Want to convince your company to do some corporate marketing? Good luck with that.

From working with clients for over a decade on their marketing efforts, I have come to realize that a lot of companies spend a minuscule amount of their advertising and marketing budget on corporate branding.

Why don’t companies spend more on corporate marketing?

It is because we are incentivized to generate short-term results, and projects/product launches are our key to unlocking short-term results. We aim to get products off the shelves and into the hands of paying customers because this helps us meet our quarterly objectives; we aren’t incentivized to invest in corporate branding. When would we be able to see results on that? How can we prove to our bosses that what we did made an impact on our KPIs or the business’ bottom line?

Quite often with eCommerce brands, we see actions and projects that are quite transactional; if we run campaign A, we are looking for this threshold return on advertising spend. At the end of the quarter or the year, the metric the team would be evaluated on will likely include an average ROAS across projects. There are likely other KPIs like top-line revenue, bottom-line net profit numbers and profit margin percentages, but the value of a brand is hard to measure and an investment in building the brand usually wouldn't give us an immediate bump in metrics.

Let’s take a few steps back to think about why brand building is important in the first place.

If you are a marketing agency, are you just known as an agency that runs digital, social, ppc ads? Or are you known as the agency in town that can run digital, social, ppc ads on budget and on time with standout creatives and customer service that goes above and beyond?

The second part of that sentence is the value of a brand.

What goes into building a brand?

Building a brand takes time, effort, and money.

Through team efforts like showing how your team works together on your social media, or what causes your team is dedicated to, the key clients that your team has managed to secure AND retain…all of these seemingly small things add up to paint a picture of how it’s like to work at and with your company.

Through paid efforts like social, print, ppc ads and tradeshows, you use keywords and ad creatives to position your brand. Do you want to be known as the most reliable option in the industry? Maybe your ad copy would have a guarantee like “100% on-time delivery or it’s on us!” If you want to be known as the most creative team in the industry, maybe your print ad can be a black canvas with a single yellow dot in the middle with the words “your company” next to it and then a tagline like “you really can’t miss it.”

While marketing a project may take 1 or 2 teams within your company, building the brand takes the participation of every member of your organization. If you run a health and wellness company and one of the key values of the company is to live a mindful, calm lifestyle, but one of your 500 employees exhibits road rage behaviour in the staff parking lot…again, the small things add up.

Why is branding more important now?

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen major fluctuations in the market with the onset of stagflation as governments around the world finally have to deal with the overspending from the pandemic years. Higher wages, higher interest rates, higher inflation, higher Core CPI… the list goes on. In tough times, businesses that had been riding high and loose with their budgets now must scrutinize their spending more closely. They’ll cut the companies that are replaceable, and most of the time these are companies that do not have solid brand values relevant to the client’s needs. While businesses’ will all want to cut costs, they are still motivated to keep the partners that have performed well in the past and align with their company values. For example, if the client places an emphasis to work with BIPOC-run companies that demonstrate inclusivity and diversity in their hiring practices, and value creative over conservative strategies and your firm aligns with this, you have a better chance of staying.

Not only does having a strong brand give you a better chance of retaining customers by reinforcing your positioning and values, but it also helps to widen the top funnel by increasing exposure of the brand to people who haven’t heard of the brand already.

The power of your brand will impact every step of the customer journey and the end result of whether your company is selected. From awareness to interest, desire and action (the AIDA marketing model), a stronger brand will help your company come out on top.

The state of the market and economy is signalling tough times ahead. Investing in your brand will help your team get through this turbulent period. If you haven’t already started, now is the time to put a game plan together.