Welcome back to our discussion on finding the balance between brand and demand marketing efforts. In our previous post, we delved into the dynamic relationship between brand advertising and demand generation and explored how brand advertising plays a crucial role in building brand recognition and capturing the attention of potential customers, while demand generation focuses on converting interested individuals into loyal customers.
We discussed the importance of striking a balance between the two strategies to drive both short-term and long-term growth for your business. Today, we'll dive deeper into this topic, exploring the intricate interplay between brand advertising and demand generation and how they collectively contribute to your overall marketing success.
But what exactly are the drivers of these two? Senior leadership need to know how ad investments are working, and it is marketers’ job to easily break that down for them.
Drivers of “brand”
Building brand value is essential for elevating customer perception and commanding premium prices. Take Coca-Cola, for example, whose strong brand legacy allows them to charge more for their products. To effectively build a brand, Kevin Keller's Brand Value Stages offer valuable insights into how marketing tactics influence brand value creation. These components serve as leading indicators across the Brand Value Stages. When these metrics are combined using advanced analytics, they contribute to the creation of a composite score that Merkle refers to as the Brand Value Index (BVI).
Like an EKG machine measuring our heartbeat, the Brand Value Index provides a key measure of a brand's health and future impact on downstream demand metrics, such as sales and stock price. This composite score considers various early signals from Keller's framework, analyzing the brand's performance across different stages and evaluating its overall vitality.
By utilizing advanced analytics and machine learning, the Brand Value Index provides marketers with a comprehensive understanding of their brand's performance and potential future outcomes. Any blip or fluctuation in this signal serves as an indicator that helps anticipate the impact on key metrics down the line.
Signals to drive better insights
With the Brand Vitality Components and the Brand Vitality Index, marketers have a powerful toolkit to assess and enhance their brand-building efforts. These insights enable them to make data-driven decisions, optimize strategies, and ultimately drive long-term brand growth.
This signal holds the potential to drive a multitude of decisions across the Brand Value Stages.
Drivers of “demand”
Demand generation is driven by several key factors that aim to create awareness, generate interest, and ultimately drive customer demand for a product or service. It’s critical to incorporate the inputs from your brand strategy in your demand generation tactics as well. This consistency in strategy will help drive better returns from marketing.
A few of the main drivers of demand generation marketing include:
Content Marketing: High-quality, relevant, and engaging content plays a vital role in demand generation. By creating valuable content such as blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and ebooks, marketers can attract and educate potential customers, building trust and positioning themselves as industry experts.
For example, the brand value stages we talked about earlier like customer feedback can inform your call center that a specific feature of your product is confusing. Therefore, your marketing team could develop demand generating content that can better explain how the product is used, and benefits each feature provides.
Personalization and Segmentation: Account-based marketing to deliver personalized experiences based on the specific needs and preferences can enhance demand generation efforts. Segmenting the target audience into smaller groups based on interests, or buying behaviors allows marketers to tailor their messaging and offers to maximize relevance and engagement.
Marketing Automation and Technology: Utilizing marketing automation tools and technologies can streamline demand generation efforts. Automated email campaigns, lead scoring, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and analytics platforms help marketers track and measure ROI, identify areas for improvement, and optimize marketing strategies
Bringing it all together
Aligning brand building marketing efforts and demand generation with sales goals creates a more powerful marketing ecosystem.
Your brand strategy must inform demand generation. The real magic happens when you can bring these insights together!
Using machine learning to incorporate leading indicators to create the composite score - Brand Value Index, marketers can strengthen their brand's value proposition, resonate with customers, and create a competitive edge in the market with better informed demand generation. It's through these strategic approaches that brands can achieve sustainable growth and differentiate themselves in the eyes of the customer.
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