Welcome to the first issue

Hello and welcome to the very first issue of my Marketing and Branding newsletter.

First of all, I would like to thank each and every one of you for being here. I hope from the bottom of my heart that you can find value, inspiration and motivation here. I will do my very best to grow this and share my insights and knowledge with you. I am but a humble servant of the people - on a mission to empower those looking to learn more about the craft.

Some housekeeping

Since this is the first mail, I naturally have some figuring out and boring analytics to do, so the structure might change as we go, but I promise to always focus on topics within the realm of marketing, branding, personal branding, content strategy, demand generation, etc. I will not deviate and promise not to ever spam you with anything useless. And that be that - let’s dive in.

Topic 1: Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

#personalbrand #lesson

Last week this time, I was awake figuring out how to be a dad - doing the midnight feeding session of our newborn son when I picked up my phone and out of habit tapped the blue LinkedIn icon that is conveniently placed on my home screen to feed my social media addiction, when I was greeted with a message that quite literally made me stop in my taps:

Fear, anxiety and an ice-cold realisation hit me - my account has been hacked. I casually finished feeding my son and the moment I was done I rushed to fetch my laptop, where I was logged into some ghostwriting accounts - I wanted to evaluate the damage. I soon realised that my profile had been removed from the face of the internet. Nothing, nada, zero, bull - it’s like I was never there.

All my hard work, my following, my online reputation, and all the opportunities that come with it, were reduced to nothing in the blink of an eye. No one cares if I HAD the following - the proof is in the pudding. So I got to work to try and save the situation, but honestly, I didn’t have the highest hopes as Linkedin is notorious for terrible customer service. But, luckily a nice lady at Linkedin helped me recover my account and no harm was done. I had to reset some passwords and all was fixed.

Why am I sharing this with you?

I am always first in line to tell people how valuable LinkedIn is for their personal brand and how many opportunities there are waiting when you have a strong profile and content strategy going, but I realised that all of that can be taken away from you in an instant.

Yes, I can rebuild it and I’m sure I can get it back to the same level in half the time it took me to get to the 34,000 followers I currently have. With everything I have learnt it should be fairly easy - just follow the blueprint - it works every time.

The realisation, however, is that one can never rely on a single social media profile and following alone to carry and build your brand. You have to build a community in a “more tangible” place that can’t simply be erased in the blink of an eye.

Advice: If you are busy investing time in your LinkedIn or any other social media platform - I urge you to not put all your eggs in one basket. Build a community on another platform as well, create a website that can start gathering organic traffic, start a newsletter, a slack group or something else on the side.

If I started this newsletter at the same time I started investing time in Linkedin, I’d now have around 20k subscribers (going at the current rate of signups). If you need help with figuring something out around this - as always - feel free to reach out. I’m always open to help.

Topic 2: Brand Awareness - Why It Matters

#branding #brandstrategy

As most of you know - I have a bit of passion for all things branding, and naturally, I absolutely love finding myself on the opposite side of a conversation with a misguided mind who wants to tell me or anyone in the room (or comment section) that one should not spend time, money or resources on brand awareness, or that brand awareness is a vanity metric. Whether this is a celebrated CEO, a door-kicker from sales, an angel investor, or who the hell ever, I always have time for this conversation. So let me help you with some insights I’ve gathered over the past 10 years of witnessing first-hand how brand awareness and clever content strategies help businesses grow.

The brand that is remembered is the brand that gets bought:

Building brand awareness is oftentimes mistaken for boosting ads for impressions in digital paid marketing. We blame the social media giants for calling their most useless ad format “brand awareness” ads. Basically - it’s a clever way to say “we will show your ads to a bunch of profiles we know rarely click or engage” and then make you pay for that.

Are the impressions useless? Not at all, but there are better ways to spend money that also generate brand awareness. Brand awareness is achieved when a person is physically aware of your company and its offering and is measured in recall value. How we measure this is a topic for a future newsletter, but what is important to know about brand awareness is that it’s not simply about making people aware of the existence of your company. It’s about making sure they know about your company, and understand its offering and when the need or want arises for a product/service like yours - that they remember you and see you as an option.

This is what people in B2B marketing refer to as demand generation - but it’s not actually about “generating demand” - it’s about being top of mind and perceived as the best option when a person in the market is ready to make a purchase in your category.

Achieving brand awareness and enjoying top-of-mind positioning is nearly impossible to achieve without a marketing investment of some sort. The more investment there is in marketing, the more touchpoints you can activate to connect with your target audience and the more likely that they will know about your company, and the higher the chances are that they will come knock on your door when they need something like the product or service you offer.

As brand fame rises, COA / COGS decreases:

That leads us to point number two. As brand fame rises, the Cost of Acquisition (B2B) or the Cost of Goods Sold (B2C) drops.

*Okay, what the hell is brand fame? 
Brand fame is when a brand reaches a point where the largest portion of its target audience and addressable market prefers to use its product above any available alternatives. A simple example to illustrate this is the Pepsi Challenge - in a blind taste test, most people will prefer Pepsi to Coke, but year after year Coke outsells Pepsi. That is brand fame at work.

Another example of brand fame is the urge that someone has to purchase an Apple product or a Mercedes instead of alternatives that can do the same thing.

Brand fame is the pinnacle of brand awareness and top-of-mind positioning. 

It’s important to know however that brand awareness doesn’t peek at some point and turn into brand fame. Brand fame is achieved through strategic brand development over a prolonged period - consistently educating your audience about your offering and building meaningful relationships and loyalty through communication, engagement and experiences.

Now back to the statement - As brand fame rises, COA / COGS decreases. Data suggests that the more famous a company gets, the better the return on investment it gets on its marketing efforts. It becomes cheaper to acquire new customers or to sell to the same ones - because they come back for more.

This then leads us to the next point…

Companies that invest in marketing grow faster than those that don’t:

If you take two identical companies selling competing products to the same audience in the same market, and we evaluate them over a 10-year growth period.

Company A spends $10,000 per month on marketing efforts and Company B spends $5,000 per month. They will have relatively similar COA / COGS results in the early stages. Digital Ads will deliver similar cost-per-impression and cost-per-click results. Billboards and out-of-home will yield similar results. But at some point, if run continuously, Company A will start seeing more traction for the same money. Where a $1,000 marketing spend resulted in 10 sales in the first year, it will likely lead to 15 or 20 sales in year two and 30 sales in year three.

The reason for this is that it becomes easier to “sell to people” the more they are aware of your company and offering, the more they know about it and the more people have a favourable experience with it. They will at some point simply start coming to you out on their own.

If done right, more marketing will always result in more sales, sales result in consumer experiences and experiences lead to referrals and return users/buyers.

The 95:5 rule is also at play here. 95% of your audience is not ready to buy right at this very moment. But your marketing efforts still help them shape perceptions about your brand and at some point, some of them will come to you to buy what you are selling. If they don’t know about your brand they won’t come. If another company invested more in building awareness and perception, the audience is more likely to go for their offering.

The biggest mistake most Founders, CEOs, CROs and Investors make is that they are impatient and they don’t understand that marketing is about making ongoing long-term investments to build awareness, and in turn, become famous among their audience. Instead, they want quick wins and sales - counting the return on every dollar spent, right here, right now.

That’s it for today. I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know how you found it. Too long? Too short? Not easy enough to understand? I truly value your input and want to turn this into something you all come to love and look forward to.

Here is a free report on the impact of branding:

Thanks for reading.
See you next month.

Warm regards,
Stefan