With the release of our newest brand - Microtank ( http://gnos.tk/microtank ) we've been rethinking our branding strategy. We've just launched an ambitious branding campaign aimed at highlighting our brands. We've done quite a bit of expert research on contemporary approaches to branding. We want to tell you about our progress here on Im0z.
*Our Branding Style
In studying the many theories and styles of branding, we've learned a thing or two. Our marketing team learned, for example, what the technical name of the style of branding Gnosis Arts has already been using. Our branding style is known as "attitude branding." (We've written extensively on this subject at our weekly microbusiness column, Microtank - http://gnos.tk/microtank ).
Attitude branding is a style of branding which associates moral ideals or virtues with the brand. Gnosis Arts brand ideation revolves around the concepts of "knowledge", "freedom", "insight", "intuition", etc., as applied to marketing. These intellectual and spiritual virtues imbue our brands, so this is an example of attitude branding.
*Mind-Share
But how do you make a brand known? That's the objective. The greatest brand in the world is nothing if no one knows about it. Brand recognition is essential to branding; we want our brands to be known and recognized by the largest number of consumers in our target market, right?
In other words, we need a "share of mind." The mind-share approach to branding attempts to make a brand the first brand the consumer thinks about when they choose a product category. So, when people think about "online marketing and Internet PR", the idea is that they will think of Gnosis Arts, or one of our brands, first.
*How Are We Planning to Do It?
Unfortunately, mind-share branding traditionally requires a lot of money, more advertising dollars, at least, than most smaller businesses have at their disposal. So how are we planning to do it? In short, we are looking to exploit new possibilities in the Google Content Network as well as utilize Google's new remarketing system.
*What Is Google's Remarketing System?
Google has recently added new functionality to its AdWords ad serving system called remarketing. What remarketing allows advertisers to do is create ads that "follow around" those who have viewed it. For example, if my ad shows on a New York Times business blog, then those who visited that blog will later be shown the same ad when they visit another content network site (profnetconnect.com, for example).
As you can guess, this "remarketing" may afford a great opportunity to capture some mind-share. As surfers see your ad on one site they frequent, they are showed the same ad on another site they frequent. The branding potential here is significant, at least in theory. We're putting it into practice, to see if there really is a benefit here. We hope to report back to you some positive and concrete steps you can take in brand advertising for your own business.
A second thing we're doing is using the CPM advertising, as opposed to CPC advertising. This is where you pay for 1000 impressions, not clicks. We're doing this to ensure our ad is actually shown a certain number of times. Here we are concerned more about impressions than clicks (or conversions).
Third, we will be pruning the Content Network sites on which we advertise. When we locate a site with regular impressions and decent CTR, we will place that site in the Managed Placements list, and then remove that site from the Automatic Placements category (ideally). This way we whittle down the sites on which we advertise to only the most effective.
Finally, we plan to identify sites which receive a large percentage of repeat visitors. For example, social media sites tend to be visited by the same person, each day. These are the types of sites we want to have in our managed placements lists, too. We want the same visitor, to be shown one of our branding ads, over and over, and on multiple sites, in order to capture a share of mind.
We will keep our readers updated on the progress of this campaign as it progresses, so stay tuned. We will be doing other things as well, such as more aggressive PR. We will also be leveraging our news and press release site for branding as well ( http://pressreleasesonline.net ). This will be a long term campaign involving many elements and much analysis.
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