Focusing on the type of marketing that supports your goals will lead to better results. And to do that you need to know what type of marketing to ask for.
How often have you told an acquaintance or an extended family member that you work in solar and they respond with, “you mean like solar panels on houses?” Only you develop utility-scale solar which is far removed from the resi world. You pause for a moment to decide to educate them on the many variants of solar or simply let it be. Sometimes it’s worth it. Sometimes it isn’t.
Those of us who work in marketing and visual communications fields either get, “you mean like ads?” Or “you mean like websites and stuff?” Much like the nuance of solar or battery chemistries in energy storage, the nuance of marketing and visual communications flavors is vast.
Why does this matter? When you hire outside agencies or staff, it is important to be clear on your goals to find the right fit.
Marketing falls along a sliding scale of performance marketing to brand marketing, with modifiers for targeted or broad-reach activities. The varieties of tactics, strategies, and types of marketing within these parameters is vast.
What is Brand Marketing?
Brand marketing creates brand awareness, influences the public’s perception of the brand, and builds brand loyalty. It often has a longer lead time for the effects to be felt by the company, but also can be more potent long-term for the organization.
The impacts of brand marketing can be more difficult to track and measure and, again, take longer to feel the effects. This leads to organizations attributing smaller budgets to brand marketing. However, when (not if) an organization faces a crisis brand marketing is like saving for a rainy day, something the company can draw on because of the strength of brand loyalists.
What is Performance Marketing?
Performance marketing, on the other hand, has a goal of generating an immediate action from your audience, with an ultimate outcome of warm leads for the sales team. It has a shorter lead time for more immediate impact, while also often being much more transactional.
The nature of performance marketing means its effectiveness can be easily tracked and quickly measured. Easily measured successes (click throughs, downloads, forms filled in, signups, etc.) reinforce marketing’s relationship to revenue, leading organizations to attribute larger portions of their marketing budgets to performance marketing efforts. However, results from performance marketing campaigns are short-lived.
Working Together
An HBR study found that brand marketing rarely negatively impacts performance marketing, while performance marketing can easily negatively impact branding when developed without incorporating brand values and strategies.
Brand and performance marketing initiatives work well together, when they are developed comprehensively. This doesn’t mean brand strategy and performance campaigns need to be developed at the same time, or even by the same agencies. It does mean that brand values, goals, and value propositions are defined and incorporated into all marketing initiatives regardless of type.
Get started in your branding journey with your brand vision.
In an ideal world, an organization would develop their brand strategy when forming, then incorporate performance marketing tactics that support that brand strategy. In reality, it is never that linear or simple. Business stage, needed leads, available budget, internal and external capabilities, and how the leadership team perceives marketing and marketing efforts all impact timelines and where budget dollars are spent.
Why Does it Matter What Kind of Marketing I’m Doing?
When you reach out to an agency or hire marketing staff, it is important to know your goals and expectations. Equally importantly, understand your organization’s current drivers and stage. Why? It will prevent so many headaches and frustration when marketing campaigns don’t perform as you expect.
Say you are part of a grid-modernization company and your key clients are investor-owned utilities (IOUs). This is a specialized and finite list of potential clients. Your company is engineering-driven and loves numbers. The one-to-one tracking relationship of a pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaign appeals to you. Once you’ve provided initial input, you invest minimal time while the agency managing the PPC campaign handles the heavy lift. Results are immediate and 100% trackable.
However, you quickly get disillusioned from the results, with very few click throughs, and few of those are quality leads. It becomes difficult to justify the expenditure, and you begin to wonder why people invest in marketing when it clearly doesn’t work.
The key here is that you have a finite, defined audience. That audience has specialized, focused knowledge. It is very unlikely that the decision-makers at those IOUs are googling “grid modernization companies”.
You pivot, spending time to identify your audience, key decision makers’ concerns, and what stage you are in as a company. Beyond startup with a few clients already, and with a focused audience, you work with a branding-focused marketing agency who helps you develop a thought-leadership strategy, including trackable downloads of a white paper series, lead-generating technical webinars, and speaking opportunities to get in front of your target audience. While it takes a bit longer, your company develops a reputation as the experts in certain key areas, keeping you top of mind for your specialized audience.
Now, say you are a new app developer, with a solar app combining time-of-use rates with solar production for homeowners or commercial customers. As a startup with a more widespread audience that the grid mod company in the previous example, as well as a lower price point, you need to make immediate sales and garner positive reviews to stay afloat and generate visibility. In this case, while brand is always a consideration with reviews impacting your reputation, brand doesn’t do any good if you have to close your doors from lack of funds. An immediate, broad performance marketing campaign fits the situation well, where the slower, targeted thought-leadership strategy of the grid mod company would not serve you well.
Finally, imagine you are a battery manufacturer. The current CEO rose through the ranks in sales, leading to a very sales-driven organization. The sales team is well-developed as are several pipelines for leads. This scenario is trickier. With a CEO who understands and values the immediacy that comes from performance marketing, the company could really use a stronger top-of-mind brand. While a longer-term investment into brand marketing makes sense, in this scenario, it is unlikely to get and keep the support needed from leadership. Stepping towards brand marketing with strategies and tactics that build the brand while giving you the ability for immediate, trackable results, such as a strong PR campaign will thread that needle while moving towards needed brand marketing.
Questions to Ask
While any agency worth the name will dig into goals and audience with you, and yes, those should be your two first questions when developing a campaign:
- What is the number one goal? Secondary goals?
- Who is the audience? And how granular can that audience be defined?
Also take into account the character of your company to help hone the success of marketing efforts. Consider:
- Is this effort to fulfill an immediate need for the company?
- What is the company’s level of risk tolerance? From must-be-successful to willing-to-try-something-new.
- Is the company sales-driven, numbers-driven, a cult-of-personality (primarily driven by a single person and their unique traits), invention-driven, or some other strong driver?
- Is there a champion in the firm willing to invest time in this effort?
- What does the organization’s defined brand strategy look like?
There are many strategies, tactics, and activities that fall under the umbrella of marketing. It would be difficult to name them all. And the content of a particular marketing effort will impact how far to the left-right, up-down that particular effort would appear in the rubric.
Be pragmatic when considering your answers. It does no good to want to be innovation-driven, while in reality, it’s all about the numbers. It does no good to hire a marketing director who has strong expertise in brand marketing, and then mandate a 100% digital marketing expenditure.
Above all, ask questions and be realistic in your assumptions. There is no perfect path, but we sure can make it a lot less bumpy.