Welcome to our series, Bar Stool Q & A. Join us as we tap into Mid-West Family’s decades of marketing experience and share top-shelf tips, suggestions, and fun marketing stories!
Welcome Joe Daguanno, Digital Sales Consultant.
What is branding?
We were doing branding before we even knew what branding was. We would go in, do the diagnostic with our clients, find their message strategy, and we didn’t even know it was called branding.
Then in 1999, we started working with Roy Williams, who is the Wizard of Ads, and it changed our lives as marketing professionals here at Mid-West.
He taught us what branding really was. He taught us that branding takes a long time. He taught us that when you win the hearts and minds of a consumer, you don’t have to sell them today.
You wait for the when, you tell them the why. It’s really a core element of Mid-West Family.
How would somebody get started with branding?
When I’m meeting with a client I break down their competition first to find out their pros and their cons, and that really opens up a hole for that client’s individual brand equity or brand identity.
So when you know what the competitive landscape is, and you know what the competitive landscape is not, then you can find where your hole is and sell that point home.
What would you say to somebody that’s concerned about investing in branding, as in they just want sales or leads now and don’t see the value in branding?
You know it’s proven if you’re using something from a sales activation standpoint, if you have a more defined brand, and a better brand, sales activation will happen faster.
So if you want sales activation, you need that defined brand. No matter what you’re using, a defined brand gets searched more, it gets clicked on more.
If you have a better brand, you will have sales activation.
So if you’re looking for sales activation right now and you have an ill-defined brand, I’d say good luck.
The bottom line: if you own a business and you want to be in that business for the long haul, start with branding and then move to sales activation.
How do you prove a Return on Investment (ROI) for branding? How do you measure branding?
We used to talk about things like sales at the end of the year because branding takes a long time. So you really couldn’t put one or two KPIs on that type of thing to say, “Ok this is your ROI”.
It’s different today though, and that’s because we talk full-funnel. When we’re talking full-funnel with branding, you can have different KPIs. You can have website traffic, clicks to your website, top of the mind awareness studies. I think that’s a key element of starting any branding campaign, is what are the KPIs that we’re going to be using.
Look at the end of the day, did you sell more at the end of this year, than you did when you started branding?
Branding takes time and I think the biggest thing with branding is that I equate it to two things: just like a workout regime, it takes a long time to get to your goals, and once you stop you’re going to go back to where you were. Also, it’s like pushing a car, this is from Roy Williams, when you’re pushing a stalled car it takes a lot of inertia and energy at the beginning to push that car. Once you get it going though, it’s great, it’s easy to push. If you let it go to a complete stop, it takes that much more energy and that much more inertia to get it going again.
Why would an advertiser trust Mid-West Family to help with their branding efforts?
We’ve been doing it for 50 years. Whether it be a digital platform or a blog or a radio station, it doesn’t matter. The principles are the same in branding whether you’re on the air or online, on paper, on billboards, or wherever you’re at.
We know what we’re doing. Hundreds of thousands of clients have gotten results because of their work with us – why wouldn’t you?
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