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Show Notes
Today’s episode is all about discovering the impact of brand 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 brand and build affinity earlier in the customer journey.
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
Charity Break – Red Rover – (13:16 – 14:19)
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.
Summary (25:36 – 27:53)
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at [email protected], follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
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