The following is a guest post by Future Buzz community member Danny Wong. If you want to guest post here, please read the guidelines.
Today I’d like to debunk some of the frequent misconceptions new marketers have about branding campaigns. Specifically, I want to share how they can be profitable and even if the campaigns send traffic but zero direct sales that can actually be OK.
Further, I want to get the point across that branding isn’t just a marketing strategy that big companies can employ. Small businesses can and should surgically use branding campaigns to saturate target channels as part of an overall approach to win their market.
Let’s start by chatting about “horizontal saturation” of consumer’s media space.
The concept of “horizontal saturation” is when an audience (even just one individual) sees a business everywhere they look, finding the business more credible, therefore leading to more sales from that audience. But it’s not always a direct line from awareness to sale.
Customers are now smarter than ever and will frequently conduct research after seeing and clicking your display ad, then following a more complicated conversion path. Unfortunately, this way, the last source is almost always attributed with the sale, not the display ad, not even partially, even though it contributed to the sales funnel.
Let’s look at an all too common example of a web conversion path from a branding campaign:
- You place a few display ads on 3 different networks,
- Let’s say one visitor ends up seeing those 3 different ads on 3 different sites,
- The visitor clicks the last ad, sees the site, wonders a bit about what your business is all about,
- Then Googles “your business + review” and finds a product review some blogger did about you,
- Later, searches news.google.com for the latest news on “your brand” then sees you in a big news story
- Finally, clicking over to your site from the link in the news story and converting to a customer.
Your analytics (pending how you’re setup) is most likely to attribute the sale to the big news story, not any of the display ads, even the last one. Especially if that person is blocking any types of tracking cookies you have setup.
But the fact is, you probably got 5,000 clicks to your site from your display ads. And while you might have gotten no sales directly from that ad, you might have seen an increase in sales from other sources of traffic: whether it be 10 more sales from people Googling your name and 100 sales from a 3 month-old product review. Or maybe even 50 sales from your big news story, which is 3 days old, plus 60 new sales from Twitter after new customers were intrigued, followed your brand, and you engaged with them personally (therefore leading them to trust you more and eventually ‘pull the trigger’ on a purchase).
While you spent $7,000 on your display ads, which led to 5,000 clicks and no direct sales, you may have seen 110 extra sales coming in from other sources inspired by but not directly attributed to the campaign. Considering you value a new sale at $100, then from those 110 sales you have made $11,000, which is $4,000 more than the $7,000 cost to support those ads. Granted, legwork and visibility of your brand digitally need to be in place first: but over time being able to show sustained returns from effective ad spends may be the icing on your online marketing cake.
Digital branding: saturate the right audience
Branding campaigns work digitally, perhaps even better than they did pre-web in that you can create multiple, cross-channel ‘touch points’ with your customers before they become customers. As the old marketing saying goes: someone needs to see or hear about your product and company several times before they finally convert to a customer. But the best part is this is now affordable even for small businesses to saturate a well-defined targeted audience through many of the modern paid promotion tactics and ad networks available.
Figure out efficient ways to saturate an audience’s media space by advertising across channels smartly in a way that reaches specific audiences. As part of a holistic digital marketing program, branding should never be forgotten.
Danny Wong is the Brand Manager Blank Label Group’s brands Blank Label, Thread Traditionand RE:custom. He’s also a writer at HuffingtonPost, TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.
Post Image: Copenhagen City Bus Wrap
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Shawn Hakimian replied | Mar 3, 2011(1 comment)
What you’re basically saying is that their’s no way to measure ‘digital branding’. I find that to be completely untrue.
Intelligent marketers know how to implement first touch analytics, this clearly shows the first touchpoint of a consumer in the conversion path. If someone visited a website from a digital ad, then 2 weeks later types your company name in google and makes a purchase, you’re able to know that he first visited from that digital ad 2 weeks ago.
Adam Singer replied | Mar 3, 2011(633 comments)
Hi There Shawn,
I’ll let Danny respond in greater detail as these are his thoughts. However, consider many digitally savvy people block cookies/tracking, clear cache, use different computers, to purchase later, etc. Attribution is not always 100% perfectly measurable, however I think Danny’s point is it doesn’t degrade the value. Especially as part of a robust mix of initiatives to contribute to a general trend up in outcome oriented metrics.
Appreciate the comment!
Adam
Danny Wong replied | Mar 3, 2011(1 comment)
Hi Shawn,
You are right that you can track first touchpoints and attribute those to the conversion. Apologies in not mentioning that. But I don’t believe there’s a way to track the ‘in-betweens’ (the other interactions that contribute to the conversion other than the first and last). You are right that I was wrong to suggest there’s no way to measure digital branding, but I think I’ll change my position to that there’s no way to track success in all digital campaigns (because of the middle touchpoints), but of course, you can make assumptions from correlations.
Steve Bartol replied | Mar 3, 2011(5 comments)
Cross Pollenation via visual media branding. It is obviously the big picture we are looking for. All the branding in the world is great, but without a creative form of interest, the effect dwindles. We always have to peak interest, that we leave the viewer wanting to see what’s next. Branding is one thing, but I believe that it is equally important to leave a viewer with a desire to find other points of interest in what your doing. Interactive video, involvement, what’s the viewers point of view, but most importantly, are they the actual Target of the campaign we are creating. I am getting ready to implement an interactive idea in the next two months, that in theory cannot fail. Visual media marketing, and let the customer do my branding for me. The consumer will pay for my marketing campaign, and they won’t even know they’re doing it. Can’t let the cat out if the bag yet. But he’s kicking and screaming to get out. Thanks you guys, hope I’m not preaching to the Choir.
Jay Costan replied | Mar 14, 2011(2 comments)
Hi Danny,
Nice article! This is very helpful especially for entrepreneurs who are just starting their businesses. It gives them an idea the importance of digital branding and how it can help them in the long run.
I like it when you said that some people need to see or hear about the product first before they can become your customers. This is true owing to the fact that people nowadays are becoming more vigilant about internet marketing.
Meri A. replied | Mar 14, 2011(1 comment)
Small businesses should focus more on the quality of their marketing campaigns because consumers are, indeed, conducting more research now than ever before. Cision has tools that can help you monitor your results and offers insight on your campaign success! Here is a link to some of the PR-Tools from Cision .
Meri A is an advocate for Cision
Grace Rizza replied | Mar 14, 2011(4 comments)
This post does a great job of explaining how different forms of marketing and internet marketing work together. Many times, clients are very hooked on their “direct ROI” and miss the combined value of their efforts.
Jason S. replied | Apr 7, 2011(1 comment)
What you seem to be talking about here is brand exposure and frequency. Obviously the more frequent a consumer sees a brand, the more they will be able to remember it. I recall a study that says the frequency number is 7-13 for a consumer to remember. With that said, it’s important that you expose your target market to your brand multiple times and through a diverse set of channels.
As far as tracking this data, there are benchmarks you can set in place to help you keep track of the “eyes” or “path” your target market takes to a sale. Simple things like using different URLs. For example, you run an ad on TV, Radio, Internet, and print. Each different channel has a different URL listed. Now you can track which channel the sale came from. Clearly this isn’t full proof but using that concept you can begin to map out a campaign that can be tracked with a lower percentage of error.