Today’s episode is all about discovering the impact of brand advertising on your organization’s bottom line. While many companies want to focus their investment on Do-state marketing, it’s actually less expensive to invest in branding and build affinity earlier in the customer journey.
In this episode, we discuss branding impact….
What Do We Mean By Brand? (3:45 – 5:34)
- Brand: the level of awareness and emotion toward an organization; also, how your audience perceives your organization
- A strong brand is comprised of three things:
- The target audience is aware of the brand
- The target audience has a strong emotional feeling toward that brand
- The target audience thinks and feels consistently about the brand
- Resources:
Benefits of Having a Strong Brand (5:35 – 13:15)
- Humans make decisions based on emotions
- A strong brand can short-circuit decision making and keep an organization from competing on price alone
- Brand investment means investing in a relationship with an audience not yet ready to buy
- Being along for the customer journey positions your brand as a known entity that is sought after at the point of sale
- This plays on the law of reciprocity in Robert Cialdini’s book “Influence”
- Close rates, cart abandonment, time-to-close are all metrics that reflect the influence of brand
Brand Investment is Less Expensive In The Long Run (14:20 – 17:39)
- Investing in brand is less expensive than investing in Do-state tactics
- The cost of reaching a Do-state audience is expensive because everyone else is bidding on that same audience
- Investing in an audience’s interest builds affinity earlier in the customer journey
- When we do not compete on point-of-intent, we can buy our audience at a lower rate
Investing in Brand Limits Downside Risk (17:40 – 21:31)
- Brand is like an insurance policy for when there is an over-reliance on a Do-state tactic
- Ex: A company’s margins covered their AdWords costs until Google changed its search algorithm and its deluge of traffic turned into a trickle.
- If you build up a strong brand, your audience will seek you out by name when they are ready to buy, even if an algorithm changes or SEO breaks
- Ask yourself: is your brand strong enough to withstand a new competitor coming to market, or an algorithm change?
How To Incorporate More Brand Into Marketing Efforts (21:33 – 25:35)
- Personas and segmentation – focus your brand investment on a targeted audience segment rather than trying to target everybody, or “boil the ocean.”
- Customer journey – understand your audience’s motivations to build awareness beyond your brand’s features and benefits
- Brand definition – develop a personality for your audience to fall in love with, or the emotion you want to create in your audience.
For more information on the charity in this episode, please visit Red Rover.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast, a production of Brilliant Metrics, ran from February 2016 to September 2017. Music by SeaStock Audio.
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