When considering whether to invest money into branding, it can be difficult to convince your investors of the value when it comes to Return On Investment (ROI). This is because there is seemingly no tangible way to measure the impact of your branding. How do people find you – are they searching for keywords associated with your business or are they searching for YOU?
If your branding message is strong enough, people will immediately associate your product with you. For example, if you search ‘luxury bag’ you will get multiple results with different luxury brands. But if you search ‘Prada bag’ you can be pretty certain of what you are going to get.
These specialised search terms make bidding on keywords in your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns much less expensive, as most other brands will not bid for keywords that include your brand name.
Here’s what our recent podcast guest, Vanessa Bolosier, had to say about investing in branding:
“Basically looking at performance marketing. And I’ve experienced this in the past. I’ve run a few experiments. You know, if you look at CPI [Cost Per Interaction], is if you look at CPAs [Cost Per Acquisition], whatever it is that your metric is from a cost of acquisition perspective, it costs less money when you’ve got brand search terms. Like it’s that simple. So if on one hand, you’re trying to use generic search terms in paid advertising (paid search) versus your actual brand terms it might cost you pennies.
So like it makes sense to invest in the brand because not only will the brand have an impact on your performance, but you will have an impact on your community, on your brand equity, on all the other areas of the business, on your employees. It will have an impact on everything.”
According to an article by CHRON, there are 5 reasons that people buy from brands when shopping:
- Confidence in Experience
- Social Acceptance and Fitting In
- Customer Loyalty to Brands
- Personal or Professional Image
- Brand Fanaticism and Loyalty
So what do you think? Is branding worth the investment?
