This is the ninth post exploring my 8 digital marketing priorities in greater detail. This post will focus on your digital branding campaigns.
- 1- Strategic Plan
- 2- Site Web
- 3- Email newsletter
- 4- Social Media
- 5- Base Campaigns – directories
- 5- Base Campaigns – classified ads
- 5- Base Campaigns – Search Engine Marketing
- 5- Base Campaigns – Retargeting
- 5- Base Campaigns – Intent-to-buy targeting
Once your permanent direct response campaigns are set to capture all types of “easy sales,” you now need to turn your attention to the future. It is one thing to capture today’s business, but you also very importantly need to establish your brand in people’s mind so that you are present in people’s mindset for their future demand.
Established branding also eases future “easy sales” as at those points in time, consideration of your brand becomes simpler, quicker for the consumer who knows who you are and has an idea of where your reputation stands.
6- Building and maintaining branding = Display Advertising
Regardless of the media you have used with your, it is important to establish your brand in people’s minds and to maintain a positive position there going forward. Display advertising; be it online, on mobile devices or even on gaming consoles establishes visibility for your brand, helping your logo, product, jingle or slogan to become readily recognizable. Outstanding creative will then capture a consumer’s attention allowing you to put forth your message, qualities and values, allowing you to position yourself in people’s mind as being responsible, credible, even enjoyable and more.
Be aware that brand building and image campaigns allow you to impact and affect individuals’ or consumers’ perception of your brand, your reputation and your alignment with their needs. However, brand building campaigns rarely turn over quick sales. At any given time, possibly only 1% of your target audience is actually considering a purchase relevant to what you have to offer. This means that roughly 1% of people are open to paying attention to your message when your broadcast it (regardless of media). The other 99% you must ensure at least gives your ad a glance so they may be exposed to your logo or signage to establish or maintain your position in their mindset for your category. Their mindset is what they will turn to when the times comes for them to be in the 1% that are “in-market.”
If our want to achieve the highest possible performance with both the 1% and the other 99%, you will need to target your advertising to editorial environments that are contextually relevant to your product or service category, or that contain a high concentration or your target clientele. The other most important factor you always need to pay attention to is how much time are people spending on the environments that make the most sense to you. If that time is very short, your messaging will need to be particularly extraordinary to attract attention. If however time spend on other sites is greater, the likelihood their users will have the time to notice and maybe even pay attention to your ad will greatly increase.
Please do not assume to know where our audience spends their time online as you will be biased by your own behavior and that of those few you know well enough to know this level of detail about them. Rather use online measurement and research tools such as comScore to determine where your desired clients are online. If this is not a possibility for you, the simple alternative is to just ask them. I would recommend you ask your clients to name their top 3-5 visited websites and the have them add 2-3 they like to spend more time on even if they don’t visit these daily. The responses may surprise you but most importantly will inspire you on how to best communicate with them online, as well as everyone else like them who’s could become your clients over time.
Another important factor to keep in mind when doing online brand advertising is to achieve a minimal frequency of exposure. One control mechanism you have over your online campaigns is called the frequency cap, or control over creative exposure to a same individual. Over the last ten plus years numerous studies from Dynamic Logic and other research firms have established that to ensure the target audience has taken the time to pay attention to your ad to understand it properly, they must have seen it a minimum of 4-5 times. Below that average, you cannot assume that they have understood of retained all that you wished to convey with your ad. The upper limit of effective frequency of exposure is reached at 8-9 impressions beyond which you no longer make any gains whatsoever, with the exception of maintaining awareness. However I would recommend you then move on to another creative which will not only maintain that awareness but also build on other brand attributes or features.
Next week we will look at priority #7: optimizing all your digital marketing efforts
Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment below: would you change the order of digital marketing priorities I’ve put forth? Have I forgotten anything significant?
