Is Branding Simply A Matter of Money?

How do you promote your brand(s), service mark(s) or trademark(s) on the Internet? Does your business even have a branding strategy, or do you solely focus on generating clients, sales and revenue? What are the best branding techniques; and, perhaps more importantly, does successful branding simply boil down to a matter of money?

We have noticed that our brand name - Gnosis Arts Multimedia Communications - is growing in awareness on the Web. Just today, I was looking at some of my website analytics, and I noticed a small but steady stream of Web searchers are searching for our business name in the search engines. This is very encouraging, especially as a business which has only been in existence a little over two years. It demonstrates that our Internet marketing strategies actually do work.

Nevertheless, an enormous time, money and labor investment has gone into these results since our inception. What we want to know specifically is this: Is effective branding merely a function of advertising spend? Put another way, can a business - particularly a small business just starting out - effectively promote their brand virally throughout the Internet without making a significant monetary investment?

Traditional Branding Theory

Traditional marketing theory suggests that the main way to establish and grow a brand presene is through impression-based advertising. Impression-based advertising means basically bombarding your target market with your logos, slogans, products and services repeatedly and over a long period of time in the hopes that the ads will create a lasting (subconscious) impression on the psyche of its viewers. The theory, which has a pedigree in social psychological circles, argues that, at some point, the public will begin to connect your brand ideation to conscious thoughts of value, worthy, quality or importance. In this way, when they do get ready to purchase a product or service in your niche, they will think of yours.

Traditional Branding in the Web 2.0 Era

In today's Internet driven economy, traditional branding strategy still exists. But it has a new name: It's called CPM advertising ("CPM" stands for "Cost Per Mil"). In this type of advertising scheme, the advertiser pays for 1000 impressions - that is, 1000 showings of his or her ad. This is contrasted with Pay Per Click advertising (PPC), in which you pay only when a vewier clicks on your ad.

This distinction isn't so important for the purpose of this blog post, except to highlight the point: Branding on the Internet as elsewhere, no matter how you look at it, costs money.

There's probably scant chance that your brand will proliferate virally throughout significant nodes of Cyberspace if you don't pay for it. The benefit of CPM advertising is you can calculate how much you have to spend to get, say, one million impressions. The downside: It is difficult to measure the effectiveness of CPM from an ROI standpoint. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to justify CPM advertising to an advertising or marketing department.

One Way to Measure CPM Advertising ROI

One way to measure the effectiveness of a branding campaign (albeit a not-so-very scientific way) is to first count the number of times your brand name is searched for prior to the start of an impression-based ad campaign, and then measure the change in this number after the campaign ends (if any). Of course, to do this you will first have to have some good analytic tools or software running for a significant amount of time prior to starting the campaign. As always, best practices in Internet marketing and SEO require the collection of data and responding to that data over a longer term.

And of course there will be confounding factors, for it is unlikely that your CPM advertising will be the only thing you do in terms of marketing your website. This will make it virtually impossible to do any A/B testing or establish any control groups, unless you are willing to implement the exact same SEM tactics on both the test group and the control group. This duplication of marketing efforts will require much more time and money than is usually available to a marketing department.

If your business or organization needs marketing research or branding strategy, please contact one of our SEO consultants.