Gone are the days of building a brand solely on social spend and Shopify best-practices. Rising digital media costs, regulations around data collection, and increased competition for wallet share and consumer attention have shifted success metrics and impacted performance.
Despite these challenges, we still see many of our clients driving success in 2022! What are they doing differently? Simply put — they are doing it all.
Successful brands are generating awareness through relevant and authentic relationships with the consumer, investing in an optimized digital funnel, and delivering exceptional products and customer experiences.
Authentic brand-building and optimizing performance marketing are not an either / or decision. Instead, we see them both as critical initiatives to drive long-term sustainable growth.
Despite rising CPMs, which we detailed in the latest Business of Fashion case study, we still believe that building a best-in-class digital funnel is critical to drive success from your branding and word-of-mouth efforts.
The initiatives we’ve highlighted below are critical investments that continue to drive success for our high-growth clients.
At the same time as building this robust digital funnel, it is critical to make a similar investment in brand and awareness:
- Build a brand around unique value propositions and emotions — branding has shifted from just logos and color pallets to building a sense of culture
- Set goals around what percent of spend should be invested in branding. We see clients invest at least 70% of paid social spend in acquisition and at least 20% of total marketing spend in the top section of the funnel (with emerging brands spending closer to 65% of spend in top-of-funnel awareness)
- Set aside a test budget for emerging channels, PR initiatives, and trying new tactics to build culture, connection and consumer loyalty
If you are not running the above or are not able to execute a full digital funnel internally, the Belardi Wong Digital Strategy team can help.
