We're Launching An Aggressive Branding Campaign

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.

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.