In this day and age, every other marketer is looking for short-cuts to achieve their marketing goals and it’s almost rare to find a client who really looks at the big picture and invest in long-term strategies.
NEIL PATEL RULES THE ROOST. NEIL FRENCH IS PASSE’
Old guard marketers still focus on building the brand and creating salience whereas most young guns in this profession don’t really get the idea of ‘brand building’ and invest largely on performance marketing to meet the KPIs and justify their marketing spend.
While traditional marketers often struggle when it comes to budget justification on brand building campaigns and other top of funnel investments, new-age digital marketers find it easier to justify the ROI on bottom of funnel marketing. Consequence: Marketeers are either myopically focussing on short-term benefits to gain a momentary sales spike or trying to create awareness and drive conversions with the same campaign which is even worse!
Gone are the days when we used to have hour-long conversations on ideas and insights with the brand custodians. Nowadays, we interact largely with ‘digital’ managers who only talk about ROI, ROAS, ACOS and CPA; seldom they would converse around brand purpose, persona, positioning or proposition. Brand custodians seem to have vanished and people in the brand team have become ‘sales custodians’.
BRAND BUILDING OR PERFORMANCE MARKETING?
It’s not an either-or case. Fact is, you can’t have one without the other – You need both. While we cannot ignore the importance of short-term benefits of performance marketing, we still need to invest in long-term brand building in order to grab a bigger share of the pie in the long run.
Top of the funnel branding efforts with no clear path-to-purchase can impact conversion. On the other hand, focusing only on the bottom of the funnel will impact your ability to grow business in the long run. You need to have a fine balance between the two in order to build the brand and scale business.
Most marketers are masters of one type; sadly very few excel at both simultaneously. Understanding how one stage impacts the other in the customer journey is really important. Thankfully, some of the newgen marketers are adopting full funnel approach to maintain a healthy balance of brand building and performance marketing. Hope to see more such folks in the coming days…