Is spending money for “brand awareness” worth it?
TL;DR Yes, as long as you’re using it to solve a problem and it's ;
not in isolation ,
not something you can only back for the short term
not without adequate tracking.
You've probably heard it before: There's no such thing as bad publicity. That’s largely true, but publicity and public attention are fickle and you often can’t control them
So what happens when you want to generate awareness of your brand or product? Do you just do something outrageous in the hopes that it gets attention? Maybe. More than likely though you're going to advertise somewhere your target client is looking.
Do we have a problem here?
Before we go any further down the brand awareness advertising rabbit hole, we need to pause and consider two things:
Can you track any higher funnel metrics? e.g. awareness, consideration, preference
If you can track, do you have a problem in that part of the funnel to fix? e.g. if you have high awareness/consideration/preference but low purchase and post purchase, you might want to focus your attention elsewhere.
Now, if you’ve lost me already talking about funnels, consideration, preference etc., that’s OK! Here’s a very quick primer on funnels for you to get up to speed.
The first question relates to your pre-strategy which is what you should have uncovered during research and then proceed to track annually. The second is a strategic question about your plans for the year. More on those parts of your marketing plan in another post, I promise.
If you’re stuck at question 1 because you can’t track. The short answer is contact us and we’ll show you how to do it very effectively on the cheap.
The other side of the funnel
On the other side of the spectrum (or more accurately, funnel) specifically in the purchase and post-purchase phases, you might already be spending money in places like Facebook or on Google to try and acquire customers.
In many fields, this is known broadly as sales activation or performance marketing because there's a direct link between advertising and a conversion, revenue and ROI (i.e. performance).
It's AND not OR
Beware the marketing agency that tells you to focus only on brand building. Unless they (or you) are really good at tracking metrics like brand awareness, consideration and preference just doing brand awareness work isn't wise for a few reasons:
You'll find it extremely difficult to quantify the investment (unless you have very clear objectives and good brand tracking).
You'll likely bankrupt yourself before you get the benefit from it.
You'll probably stuff it up by putting the wrong message into the execution (more on this in a second).
Your conversion points i.e. your salespeople/teams, website, store etc. won’t get the maximum benefit if you just do this.
Likewise, some agencies or consultants will insist that you put all your advertising budget and effort into performance marketing. Why? Because you can quantity your investment and see exactly what you get for what you spend. Accountants and finance departments love this approach. I really like the approach too because I'm thrifty. But I'm sad to say, just doing it this way is wrong too. Why?
You’ll create transactional customers who you only speak to in the channels you're advertising in.
You’ll have a very short funnel because most performance channels are at the purchase stage. This is good in as you capitalise on buyer intent, but if this is all you're doing, you’ll only end up playing on you own half of the pitch and it's very difficult to score from there.
You'll have low brand recognition or awareness outside of the customers you pay to target.
The truth is you shouldn't be putting all your eggs in one basket. It's not performance marketing OR brand building. Instead, you should broadly have two strategies.
Short term acquisition using performance marketing.
Long term brand building using mass media.
Here's why.
Fundamentally, it comes down to one thing: you will make more money.
We know this thanks to the studies of advertising performance by Peter Field and Les Binet. These guys literally wrote the book on how to advertise properly in; The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies.
No one's saying one approach won't work without the other. But this is a classic case of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.
Here's the short version of why they work together…
Brand building (Long term)
Creates brand equity - in layman's terms your brand’s value. That means higher margins and more profit.
Influences future sales - if your customer knows who you are, there’s a higher likelihood you'll be in the set of brands or products they'll consider.
Emotional priming - by introducing your brand codes/assets to a broad audience, you'll influence your customer’s subconscious/system 1 decision-making process so when they're presented with an opportunity to choose, you have higher brand saliency (i.e. they have a higher likelihood of picking you.)
Sales activation (Short term)
Exploits brand equity - your brand work has done the heavy lifting, now your customer knows who you are and is more open to your offer.
Generates sales now - as I mentioned earlier, this activity generates sales which you're able to capitalise on because you're in the customer's consideration set.
Persuasive, product/service focused messages - capitalising on the equity and using your brand codes, you can close with product features the customer will want.
It's the marketing version of a basketball alley-oop. Long term brand building sets up the ball and short term sales activation slam dunks it home.
What's the split?
According to the research of Field and Binet, the rough split for brand/sales activation is 60/40. That is;
60% of your budget should be on long term brand building.
40% should be on short term sales activation.
This will vary by industry. In industries where customers purchase larger things more infrequently like banking or automotive, you'll find the split is weighted higher towards brand building and less towards sales activation. In low involvement, it’s the other way around.
Go forth and market
So, yes it's ok to do brand advertising. In fact, you should potentially be spending most of your media budget on it. Just make sure you're doing it to solve a problem you can track, over a long period and that you have a sales activation campaign on to capitalise on all the work you're doing!
If that sounds too hard or you're not sure where to start, why not give us a call and let us take your six?