How To Grow Your Brand

Speak to any experienced growth marketing freelancer or Chief Marketing Officer and they will know about about the 5 rules for how brands grow. In this article we summarise the rules and what they mean for your strategy.

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1. Reach new buyers.

Brands grow because they attract new customers, consistently. It is never enough simply to focus on existing customers. Whatever brand whatever category you have to continuously be bringing new people into the top of the funnel. If you focus all your efforts on the bottom of the funnel e.g retargeting and search, then ultimately you will find growth stalls. Don’t spend money advertising to existing customers - use other means of communication and brilliant customer service to engage and encourage them to buy more. As a general rule invest 80% of budgets in brand building and 20% in performance advertising - this ratio may change depending on maturity of business.

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2. Make it easy.

Consumers have little headspace for brands - in fact they really don't care about brands at all. Any friction in the purchase process is the kiss of death. Your job is to make it as easy as possible for your prospects. There are 2 key considerations here: mental availability, and digital / physical availability. Mental availability is about ensuring you are top of mind when a consumer comes to the point of need - you may do this through advertising or content but whatever the strategy it is about inserting yourself into the mind of the buyer so when they come to but you brand is top of mind or at least int he consideration set. Digital / physical availability is about being accessible. If your site or app has poor search engine optimisation and poor conversion rate optimisation you will struggle to grow, and similarly if your physical products aren't distributed in the right shops you will struggle to grow because no matter how great your product is, if people can't access it - there's no sale. So make it easy in terms of mental availability and digital availability.

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3. Be Distinctive .

As a brand you have to stand out. This doesn’t mean you have to continually do crazy stuff but it does mean your assets and campaigns need to be memorable. If they aren’t you simply don’t create space in the consumer’s mind. And if you don’t have share of mind, then you won’t receive share of wallet. Being distinctive as a brand may be easier to do with a unique product or service but for most brands it requires work and creative risk. You need also to link the distinctiveness to a long term strategy for the brand so you can build on it over time, developing compound brand returns.

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4. Build memory structures.

Brands are stories in the consumer mind. And like any good story it should build over time. One element should lead to the next and the next so that the consumer (subconsciously or consciously) goes ‘ahh I recognise that’ and ‘I know that part of the story’. But the story must evolve and never be static. In that sense brands need to build familiarity that constantly refreshes and changes. These memory structures prime the prospect to receive the sale message and convert easier.

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5. Be consistent.

Consistency is about your brand as well as your budgets. Brands need to ensure that they are visible over time. There will of course be periods when things spike for both brand and story for example a product launch, or a seasonal peak period but going dark for any period of time will kill growth. But you simply can not afford to go dark for an extended period of time and expect your brand and business to grow. This becomes increasingly important when you enter a recession. The tendency during a recession is to cut brand budgets. This however is proven to be detrimental to the long term health of a brand. If at all possible protect brand budgets and maintain consistency over time. Creating brand maps can be beneficial as well.

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If you’d like discuss how to get your brand to grow with one of our freelance growth strategy experts like Sarah or one of our Fraction Chief Marketing Officers like Sardar you can add a brief on the platform here

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If you are interested in further reading a great place to start is the book How Brands Grow by Professor Byron Sharp. You can buy the book on Amazon here