I had a very interesting conversation with the owner of a local plumbing service company.  He is doing a great job of tracking the cost per call (ROI) for his marketing.  He had daily statistics and looked at them regularly.

This company has three main sources of business:

• Past clients or referrals from past clients

• Yellow book advertising

• Pay per click advertising with Google

He considered the past clients and referral to be "free" sources of business.  He advertised in several different phone books and had a unique

We work with a equipment manufacturing client (to remain nameless) that used to spend several hundred thousand dollars on print advertising.  They ran ads in specialty trade magazines.  This money was spent year after year, month after month.

How do you calculate ROI for a Brand?  This is a question that has baffled marketers for years.  Sure you can measure the effectiveness of advertising with a call to action, but how do you measure the affects of name recognition.  The Big companies use focus groups and surveys, spending large sums of money on marketing research.  For the larger brand name companies this is relevant and accurate.

But what if you are a smaller brand or better yet what if you only serve a niche market and the larger market has never heard of your product.  How do you measure the ROI on your brand then?