What Is Brand Marketing and Should We Be Investing In It?

TL;DR? What Brand Marketing Is and Why You Need It

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Brand marketing is about promoting your brand, not just the products you sell or services you provide, and paves the way for sustainable growth over the long term.

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• People can’t buy from your business or donate to your charity if they don’t know about you. Brand marketing plays a critical role in success by getting you known about and remembered when it matters

• Being known about and easily recalled isn’t enough on its own. People need to see that you have what it takes to satisfy their wants and needs. Brand marketing has an important role in showcasing your abilities in order to establish your credibility

• Even when people know about you, can bring you to mind when it counts, and recognise your capabilities, they still need to trust you. Brand marketing that highlights your organisation’s personality and values helps build trust through authenticity

• Brand marketing is a long term strategic investment aimed at making your business or charity visible, memorable, relatable, credible, and trustworthy to audiences when they’re ‘out of market’ so that they are more likely to consider you when they are ‘in market’ 

• By building familiarity and affinity over time, your brand marketing efforts help to elevate your business or charity over its rivals when it comes to people making a choice (they are more likely than not to pick a brand they have heard of and trust than one that’s new to them with unproven bona fides)

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Brand Marketing: The Basics

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There’s a saying that people buy from those they know, like, and trust.

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The same applies to brands, both business and charity.

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Brand marketing, at its heart, is about making that a reality, and it’s really crucial to your future success, because:

• If people don’t know about you, they can’t possibly do business with you

• If they’ve heard of you fleetingly and are only vaguely aware of you, they’re unlikely to remember you when they’re in ‘buying mode’ (or ‘giving mode’ if you’re a charity)

• Even when people have a solid awareness of you and can easily recall your brand, if they’re not convinced of your capabilities and quality, they’re still unlikely to consider you

• And, if despite all your efforts to become well known, memorable, and known for your expertise etc, if you haven’t also done enough to gain their trust, people probably just won’t buy from or donate to you in the end anyway

Brand marketing is the sum of all your efforts to attract attention, make your brand ‘sticky’, let people see that you have what it takes to meet their wants, needs, and expectations, and that they can rely on you to do so.

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An Example of Brand Marketing In Action: McDonalds Restaurants

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Picture this: you’re visiting a town in the UK for the first time to attend a meeting with a potential client. Your appointment isn’t until 1:30pm but, eager to make sure you beat the traffic and arrive on time so you can make a good impression, you get there early.

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It’s lunchtime. Your stomach is grumbling and you decide it’s probably a good idea to grab something to eat before heading to your meeting.

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You want something hot and tasty, of a quality you know you can count on, that’s easy to get to, with speedy service so you have time to consume it without having to rush and can still be at your appointment on time.

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Do you:

1. Start researching local independent food outlets on Trip Advisor to find somewhere that is convenient, has free parking on-site, 5-star food hygiene rating, and lots of positive reviews for its food and service; or
2. Plot your satnav to the nearest McDonald’s drive-thru because it's a brand you are already super familiar with, and although it’s hardly gourmet quality, you know exactly what to expect and that it ticks all the right boxes on this occasion?

Nine times out of ten, most of us will probably default to the latter and head for the nearest Golden Arches.

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It’s not because we’d rather give our money to a gigantic global corporation instead of supporting a local small business, or because we particularly adore the food they serve, it’s simply because McDonald's is a brand we know, that comes to mind easily when we’re looking for somewhere quick and convenient for something to eat, and that has a firm reputation for its food and service quality. 

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We don’t know the local brands, and so can’t seek them out specifically, which means we first have to do some research. Can we park close by for free or will we end up paying through the nose to park half-a-mile away at the other end of the high street (having had to first master the confusing one-way system)? Will the food be up to scratch? And will our order be prepared and plated quickly enough that we can take our time to enjoy it rather than be forced to guzzle it down so we have time to frog march back to the car and still get to our meeting (ideally without the obligatory burger relish stain that comes from scoffing our food too speedily to notice we squeezed the bun a bit too hard)? 

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This isn’t a happy accident. McDonald's has spent decades promoting its brand to us. It’s made itself unignorable, and synonymous with fast, dependable service and uniform quality - no matter where you are in the world, when you walk into a McDonald’s restaurant, you know exactly what to expect.

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That’s the power of brand marketing - being known about, being memorable, and being known for being good at what you do, and trusted to do it well.

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Brand Marketing And The Customer Journey

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Generally speaking, the vast majority of the time, people are just not in the market for what you sell or do.

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For instance, on average in the UK, people tend to stay in a house for 9-10 years before listing it for sale and moving up the property ladder. The process of selling a home typically takes around 6-9 months, which means homeowners are only ever ‘in market’ for the services of an estate agent for roughly 6% of the time they own any given property. 

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Does that mean estate agents should focus all their efforts on trying to laser target their promotional marketing efforts at those people ready to sell and move? 

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Put simply, no.

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Instead, the investment in marketing needs to start much earlier, with estate agents consistently getting their brand in front of residents in their patch over the long-term, even - especially - when those residents are not considering putting their homes on the market. 

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This way, there’s a greater opportunity for repeated brand exposure (familiarity breeds affinity) with plenty of chances to build the sort of narrative McDonald’s has: “this estate agent is everywhere I look, they seem to do a great job of presenting houses for sale, and I hear they have a track record for helping people sell faster, for more, and with less hassle” so when someone is ready to engage an estate agent, there’s more chance of being invited to pitch for the listing.

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Effort invested in brand marketing today paves the way to greater performance marketing success tomorrow - regardless of the type of business you operate or the kind of charity you run.

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When mapped to the typical three stage marketing funnel that’s widely used to depict the customer journey, brand marketing involves:

• Awareness raising activities at the very top of the funnel designed to get your brand seen and remembered

• Activities in the middle of the funnel that are designed to educate aware audiences about your capabilities, and that help to acquire trust

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What Does Brand Marketing Involve?

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Strategic brand marketing consists of establishing:

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Brand identity: creating a distinctive visual identity that consists of a recognisable logo, fonts, and colours

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Brand tone and voice: the way your brand conveys it's personality (fun and approachable v serious and professional etc)

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Brand values: people increasingly buy into the how and why of your organisation, not just the what. This is where authenticity really matters, and helps to engender trust. Your brand values speak to your behaviours and how people can expect to be treated

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Functionally and tactically, brand marketing typically involves:

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Brand awareness advertising: using ads across digital, out-of-home, broadcast, and print channels to get your brand in front of as many people as possible in your target audience as often as you can

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PR or public relations: telling your stories in the media in a bid to get your brand in front of broad audiences but to also use the power of ‘earned media’ to establish your authority and credentials

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Content marketing: creating and distributing content that showcases your knowledge and expertise, previous work, and satisfied customers

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Social media marketing: using a mixture of organic and paid social media to get your brand and content in front of your target audiences, stimulate conversations, and deliver good customer service by responding promptly and directly to queries and complaints

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PPC and SEO: using pay-per-click search engine ads to drive traffic to the blog, case study, and resources pages on your website where you present your brand-building content in addition your technical, on-page, and off-page SEO used to surface your content organically

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Email nurturing: using your highest value content to acquire the email addresses of marketing leads, and then nurturing these towards your sales pipeline when the time is right - building your narrative with storytelling, and keeping your brand front-of-mind

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Key across all elements of your brand marketing communications are frequency and consistency. It’s important to keep showing up, and to do so in a way that means people recognise you.

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The Importance of Being Bold With Your Brand Marketing

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OK, so you now know that brand marketing is an investment in getting seen and remembered, recognised for your experience and expertise, and trusted, and you have an idea of what it involves.

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Let’s now talk about how to execute your brand marketing in a way that improves your chances of success: taking a bold approach.

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People are so inundated with marketing messages these days that they have begun to tune them out.

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This means that for your brand marketing efforts to work effectively, you need to find a way to cut through all the noise and competing distractions or you risk simply blending in when you need to stand out.

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To achieve this, you need to do something that grabs attention and really sets you apart, which typically means:

• Being notably different, quirky, or unusual in some other way

• Turning up where people wouldn’t expect to find you

• Using emotion and humour in your brand marketing communications

Or all of these together.

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It works because of the way our brains have evolved over thousands of years. 

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The ‘prehistoric’ limbic system consists of brain regions that exist to keep us alive by continuously scanning our immediate environment for threats, and that are hypervigilant when it comes to noticing things that differ from expectation or suddenly change. Happily, these same processes also spot advertising imagery and messaging that doesn’t conform to established norms, which is what makes bold and creative communications so key to grabbing attention.

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The limbic system thinks and evaluates inputs emotionally, based on how a particular stimulus makes us feel. It also compares them with a library of feelings from previous experiences. If you can feature emotionally evocative imagery, music, and messaging in your brand marketing, you have a greater chance of triggering your audiences to pay attention as their brains make an assessment: “Have we encountered this before? How did it make us feel? What can we remember from it?” Better still, our brains encode things more permanently in our emotional memory for future retrieval, and so emotional cues aid memorability.

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And guess what? Humour triggers a particularly potent emotional reaction; not only does it help to get your brand remembered, people will then positively associate your brand with the pleasant feeling they experienced, increasing their fondness for you.

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It's exactly why we used a guerilla marketing stunt to promote a music festival in Preston by installing a Banksy-style mural in the middle of the night so that it mysteriously appeared for all to see the next day, just like the real thing. Read about it in this case study: Festival success with Facebook ads and guerrilla marketing.

Don’t believe us? Then consider this: Confused.com was the first entrant into the online insurance comparison market in the early 2000s, but it's promotional marketing was just what people expected of it: you go online, answer some questions, get a list of quotes to compare. Then along came CompareTheMarket.com with its entertaining ‘Compare the Meerkat’ ads featuring an animated Russian Meerkat called Sergei, and GoCompare.com with it's fake opera singer Giorgio Compario. These were utterly unlike anything else at the time, and barely even talked about the product; they promoted the brands instead. Today, these two dominate the online comparison space whilst the first entrant hovers between third and fourth place - its ‘steady Eddie’ approach left for dust by the more creative brand marketing of its upstart rivals.

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Here at Fifty2M, we differentiate ourselves with our playful, tongue-in-cheek references that have seen us come to be known as "the marketing agency with balls" - reflecting not just our bold approach to grabbing attention and getting results, but also the fact that we hand out branded stress balls to would-be clients. It makes us instantly recognisable, and memorable for all the reasons discussed above.

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Key Takeaways: What You Need To Know About Brand Marketing

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• Brand marketing is a long-term investment in sustainable growth

• Every purchase from a business, or donation to a charity, begins with awareness; if people don’t know about you, they can’t possibly have any kind of relationship with you

• Whilst brand awareness is crucial, so is brand recall; you need to come to mind easily when people are ready to buy or donate

• Brand marketing is also essential to establishing your credentials which are key to gaining people’s trust

• Strategic brand marketing consists of establishing a distinctive, recognisable and memorable visual identify; a tone and voice that portray your brand’s personality; and authentically showcasing your values, such as integrity, in a way that engenders trust

• Tactically, brand marketing consists of activities and communications addressing the top and middle of the marketing funnel, including brand awareness ads, securing brand mentions in the media with PR, content marketing, paid and organic social media, PPC and SEO, and email marketing

• Standing out is key to success, and so requires a bold, creative approach to grabbing attention, using emotive imagery and messaging, and especially humour

Have you enjoyed reading this blog? Found it useful and informative? Then show it some love by sharing it on your socials and tag us in! Think it all sounds a bit exhausting and want some help with it? Enquire about our Brand Marketing here.

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