Branding’s Buffet of Benefits

“So far this month, we’ve gotten three sales off radio leads.”

That was at dinner earlier tonight. These are high-dollar sales. It was a compliment. We clinked glasses.

It’s 2:04 AM, and I can’t sleep. I’ve been thinking about that dinner with some clients, colleagues, and friends.

I’ve been thinking about how that radio campaign’s done so much more – though maybe not as outwardly obvious or measurable on a report.

Our company doesn’t produce direct response campaigns, or at least, we don’t do it often, and we don’t enjoy it when we do.

I’ve grown weary and jaded toward direct response advertising, and I get the sense most of the public is with me.

We specialize in producing branding campaigns for good companies.

Yes, they should help you make direct sales every now and then, but if that’s how you were measuring the success of our campaigns, we wouldn’t keep clients very long.

We believe the goal of your advertising, in fact – the goal of all your marketing, should be to position your company as the one your market thinks about first and feels the best about when the need arises for your service or your product.

With direct response, if you don’t need my client’s service at the moment you’re touched by the marketing, it doesn’t have any impact and certainly no residual value or ancillary benefit.

Yet, a properly constructed branding campaign will only help you build equity (and more equity and more equity) in your market over time. It’s a wonderfully solid mutual fund paying reliable, steady – and sometimes shockingly exciting – dividends year after year.

It provides many benefits:

• It eliminates – or at least greatly reduces – the need for what we call “no preference advertising” – PPC, Yellow Pages – the places people turn when they have no preference. Expensive, inefficent places.
• By telling well your story and continuing to tell in ways that are meaningful to the customer, you bulid your brand promise and extend it to your employees – increasing their close ratios and average tickets.
• A branding campaign does wonders for repeat business as well. Between times when a customer needs your produce or service, she’s constantly reminded of what a great choice she made in picking you every time she hears, sees, or reads a piece of your marketing.
• A branding campaign constantly sparks referrals in the same way it keeps the fuse lit for repeat business. I may not need you today, but if I hear your story and it reminds me of how smart I was to choose you, I’m likely to refer you, in part, to make myself look good to friends and family.
• A great branding campaign serves as a perpetual recruiting tool for great employees who resonate with the values of your advertising. Even when you’re not hiring, you’re painting pictures of your company as the attractor of awesome.

Yes, a direct response campaign can yield marketed leads. But it builds no equity and has no long term sustaining value. It’s in one ear and out the other, or worse, directly into your trash can or folder.

Build a branding campaign that reflects who you are and what you stand for and against. Tell your story, and it will reap benefits for you in every aspect of your business for years and even generations to come.

Cheers. I’m going to try and get some sleep.

;