Brand marketing in a very layman language is building awareness, trust, respect about your Brand. Such kind of campaigns are generally targeted towards broader audience unlike in Digital marketing. Generally such campaigns are targeted towards top of the funnel traffic for Business. In Indian context when we talk about Brand Marketing it directly implies about running campaigns on TV, New Paper, FM and obviously Programmatic inventory Buying on Digital Mediums including Google/Facebook etc. Although some targeting is available across these medium however measuring direct impact of such campaigns are still very difficult. With my own experience in ecom, impact is largely measured via proxies or organic benchmarks.
What is right Budget for Brand Marketing?
Based on management books, large size corporations spends between 3-5% of their total annual budget on Marketing (Not Brand Marketing). However this may go upto 10% depending on business size and stage (early stage, mid stage, established). For a new business it is advisable to have 80:20 ratio within marketing spends where 80% of the spends will be on mediums which can give direct results in terms of sales/leads etc and 20% on Branding exercise. However this mix will change for a fully established company and new 80:20 ratio would be 80% on branding and 20% on other things. Depending on your stage and need you may decide your money allocations/
If you are a Big Brand :
- Views/Reach/Frequencies
- Brand Reach against known audience size
- Brand Awareness via customer surveys
- Brand Consideration vis customer surveys
- Unique Visits/New Visits via analytical tools
If you are a Small/Medium size Brand :
- Unique Visits/New Visits via analytical tools
- Delta in visits during campaigns (New Daily visits Benchmark- Pre Campaign Visits benchmark)
- Count of Brand searches after/during campaigns (Use Google Trends/Google Analytics)
Measurements Tools:
- Google trends
- Google Analytics/Any other analytics tool
- Survey Agencies like The Nielsen , IMRB etc See list here
- ZAPR (In case you spend a lot of money on TV advertisements)
- Nielsen also offer TV effectiveness measurement
- Internal dashboard of platforms Google/Facebook/Hotstar (Catch : Dont rely on their attribution mechanism, do your own due diligence.)
How to plan Brand Campaigns?
Offiline : if you are planning a pure Offline media campaigns here are steps.
Step 1
Market Survey by third party agency incase you can afford. Otherwise you can do . your own survey by sending a small questionnaire to existing customers. Both will give you understanding about key problem area your brand is facing.
Step 2
Find out what are most prominent concerns coming from customers.
Step 3
Hire Agency for creative work brainstorming which will result into right Messaging, Video banners.
Step 4
Hire Media Planner (external/inhouse) to deploy assets on right mediums which are closer to your audience and cost effective.
Step 5
Measure the impact using above mentioned tools.
Online : if you are planning a online media campaigns here are steps.
Same steps above only change at step 4 would be to add digital properties for Digital media buying.