For the past ten years working in digital marketing, the world has been divided into Branding and Performance Marketing. Branding is full of large budgets and not much accountability for their results. Performance Marketing (or Direct Response) has ugly creatives but gets beautiful, carefully documented returns.
Advertising has not always been lik…
Tag: brand marketing
Delivering Better Brand Experiences: Why It’s So Hard and What to Do About It
Great marketing is about making consumers enjoy the experience they have with your brand. Every consumer touchpoint should be a delightful brand experience, even when carrying a commercial message. This is how you positively impact everyday customer behavior and purchasing decisions. If we want people to change how they behave, we have to change their experiences. In spite of this knowledge, brand marketing is often tied to vanity metrics that don’t drive any real behavior change, and performance marketing is not much better than the cheesy infomercial you see on late-night TV.
But marketers want to do better: no one sets out to do a mediocre job. The industry is continuously innovating to deliver better brand experiences and drive impact, but the results are often inconsistent, making it difficult to know what new practices to adopt.
This post explores some of the current efforts made to provide a better brand experience. Through this careful exploration, we’ll discuss why it’s so hard to raise the bar and look to the future to see how to break out of stale marketing cycles.
How to Plan a Marketing Campaign: from Strategy to Tactics – Part 2
Once you have a clear sense of your business objective and your target audience (topics we discussed in Part 1 of this series), it’s time to take those actionable steps you identified and put them to work for ongoing results. Making a strong plan for your marketing strategy allows you to build on your knowledge, providing ongoing results with sma…
How to Plan a Marketing Campaign: from Strategy to Tactics – Part 1
Developing a marketing campaign requires a unique combination of creative, big-picture thinking and focused, detail-oriented implementation. It can be challenging to figure out how to piece all the different elements together, but breaking down the process into tangible steps can help ensure that your vision will translate into effective tactics to reach your business objective through powerful creativity and seamless execution.
I have worked with numerous startups, medium businesses, and in large multinational companies, and when it comes to campaign planning and execution, there are common mistakes that can be avoided through careful planning and methodical execution. Whether if you are the person in charge of marketing in a 2-person startup or a brand director supported by 5 different agencies, you should find this two-part series useful.
Generally speaking, smaller companies have limited time and resources, and they tend to skip important steps in the process given their natural bias to action or simple lack of bandwidth. Larger companies often lack the synergic coordination between teams required to make the most of the resources available or fail to properly execute their plan due to the lack of attention towards smaller, technical, yet critical details.
For this reason, I’ve decided to learn from my mistakes and the mistakes made around me and document the process required to plan and launch a successful marketing campaign. In this first part of a two-part series, we’ll be exploring how to put your business objective and target audience to work, creating actionable steps that take you from data analysis to an idea that serves as a solid foundation for your campaign. Continue reading
Don’t call it Performance Marketing
“Performance marketing” vs. “Brand marketing”
There is this weird distinction in the advertising industry between “performance marketing” and “brand marketing”, where the former usually refers to the highly-trackable, data-driven spend, where the other is awareness-creation, emotions-driving, hard-to-measure-impact kind of spend: the most obvious example of the two are SEM and TV advertising. Continue reading