Archives for January 2020

Finding ways to distribute marketing budgets is an important priority for many marketers. When marketers are getting ready to run advertising campaigns, they must know where the best areas are to spend money and have the best return on investment possible. In order to come up with an efficient mix of marketing dollar disbursement, marketers put together different methods in order to obtain the absolute maximum effect. Marketers strive to spend the least amount of money possible in terms of advertising yet still reach a large audience. One technique which they use in order to reach this outcome is the brand development index, or BDI.

According to an article on Cleverism, the brand development index is used for identifying the relationship between the total sales of a brand in a particular market and the total population in the market. The article uses the Coca-Cola Company as an example, stating that to calculate the BDI for any particular region in the US, Coke must calculate its sales in that particular region as a percentage of its total sales in the US. This is then compared with the population of the region in question as a percentage of the total population of the US. The formula used is: BDI= [Brand sales to region / Population in region] / [Total brand sales + Total population]. As Informit better describes it, the BDI Is basically a measure of brand sales per person or per household within a specified demographic group, compared with its average sales per person or household in the market as a whole.

After attaining these calculations, brands can decide whether they want to spend more or less marketing dollars compared to what the market’s BDI is. More of the marketing budget can be spent on areas where the BDI is higher because more of a target audience can then be reached. BDI also tends to be used in conjunction with CDI or category development index. The CDI measures how strong sales are for certain product categories in specific markets and then compares it to the average performance of consumers everywhere. The formula used here is: CDI= [Category sales to group / Households in group] / [Total category sales / Total households]. The outcome allows marketers to pinpoint where the strong and weak segments are located for different service categories. Like the BDI, the CDI contributes by giving marketers important information so that they can better assign advertisements and disburse marketing budgets to certain areas. Informit describes the CDI as an index of how well a category performs within a given market segment, relative to its performance in the market as a whole.

Both the BDI and CDI tools are important for marketing initiatives and guide marketers in the right direction so that they know whether to pour their efforts into constructing a brand, or if the category is weak overall and efforts should focus on improving the category before focusing on the brand. These tools also enable marketers to find comparisons much faster and easier. Overall, both tools are extremely important in guiding marketers to put together financially sound marketing strategy plans.

 

Giving a brand a personality is essentially giving it human traits or personifying it. When a brand is described as unique, “trustworthy, beautiful, or funny, it is being assigned adjectives and characteristics that are normally given to a person. It might seem like a bit of a strange practice, but it is actually an essential part of crafting a brand’s personality. A brand should extend much further than just being a cool logo or name. It should be a customer experience and should communicate through various methods what it actually represents. When a brand has built a personality and a voice for itself, it is able to make personal connections with audiences.

 

I recently began working for a marketing agency in the floral industry. Gems is a lifestyle company focused on creating demand for fresh cut flowers. The company’s goal is to change when and how people buy flowers. Gems’ flowers are grown in Colombia and are then distributed to supermarkets throughout the United States. Bouquets range from standard holidays arrangements and traditional daily bouquets to custom recipes created for smaller holidays like the Day of the Dead and Diwali. It is a wonderful company who describes itself as distinctive, personal, and remarkable. I find these qualities to be true and relevant to the target group. In addition, these traits align with what Gems delivers.

Gems’ target audience is made up of grocery stores who want to offer a “different” type of bouquet to their customers. Gems is able to fulfill these requirements by offering distinctive yet personal bouquets. New recipes are put together according to what clients ask of our company. We completely tailor bouquets according to what supermarkets want to serve to the public. However, Gems pays attention to detail and does its best to ensure that each product is sophisticated and distinctive enough to differentiate us from other floral distributors. We try to be different in the types of bouquets that we offer and what holidays we offer them for, as well as adding very detailed final touches like sticker picks and custom sleeves in order to make the bouquet that much more special. These qualities not only contribute to the company’s claim of being remarkable but also fit into the brand personality Gems aims to achieve. Gems has worked to construct a brand that is sincere by building a personality that is transparent and thoughtful. It is ethical and has built customer trust along the years by taking customer expectations seriously and always delivering responsibly.

One of the reasons Gems has maintained such a successful brand personality and reputation is because they have maintained their personality through their actions. Gems is an honest brand that works to deliver products ethically and will correct issues that do not align with their brand personality. There are a couple of things that Gems can do however in order to liven up their brand personality in the digital age. In addition to the qualities mentioned above, Gems portrays a young and exciting brand image and I believe there is a lot more that the company can do in order to display this. For example, trendy and younger brands tend to be associated with social media and exciting posts. Gems should take advantage of this personality trait and use it to garner excitement among their followers.  Additionally, Gems can be more consistent with press releases and the frequency of their posts. This would absolutely add a more personalized touch to their brand personality.

A whole lot goes on online. There’s a lot of content generated between social media, google searches, and so much more. Content marketers work to understand where a particular brand or company is talked about, what exactly is being talked about, and who is outranking the brand in terms of reputation.  When it comes to digital marketing, a company’s share of voice (sometimes known as the SOV) describes the share of conversations that surround a brand, products and services, and various marketing channels like blogs and social media. This means that brand awareness can be measured via different marketing channels compared to the company’s competitors. When you’re measuring your share of voice, you are determining how effective your brand is in their marketing efforts compared to marketing efforts put forth by competitors. The higher your brand’s share of voice is, the more popular and significant your brand is in the industry.

Share of voice can be measured for different channels such as social media and SEO and although the steps involved change slightly, the overall equation is fairly simple: Brand advertising / Total market advertising = Share of voice. It is crucial to be mindful of the amount of mentions made about your brand during a certain amount of time. Next it’s time to follow this process for your competitors, keeping track of all related keywords. By calculating the total amount of mentions and dividing it by 100, you can calculate what 1 percent of the total voice for your group is. You can then separate your brand’s total amount of mentions and divide it by whatever number was first calculated. This can be done repeatedly to calculate the total voice for each competitor.

In order for marketers to garner consumer interest and get them to buy products, a brand needs to be visible, meaning that brand awareness is priority for marketers. The share of voice metric is not only extremely useful in understanding how visible a brand is, but in measuring marketing efforts across different channels as well.

According to an article on share of voice by Talk Walker, there are three main segments that should be considered when growing a brand’s share of voice. The first segment is traditional media, meaning achieving brand mentions through public relations and sponsorship strategy. The second segment is utilizing influencers and industry experts. When a brand is mentioned by a particularly strong influencer, brand awareness can skyrocket. The third segment is user-generated content. By making customers happy, they will then turn around and create satisfaction-driven content, which will reach the ears of other customers and improve brand awareness.

Share of voice is a very helpful tool in understanding how your business compares to competitors within the same industry. Tracking your brand’s SOV over a period of time can help you understand how relevant you currently are in the market. It is also a great tool in determining in what area your brand must gain more strength. For example, if you have a very strong share of voice when it comes to SEO, but a weak share of voice in the social media market, this serves as an indicator as to where a company must improve. It’s important to know what consumers are saying about your brand, and just as important to know what they are saying about your competitors. Calculating share of voice provides important information that can help your brand be viewed in a more positive light.

 

The meaning of a brand plays a huge role into why we purchase them. Brand management is essentially about managing what brands mean. When brands have strong meanings, it is easier for a strong brand to be built. Once a brand meaning begins losing importance in the life of a consumer the brand begins to deteriorate.

The most important part of creating brand resonance is to market products in such a way that owning said product helps consumers define a part of their social identity or who they are. You can see this in consumers who swear by MAC makeup, Apple lovers who only use mac computers and iPhones, and auto owners who refuse any cars that aren’t Mercedes. These consumers feel that certain brands in particular really help define a piece of who they are.

According to an article by Branding Strategy Insider, there are three routes to the path to the pinnacle of resonance. Personal resonance has to do with self-connection and helping consumers find their voice to express identity and navigate life choices. Personal resonance also covers interdependency by facilitating habits, rituals, and routines (a Starbucks coffee every morning, for example). The article then mentions that the second route is cultural resonance which links brands to enduring values or epochs and role resonance which links brand to social roles (Birkenstock consumers are “tree-huggers). Finally, organizational resonance is the third route by making sure the brand fits with the business model and making sure there is shared understanding of the brand among employees.

It is crucial for a brand to begin at the bottom of the brand resonance pyramid and strive to move up to the higher levels. However, few brands reach the very top. There are some steps brands can take in order to make the brand resonate with customers. By engaging with customers on an emotional level, learning about customers and their goals, targeting content for specific audience segments, and listening to customer feedback and adjusting accordingly, companies have a good shot at creating a brand that stands the test of time.

The brand resonance model is a great guide in brand building activities because it creates a checklist for brands to complete so that they can gain more brand equity. Once a company is able to reach the pinnacle of the brand resonance model, a harmonious relationship between the customer and brand will exist and the brand will therefore gain loyalty and will be much more competitive in the marketplace. These are the blocks which brands should build upon in order to develop a strong and successful brand.

With accessibility to the internet has come accessibility to all sorts of online data. According to Towards Data Science, around 2.5 million terabytes of data are generated every single day and by 2020, for every single person, there will be 1.7 MB of data created every second. In other words, this is a massive amount of information for marketers to work with. If the data were to be processed and analyzed, marketers would be able to gain many insights crucial to targeting the right types of customers. Because decoding so much data is a difficult task, data science has become an increasingly important field in the area of marketing.

Data science assists in pulling information from data and helping marketers choose the right insights that will allow them to optimize marketing strategies to the max and gain the most revenue they can. There are also many other ways that data science can be used in the marketing field, including SEO, content marketing, engagement, and marketing campaigns.

One major way data science can assist marketers is by putting together spending models that can help marketers better utilize their budget. Because many marketers tend to work with tight budgets, deriving the maximum ROI from those budgets is sometimes very difficult to do, but also essential. Sometimes this doesn’t work, and budgets aren’t used in the most efficient way possible. Data scientists can therefore take a look at what marketers are spending and run this data so that budgets can better be distributed across different campaigns and channels.

Data science is also beneficial when it comes to making data-driven decisions like targeting leads and lead scoring. For example, with analyzed data science in hand, marketers can target leads by looking at their history and determining what their online behavior is. This strategy can help marketers really get the most value out of their marketing efforts. Marketers can segment their customers according to behavior and consequently increase sales performance and revenue.

Additionally, data science can improve customer communication and interaction. Data points marketers in the right direction so as to allow them to understand when to effectively communicate with customers. For example, marketers may learn that certain customers do not reply to any emails but do in fact respond to text messages and phone calls. This is a way for marketers to understand how to best communicate with their target audience. Marketers can also use data science to access information about customers to receive information and send ads to those customers specifically.

Overall, data science is a useful way for marketers to collect useful information on their customers so that they can meet their marketing goals. There are a variety of benefits that data science provides and the ability to measure the decisions marketers have made is extremely beneficial. It also gives marketers the opportunity to break into the mind of customers and come up with really personal marketing strategies by illuminating crucial trends and relationships. The modern marketer really relies on data-driven results so it is a useful and important niche in the marketing industry.

A brand isn’t just an image or a logo. The term is used loosely and so many consumers do not realize that there is so much more to a brand, including feelings and emotional relationships. A brand is a relationship and along with a brand comes brand image and brand identity—two pieces that are crucial to the brand’s success.

 

Brand image and brand identity are often times mistaken for one another because they are both related to branding, which includes assigning a name to products or services. However, both terms mean very different things. Brand identity relates to the way a brand is defined and the way the creator of the brand wants the public to view it while brand image refers to how the brand’s consumers perceive it.

 

A brand’s identity focuses more on the way a company chooses to represent itself and the way the brand wants its audience to view it. Essentially, the brand identity should represent what the company looks like, stands for, and what is represents. Branding plays a crucial role in ensuring that an audience understands a company’s identity. A company’s consumers and competitors will distinguish products based on the way it markets itself and communicates its identity.

 

On the other hand, a brand image is geared more towards what customers think about a brand. When a customer thinks or hears about a brand, the feelings and ideas that come to mind are what form the brand image. Many moving parts go into building up a brand’s image such as promotions, campaigns, customer interaction, etc. However, once a customer perceives a particular brand in a positive light, it is well on its way to becoming successful.

 

Building an effective brand image and brand identity makes it easier for consumers to connect with a brand and form a special relationship with it, which in turn builds customer loyalty. Both are critical for a brand to prosper. By understanding how both of each of these segments of branding feed into the creation of a brand and by carefully strategizing, a company can create something to be remembered by.