Late last year my boss Kim shared this brand marketing article from LinkedIn with me. I suggest you give it a read. It was perfect timing as we were planning Insight Online’s Marketing Strategy for 2021.This article was invaluable as it helped us identify that it was time to shake things up with our current approach.Our key takeaways from the article:
Firstly let’s talk about the short term campaigns that we run. These are our eBook/guides/workshops/webinars that we promote. You may recall our blog about our journey through content marketing from last year where we shared our process and results. In general, these work well for us and there is no reason why we should stop. They have played a critical role in growing our database and sales. We also get great feedback from Marketing Managers on our content and it will stay in our plan. I do think because of how well they were performing we became a bit comfortable with running these campaigns. As these campaigns only run for bursts 4 times a year we were not seeing the consistent growth we wanted. When these are not running we do notice a drop in traffic and enquires until we start them up again. This graph below sums up our experience and it’s clear that we need to strike a balance by introducing some brand marketing to the mix
I wouldn’t say that we were hyper-target per se, however, we are good at creating tight targeting through Facebook and Google Ads. We are always optimising to bring down our costs and increase our conversion rate. This definitely has its place, but it’s something we can be too focused on. Sometimes we lose sight of loosening the reins on our targeting to potential customers that might not be interested right now.
As a marketer, we also know the importance of brand marketing but have been so focused on our short-term campaigns and targeting we haven’t been invested in long term brand building. So we decided to get out of our comfort zone and do some brand marketing for Insight Online. It will take time and we need to persevere with it to see the benefits.
We currently do a standard brand campaign through Google Ads. We have started doing radio which is exciting! If you are keen to hear the ads tune in to the Breeze. Also, we will be branching out into video, we are also keen to see how advertising on Spotify works. We are not expecting much from Spotify, but are interested in how it works. It’s easy to stick with what you know but we are excited to be trying something new and we will keep you updated with our progress. We are keen to hear your thoughts. Leave your feedback in the comments below.
