Building a great brand from scratch is the dream of every startup entrepreneur. If you are starting up, I’m pretty sure you want to build a brand that is friendly, well-known and stands for something beyond profits.
In most of the cases, companies try to build a brand with advertising. They just pour money into different channels and show their logo to the maximum number of eye balls possible. But is it possible to build a brand just with advertising?
To be honest, advertising has lost its effectiveness. Just because a brand’s logo is all over the place, it doesn’t mean people will recall it, let alone have any emotions attached to it. There is too much noise with advertisements and people are tired of ads. In this day and age, building a great brand is possible without advertising.
You might already know about brands that have become household names without advertising. Can you think of a few names?
Digital brands like Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Uber etc. have never spend money on advertising to build their brand. They always focused on user engagement and creating a good brand experience. None of these brands become what they are today through TV, Newspaper and Radio ads. The secret to building a big online brand, especially in the age of internet is to have a very low barrier of entry to a product experience.
With free products and services online, a brand can attract potential customers at zero cost. This create brand engagement and not just brand impressions. Brand engagement is 10x more valuable than brand impressions. (I am attracting you to engage with my content for free, and right now you are engaging with my brand – DigitalDeepak).
Only a few entrepreneurs understand branding and the rest end up wasting money in ‘branding activities’. Some marketers think that they can create a great brand by out-spending the competition on advertising. So they end up investing money in driving brand impressions. They roll out fancy TV ads, get millions of banner ad impressions online and cover the first page of our daily newspaper. These ads compete for the consumer’s attention… And we (consumers) try our best not to pay attention to these interruptive ads!
The ability to attract attention is the most important asset for any business. If you have their attention, you can convert that attention into a transaction. But instead of interrupting consumers with ads to get their attention, entrepreneurs should focus on creating something amazing with a low barrier of entry and naturally attracting consumers to engage with their brand.
The Problem with Brand Impressions
Before we get into the art of attracting consumer’s attention, let’s understand why brand impressions miserably fail to convert prospects into paying customers. And why it is becoming a less effective way of building a brand in this day and age.