Useful signals include branded search demand, direct traffic, share of inbound enquiries from target accounts, win rates against named competitors and the proportion of new customers who say they already knew the brand.

None of these proves causation on its own. Together, over several quarters, they show whether growing mental availability is turning into commercial advantage.

What a better brand report contains

A brand attention report built on these steps fits on one page:

• the defined category buyer audience and its estimated size;
• reach and frequency within that audience;
• mental penetration and links to priority buying situations, tracked over time;
• results of any controlled lift studies, with their limits stated;
• two or three commercial signals that should move if the brand is working.

Followers and impressions can stay, as diagnostic measures. They should not be the headline.

The conversation it changes

This approach changes the question the CEO asks. Instead of “did the campaign go viral?” it becomes “are more of the people who will buy from us in the next two years starting to think of us at the right moment?”

That question is harder to answer. It is also the one that connects brand spending to future revenue.