Over the pandemic, we saw a huge move into digital and lower funnel marketing channels. Many companies were focusing on holding onto their short term marketing efforts at the expense of brand building. Now that we have a moment to take a breath and pause and reflect, we want to warn against this potential overcorrection into short term sales activation. Now’s a good time to evaluate where you’re at in terms of balancing these two important components of marketing.
Conventional marketing wisdom holds that about 60% of your marketing communication spend should be directed toward brand while the remaining 40% goes toward short term sales. Often, in the early stages businesses will focus on sales activation to ensure that they get off the ground and build an initial customer base that is familiar with their product.Â
However, at a certain point priorities begin to change and companies can’t continue to scale using only sales activation. At that point, brand building serves an important role in creating even more efficient sales activation. Companies are working to maintain their strong brand position among competitors, and sales come along for the ride.
Where does your company currently stand in these efforts? How can your company continue to build brand and remain relevant in the marketplace? These are all important questions to ask, and they’re questions that we’d be happy to help you answer. In the meantime, it’s important to consider some specific goals and tactics that can help your brand building efforts:
- Go for reach: Aim to reach the highest number of category users by explicitly making “reach” your digital marketing goal. Avoid the temptation to talk to your most loyal customers because they’re going to see your message anyway.
- Aim for fame: Advertising campaigns that aim for fame are more effective than campaigns that use other single objectives or campaigns that focus on too many goals at once.
- Use video: Videos are engaging and they convey information quicker and more efficiently than alternatives like photos or text.
- Aim for fluency: We’re only able to remember a few pieces of information at a time, so make sure your message is clearly conveyed in your advertisement. This means that your campaign should have a clear campaign idea and this idea should permeate throughout the touch points.
- Understand context: Think about what people might be thinking about when they see your advertisement. People will remember your advertisement better if they’re in the right mental state.
Give us a call at 833-578-1314 or email us at [email protected] and we’ll be happy to discuss your challenges surrounding building brand and reaching the right customers with the right message.
