When I first started in business years ago, I looked at marketing in a completely different light than I do now.
I thought good marketing was to focus on building a big and well-known brand.
Makes sense, right? The more people who know who you are, the more people who will buy from you.
Boy did I have it backwards…
How Brand Building Can Cause More Harm Than Good
Many businesses are so distracted by brand building, they forget to focus on the most important part of a business…
The selling part.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against brand building or branding. Having a solid, coherent brand is an extremely important metric.
Buttttttt, we should not be using brand building as the goal for our advertising.
“So why is focusing on brand building bad?”
Here are a couple reasons why…
First, marketing should be measurable.
Pearson’s Law says,
“What is measured, improves.”
Brand building is almost impossible to measure.
If we spend money on an ad and cannot measure the success of the ad in dollars, we might as well be throwing our money to the raccoons.
Second, we don’t have the budget to do it.
Trust me, if that is your only goal, it is going to take soooooo much money.
You have no idea how much money it takes to get the market saturated enough with your brand name for it to start getting recognized.
You won’t be able to keep up if that is the only goal.
So how should we go about building a brand?
The Secret To Doing Brand Building Right
Brand building should be a biproduct. The FIRST priority should be to sell.
A lot of people that think they know marketing, will tell you that is a dumb way of looking at it.
They’ll say:
“What about Coke? What about Nike? Look at McDonalds? Do you think that those brands aren’t worth anything?”
Yeah, sure they may be worth something now. But they all started by selling.
If you look at Coca Cola’s history, they started by selling coupons.
Now they can throw a cute polar bear on a billboard, as the marketing department has 600 people and a $600 million budget… it’s all good.
But we don’t start out with a $600 million budget.
And we want to turn a profit.
Well, we get profit by selling.
Selling helps us focus on directly increasing profits instead of spending $1000 on a “brand building” ad where 100,000 people saw our name, but we have no idea what the effect of our advertising was.
You cannot pay rent with “brand awareness”. You pay rent with money. You make money by selling things.
Let’s put brand building as a side mission…
It will happen naturally if we do the selling right.
If we sell enough, if we develop our audience, if we retarget, if we make sure we have good conversion, if we have a good product and a good offer
Yeah, we will sell things.
And as a side effect we will build our brand.
Time to go out and start selling.
And for goodness’ sake, stop wasting money on brand building!
Talk soon,
Caden
P.S. If you want to know how I would implement ads that focus on selling and keep from wasting away your ad budget, fill out the form HERE. One of my team members will get in touch with you.
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