Branding campaigns are an investment in the future.

You invest now to reap rewards next year. But the results are cumulative and compounding.

Every year yields bigger and better results.

According to the data, strong brands capture, on average, three times the sales volume of weak brands — while charging premium prices.

Combining 3x the sales with a greater profit margin is how you dominate your industry and grow rich.

On the other hand, Sales Activation campaigns are immediate. You invest now for sales now.

But the results reset to zero after each effort.

Comparing the two approaches looks like this:

However, very few successful businesses exclusively advertise one way or the other.

As a business owner, you need sales now to sustain your business, but you also want to invest in long-term growth. So what’s the optimal split between the two?

Here’s a nice illustration of that:

 

Think of the straight line as sales-activation only.

Logically, a straight line is the shortest distance — and yet it’s the slowest path, because it severely limits the acceleration of the ball.

The steep drop allows for maximum acceleration, but it delays forward movement too long to win out. It beats the straight path, but not by much.

The best path is the curve that allows for acceleration AND forward movement.

Moving from physics to business, the combination of short-term sales activation and long-term branding looks like this:

And the best split for most companies is 60% long-term branding with 40% short-term sales activation.

In practical terms, you can think of your:

  • PPC spend,
  • Direct Mail of offers,
  • Email activation of customers, and
  • Advertised sales or special offers…

as Short-Term Sales Activation.

And you can think of your mass-media (or OTT / CTV) spend as long-term branding — IF your ads focus more on storytelling and bonding than offers.

There’s no point in misusing a storytelling and branding medium like video or audio just to make short-term offers. Because long vs. short isn’t just different types of ads, they are different mindsets.

Get that split right, and you’ll escape the PPC treadmill and start growing consistently, year-over-year.

But… the first step is the hard step: investing in branding for a year while you wait for top-line results to start kicking in.

That doesn’t mean you can’t feel the branding working earlier via leading indicators.

It just means that focusing on the future usually takes the kind of discipline that separates the winners from the also-rans.

And that hiring the right team to coach you through the hard part makes everything work better.

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