Does Brand Advertising Still Qualify as Effective Marketing?
Posted by Patrick Murphy on Thu, Mar 03, 2011
Do brands need different marketing strategies?
The concept of brand advertising has taken a beating with the rise of digital marketing. International or nationwide offline brand advertising campaigns seem now more than ever to be the preserve of multi-national companies like McDonald’s, The Gap or Gucci. The new channels of communications opened up by digital marketing have prompted many companies to pull budgets from traditional offline media to focus on new media. However, they are then often surprised when they don’t achieve the expected results.
Companies do want to spend more on brand awareness
The prevailing consensus is that depending on the existing profile of a brand, a combination of offline and online activities must be implemented in order to see real results be that creating brand awareness or cementing a brand’s identity. In a recent survey, it was shown that for 2011 54 percent of European companies plan to include brand awareness activities in their budgets as compared to 35 percent of US companies.
Maybe time for a balance between online and offline marketing
There are a number of reasons put forward for the difference in numbers here, one being the recession, which hit America harder and another being the lure of digital media’s measurability and accountability. Moving forward, industry commentators are recommending a balance between direct and brand ads as well as traditional and digital media.
By marrying online and offline promotions, companies can ultimately derive a greater benefit from both. An example of this is a promotions campaign that clearly promotes a URL or asks customers to visit a website in order to benefit from the promotion. In this way, marketers can accurately gauge the success of an offline campaign and begin the process of converting customers to online forums.
Once again comes back to metrics
Also it does not always benefit marketers to focus on the measurability of a given tool. For example, the industry still measures click-through rates for banner advertising even though the response rate has been less than 1 percent for years. Here, the existing wisdom must prevail in that it is not always possible to measure brand activities in the same way as other promotional activities and it is pointless to try. Hey what is your view?
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