How a weak brand identity undermines your digital success
The digital marketing landscape is a battleground where only the most innovative and strategic businesses thrive. With the ceaseless evolution of technologies and audience preferences, companies must adapt their strategies to stay relevant and profitable. Yet, in a world where performance marketing often takes precedence, there’s one crucial component that many businesses neglect – branding.
But what are the dangers of undermining branding? What do we see happening in the digital landscape, and why are we so focused on performance? And most importantly, is a weak brand identity really the silent killer of success in today’s hyper-competitive Industry?
What is branding?
To understand the importance of branding, we must understand its definition.
”Branding is the process of creating a distinct identity for a business in the mind of your target audience and consumers.”
However, branding or a brand identity goes beyond a memorable slogan or an appealing logo. It is the translation and communication of a company’s mission, values, and the impression it etches in the minds of consumers. A strong brand identity can catapult a business into the limelight, establishing customer loyalty and differentiating it from competitors. Contrariwise, a frail one can subtly but steadily undermine a company’s potential.
What we see most businesses do.
We’ve all seen those ads of agencies praising and promising to deliver the highest ROAS and best results on your marketing efforts. We rarely see them talking about the importance of your branding and attracting new customers to facilitate long-term growth, though. But why?
There’s not one easy answer, but let’s look at the most important causes. Foremost, businesses and agencies tend to focus on low-hanging fruit, short-term sales to generate revenue, and a healthy cash flow. This ‘low-hanging fruit’ usually consists of your current customer base, people who have already bought your products or services and are familiar with your offering.
For this reason, we see a lot of businesses, agencies, and marketers putting emphasis on their current demand pool. Generating short-term sales, without attracting new customers to create future demand for their products or services.
What brands should be doing.
Now we aren’t saying that focusing on low-hanging fruit is a bad thing, at the end of the day we need revenue to build a sustainable business. However, solely focusing on performance is like sprinting at the start of a marathon.
Success lies in the power of a balanced marketing strategy, where performance marketing and branding coexist and complement each other. It’s an approach that empowers businesses to nourish their existing customer base, while expanding their potential audience base, paving the way for sustainable, long-term growth. In essence, branding is performance over time.
But if this approach has the best of both worlds, why don’t marketers or businesses deploy this method? Well, simply because they lack the means to do so.
Why they can't.
Various regulations have made it incredibly difficult to gather, track and assign values to every touchpoint in a customer’s journey. Marketers and businesses simply lack the means to track every interaction a person has with their brand before converting. What they can measure, however, are people who buy or have previously bought and can therefore be retargeted.
This means that people who have shown interest in your product or service (for instance by clicking an ad), but never proceeded to purchase will be lost. This means missing out on a huge amount of potential, not attracting enough new customers for sustainable growth, and saturating your current demand pool with continuous retargeting.
The dangers of not investing in branding.
A narrow focus on performance marketing – chasing conversions, and incessantly retargeting existing customers – leads to an underinvestment in your potential customer base. Companies risk over-saturating their current demand pool and underinvesting in attracting new customers. Over time, this strategy can inflate customer acquisition costs, hinder long-term growth, and potentially even destabilize your business model.
‘’Too much time spent picking the low-hanging fruit, means less time watering the tree. Eventually, the tree stops growing.’’
Through Billy Grace, businesses can leverage first-party data, gathered through a state-of-the-art tracking pixel, to understand their audience better. By applying powerful AI algorithms, Billy Grace can analyze consumer behavior, preferences, and engagement across multiple channels, providing businesses with invaluable insights to build a solid and engaging brand identity.
The AI-driven attribution model ensures that businesses not only understand the customer’s journey but can also assign the correct value to every touchpoint. This sophisticated approach allows CroudX to optimize your marketing efforts effectively, ensuring they reach and convert both their existing and potential customers.
In conclusion, if there’s one wake-up call businesses must heed today, it’s the necessity of a strong brand identity. Neglecting this aspect of your marketing strategy is akin to leaving a chink in your armor on a battlefield as competitive as today’s industry. At CroudX, we’re committed to helping businesses fortify their brand identities and optimize their performance marketing, setting them on a path of sustained growth and success.
