Investing in Brand and Demand to Grow Your Business
One of the most hotly debated marketing topics in recent years is the notion of brand building and its relationship with lower funnel demand generation activities. Intuitively, we believe both have a role to play however marketers often have varying opinions on how to strike the right balance in the context of business priorities.
The viewpoint that we wholeheartedly endorse is that they can no longer be viewed as competing functions in our strategic plans, and that both are required to maximize marketing growth.
What separates those that are using brand and demand to successfully deliver business results?
Long-term growth is a function of customers creating memorable connections between your brand and how it plays an essential role in their lives. Upper funnel ads should position your company in the hearts and minds of your target such that your product or service is considered when a relevant buying situation arises.
Before you declare your budget cannot support TV commercials, there are several cost efficient ways to tell your brand story without having to involve a Hollywood director and an entire production crew complete with viewing village (and don’t even get me started on frame by frame editing of a 30 second spot). Take advantage of digital storytelling formats to make your brand stand out with bold images, short videos, animations, infographics, quizzes, polls, and gamification to bring it to life.
When your brand can strike a chord and own an emotional territory, it reinforces why buyers are willing to pay a premium over the category alternatives delivering pricing power. But here is the real kicker: successful companies focused on driving acquisition with brand campaigns often see a cost reduction and increased conversion in lower funnel efforts. By creating an optimized full funnel environment for sustainable growth, companies that invest 50% of budgets in brand building see better financial performance, according to IPA Databank (Brand and Demand: The Key Principles of Marketing Growth).
As we embrace and enter the golden age of digital marketing, the drumbeat for lower funnel spending continues to gain momentum, especially as e-commerce takes hold. Marketers lean more heavily into demand since near-term impact can be captured, whereas brand messaging takes more time to measure. While we are aligned that creating urgency around specific offerings or promotions is essential to drive short-term growth, there needs to be a balance between Brand and Demand investments.
Let’s be real for a moment. Both are under intense pressure to make every dollar count and deliver more with less, as we scrutinize marketing budgets with a risk of a prolonged slowdown. Justification of spend allocation and specific tactics take on a whole new level of importance so having rationale to support your decision making can help the process along.
Consider using the Customer Journey to map out opportunities
Given market disruptions and the adoption of emerging technologies, the buyer journey in nearly every category is changing rapidly. It is less linear involving more digital touchpoints for consideration but not necessarily more conversions. This shift requires a more flexible omni-channel approach to reach potential customers efficiently in their preferred channel as there is now an unprecedented level of interactions online.
Easier said than executed upon, meeting your customers where they are and tailoring your messaging to meet their unique needs poses a real challenge. It forces marketers to take a step back and truly understand their customers on a deeper level. Your best customers may not be researching products all on the same channels as some will watch YouTube videos or scroll through social media on their phone to gain inspiration. It’s probably safe to imply that a single format or channel will no longer get the job done as a combination of tactics across various touchpoints will be most effective at shaping demand.
Successful brands who focus on acquiring customer data during the research phase and through online methods achieve optimal targeting results. These powerful insights help harness more relevant messaging, a critical step to nurture customers through the full marketing funnel using a more balanced approach not dissimilar to achieving work-life balance.
Taking this analogy further, healthy work-life balance involves consciously managing your time and energy to meet both professional and personal commitments while prioritizing self-care and well-being. Much like well intentioned and executed tactics synergystically delivering business results, these are the building blocks to ensure a balanced effort at each stage of the marketing funnel. While few would argue that balance is an essential step to realizing your full potential in life, this equally applies to your business.
For clients that are growth-oriented and looking to level up their marketing efforts, we highly recommend an intensive workshop series. A key output becomes a customer journey map that can help your company visualize how customers and specific buyer personas feel/think/act at all brand touchpoints. By embracing a transformational mindset, you can more easily unlock new and untapped opportunities to fully meet evolving customer expectations for a more personalized experience.
Focus on fewer and more meaningful business objectives….and don’t forget to measure
Ensuring you are on the right path starts with setting the right business objectives, then layering on marketing communications goals to ground your strategy. Being deliberate in your choices will help prioritize initiatives and ensure your team focuses on activities that deliver desired results.
Noticing cause and effect will help your company decipher the signals that correlate and matter most. Clearly V.F. Ridgway was onto something when he stated, “Not everything that matters can be measured. Not everything that we can measure matters.” While much has been said about the dysfunctional consequences of performance measurements, companies can improve their profitability by measuring and tracking marketing performance meticulously.
The most meaningful business metrics for your category will help your brand identify areas that you are meeting or exceeding expectations while pinpointing areas of focused improvement to achieve your business ambitions.
So now it’s time to land the plane! But I am not a pilot…..
In these challenging economic conditions with shifting consumer preferences, being agile in your marketing approach is critical to long-term business success. When we analyze brands that are leaders or disruptors in their respective industries, a common theme emerges. Top performers don’t just think in an agile manner, instead they are willing to experiment with test-and-learn approaches to optimize results. This enables rethinking and divesting of dated and underperforming tactics that no longer demonstrate value. Taking a more disciplined approach to experimentation and rapidly iterating based on changing market conditions allows companies to accelerate growth and steal share. Or as we like to say, “Win. Win.”
So how do you put all this into practice? Understanding the drivers of brand awareness and trust are the price of entry. Once this is firmly established, focus on producing an equally potent demand generation program that thoughtfully keeps your target audience engaged and drives intention to buy. As your core customers evaluate and compare your offering with alternatives, this presents an opportunity to influence their decision and streamline the process as most often consumers are anxious due to choice overload and feel overwhelmed during the research process. Being seen as both their ally and a trusted source should underpin your customer experience especially in the digital ecosystem.
While there is no one size fits all approach here, it’s worth illustrating that we recently guided a client through a combination of a category and competitive deep dive, white space mapping and designed a ‘day in the life’ profile of their biggest growth segment to uncover new insights and pain points. This exercise revealed several unmet needs for the target and enabled us to provide recommendations to both capitalize and leapfrog their competitors.
By now you should be feeling inspired and not content with the status quo. Are you beyond determined to accelerate growth, strengthen your market position, and create lasting impact? We can help. Our proven and proprietary framework is your gateway to unveiling fresh strategies, refining your messaging, and expanding your reach into new markets.
Facilitated by Christine Tolton (CSO & Founder), our exclusive accelerator combines strategic planning and tactical insights to formulate a comprehensive marketing strategy. Why do clients love this approach? It consistently delivers transformative results by unlocking new and untapped opportunities that your team can action immediately. Plus, it avoids meeting fatigue and death by Powerpoint slideshows that span several months with no bias for action or actual impact in market…. we know no-one likes that!
We can offer a fresh perspective to help enhance your 2024 marketing efforts and develop a tailored strategy for success built around your business priorities.
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