For years, marketers have been asked to do more with less. The more market volatility, the more marketing is naively perceived as a cost that can be cut to increase margins. While you fight (again) to prove marketing is an investment for growth, here are recommendations for what you can do immediately to improve your market impact, from the authors of Rebrand Right– how to refresh your brand and marketing to grow your business, hailed by Boots CMO, Pete Markey, as “a definitive guide on how to help your business grow”.
Consolidate your budgets
We’ve found it’s quite usual for marketing to budget brand marketing separately from demand generation. Does that sound familiar?
Consider the buyer’s perspective. They think of you as one brand and are not interested in your organisational structure. One brand enemy you face is inertia because buyers often feel safer repeating a decision rather than making a new one. You need to build their confidence in choosing your brand. The experience they have with you has to be cohesive. This is full-funnel marketing, from brand to demand to experience.
Les Binet and Peter Field tell us it is critical to balance long-term brand building with short term demand generation. Put the brand and demand budgets together so you have a maximum investment amount. As you define your marketing strategy and plan, you will make choices that allocate investment to where it’s needed most to achieve your goals.
For the full funnel, we’ve found it effective to invest 10–20% of the budget in making ads and tactics, 10% in localisation and production (including martech) and 70–80% in reach and frequency. Often, the tactics at the top of the funnel are more expensive than nearer purchase, so we usually find that the budget ends up being split along the lines Binet and Field recommend.
Investment consistency is the other challenge. As the quarters progress, budgets can get cut to achieve a target margin. Leadership have ‘great ideas’ that eat budget that has to come from cutting somewhere else. To build demand, you must invest consistently, so work with finance to achieve continuity.
Deploy creative that cuts through the noise and gets attention
You need creative that cuts through the noise and generates an emotional response to help you get attention and become easy to mind. High-quality creative attracts four times more profit than low quality.
Les Binet tells us that: “Campaigns that consciously aim to make the brand and its marketing famous are much, much better at reducing price sensitivity and supporting premium prices than any other kind of marketing.”
Before you dream of any new campaign creative ideas and advertising, what do you already have? Make popcorn and watch them all.
We’ve worked with businesses who think nothing of investing in a new ad every year without putting the media budget behind it to get it seen. Everyone loves the shiny new thing. Marketers enjoy the making and the kudos. The financial enemy for agencies is an effective ad they’ve already made. This is a tough paradigm to shift, but we ask you to care more about growing revenue than being seen to launch a new ad. Effective ads rarely wear out.
Do any of the ads you have support your brand strategy? If one comes close, can it run as is? Or does it need to be tweaked to fit? Do a quick calculation of how much you would need to invest in reusing or upcycling existing versus making new. Test to understand how effective the ad is. The cost of developing new is money and time, because the market won’t wait.
If you need new advertising, then appoint the best creative agency you can find to inject their brilliance. This is one of those moments to bring in external creative firepower. Agency talent works on different briefs for different businesses to bring compelling creative ideas to the brands they work on. Their culture hungers to create work that cuts through the noise. Why? Leadership are often more open to ideas from external experts, and motivations, politics, exposure and culture often prevent in-house ideas from being successful. If you already have strong creative you can use, ask the agency to help make the creative idea work from brand to demand.
Ensure you know the problem that needs solving
The world’s most valuable brands have four things in common. They’re Cohesive, Relevant, Easy and Different – CRED – the four brand factors that drive growth. To strengthen your brand’s CRED, begin by diagnosing what needs to be protected, changed or added. Take a quick, free CRED diagnostic quiz at Rebrand-Right.com to identify where to focus your efforts. Our book Rebrand Right will guide you through why and how to strengthen your brand, marketing and experience.
We’re rooting for you.
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