A fallacy often found in marketing is the emphasis on quantitative. This can happen particularly in digital marketing when the focus is on measuring traffic to a website for example. Measuring how many people are visiting a website or social media channel without knowing how the business reflects in the minds of those visitors may deflate the value of a brand.
This spring I purchased a copy of Harvard Business Review magazine because the cover was dedicated to ‘building your brand.’ See one of the articles below, in which the authors talk about a problem you likely encounter: quantity (metrics) over quality (brand development). Marketing often focuses on, and the industry has supported, something called performance marketing. Because I offer digital marketing services, my ideas relate to online marketing. The HBR article stretches out to marketing beyond digital. Performance marketing in the digital realm would refer to ‘clicks’ and ‘impressions’ instead of the feeling your business leaves on your audience or a singular person. Yet according to the authors, “with the right metrics you can increase your return on [your metrics and how your audience perceives your brand].”
From Harvard Business Review IDEA IN BRIEF
See link to full article, below.
THE PROBLEM
“Marketers often worry that performance marketing and its focus on short-term sales is crowding out brand-building activities aimed at enhancing customer perception of their brand - and sometimes works against brand strategy.”
Lamens Terms: If you’re focused only or mostly on seeing higher numbers (ie traffic to your website or showing up on page one of search results), the integrity of your brand can be compromised in the process.
WHY IT HAPPENS
“Brand-building activities are typically measured using metrics that have no predictive or retrospective connection to financial returns.”
Lamen Terms: If you’re too focused on metrics you might lose money and currently there’s no way to measure this correlation.
THE SOLUTION
“To achieve performance-accountable brand building and brand-accountable performance marketing, firms need to upgrade their brand metrics in a way that allows the two to work together.”
Lamens Terms: Don’t ignore your brand. Since you’re reading this and are likely not an agency with tools to measure how the performance of metrics affect your bottom line, I do suggest trying to spend equal measure on brand building and equal measure on your metrics (search results, traffic, etc.) I provide an example below.
EXAMPLE
You want to improve where your website lands in search results. That’s to say you’re interested in improving your site’s SEO. And you’ve heard that if you add content to your site regularly, by blogging, for example, you can improve your SEO (a metric).
You were also told, or have learned that you need to lace your content with long-tail and short-tail keywords, broad match keywords, use H1 tags, etc.
You can and should also add links to third parties, plus include images for engagement. You need your post to be long - like 500-2000 words.
Equipped with this knowledge you begin to write with intention. The intent is to use all the above and increase your metrics in SEO.
But this content may and likely will miss a critical piece: Your audience. And how they perceive the value of your brand. You may not have included or thought about how your audience will respond to the content. You may not have thought about whether or not the voice of the content is strong or weak if the keywords weigh down the message or make the reading too clunky and maybe even uninteresting. Because the above actions focus on performance marketing, not on brand building.
The HBR piece, linked below, points out that for the last 20 years, performance marketing has been the dominant approach that companies use to connect with customers. Think about it this way: the internet is a bit of a mess. I’m willing to bet that when performing a swift search, you don’t trust most of the information you find, and feel that most of what you discover is a bit stale, irrelevant, and maybe shallow as opposed to in-depth. That’s in part because most content is curated online with performance marketing in mind. A lot of content is more concerned with showing up first in search results, for example than interested in the quality of the information and how it reflects on the brand.
PIVOTING
When looking for quality online, one of the places I’ve really come to love is Substack. I can pay my favorite specialist a small token ($5-6 a month on average) for direct access to their writing. I pay Emily Oster of Parent Data because I’m a new mom, and I pay Katy Hessel of the Great Women Artists because I love art. I do wish they had their own website where they could drive traffic. But I do find comfort in directly paying these specialists for quality content.
One of the dynamics that unfolds on Substack is the immediate monetary return on quality content. An individual is paid per subscriber for (more) access. This format exists in large news media, and from what I understand, Substack is a direct result of the phenomenon that is ‘paid media.’
I don’t intend to divert from the topic of this post. However, the takeaway can be this: as an audience member, do your best to create quality content. In addition to using tools that support positive metrics.
Over time you will be able to watch your analytics (metrics) to see which content receives more engagement, and which content leads to conversions. Some content can have actions within that translate to a direct buy, for example. Which content draws repeat views?
Your brand matters. People care what you make. Measuring the direct correlation between how many clicks for example impact your brand quality will be difficult to achieve for some time. Much of brand building is about authenticity, intuition, and listening to your people. Using data, like Google Analytics is a nice tool for support.