Starting a brand is hard, growing and scaling one is even harder and requires a different focus. Here are 7 areas to think about when growing a brand.
- Brand Health Tracking
It’s important to understand the health of your brand and not just count the sales. Brand Health Tracking is a indicator of future success and is important to understand key metrics like awareness & consideration, and also other equity statements related to your marketing strategy and positioning.
- Distinctiveness
Having a distinctive brand makes sure you stand out amongst the clutter and your competition. Key to this is ensuring you understand and prioritize your Distinctive Brand Assets. This is one of the most important areas of marketing effectiveness.
- Balanced Plan
It is common amongst modern brands to focus all their budget on short term initiatives such as Paid Search advertising which isn’t sustainable in the long term. You need to have a balanced plan with budget & activity focused on growing the brands (e.g. awareness) and direct response (e.g. sales).
- Targeting
Despite super tight targeting being a topic of much discussion in the digital age, you also need to ensure you are balanced here. While targeting can be good when going after “near in” or bottom of the funnel sales, don’t target too tightly for brand activity as this will increase costs and lower reach. Ultimately you want to reach as many category buyers as possible with your brand activity.
- Advocacy
With the plethora of choice in certain categories, and the abundance of new brands, the “messy middle” has become an even messier stage in brand choice, as consumers ask for opinions and conduct lots of research before buying. This is where advocacy is important as it provides reassurance to consumers, while ensuring your Ratings & Reviews are set up for success.
- Creativity
While marketing has evolved in recent years, it can be said that creativity has often taken a back seat with brands very focused on being too tactical or just running lots of content without strong hero creative. It is critical you create something that stands out both on the TV and in the newsfeed.
- Distribution
While D2C (Direct to Consumer) has changed the game when it comes to getting products in customers hands, having a broad distribution is still fundamental to growing a brand. In most instances you will limit the growth potential of your brand unless you branch out to retail distribution or other distribution outlets.