The Difference Between Brands That Try, & Brand Builders That Achieve

It’s one thing to build a business; it’s another thing entirely to build a brand. And unfortunately, we know after a decade in integrated marketing, that the latter will ALWAYS outlive the former.

For us as a performance marketing group in Austin, we keep our eyes on the story of an industry. By looking at the story (the past, present, future, and characters) of different industries, we see that there are three categories of brand builders:

— Those that have a hardened tradition of, well, following old traditions, and don’t see the point in keeping up with evolving technology.

— Those that funnel what marketing spend they have into any list of “must-haves” they find online, not realizing that some don’t work without others — like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

— Those that pour a huge, well-intended sum of marketing spend into anything and everything, forgetting about the thought and strategy needed to make sure it delivers.

Here’s where these three categories of brand builders most often end up:

— Fizzling out the way champagne on New Years does when no one drinks it.

— Seeing minimal or no returns on the strategies they are trying; AKA, it’s built right, but the user experience expertise isn’t there – conversion rates are low because the consumer flow isn’t smooth.

— Seeing some returns, but they’re not optimized. For example, loads of leads flow in, but they’re not targeted quite right, and so your sales ‘call to action’ (Buy, Subscribe, Schedule a Demo, etc.) doesn’t work for how much you’re spending, or your sales team spends more time than usual converting them.

While we hate buzzwords at Rock Candy Media in Austin, we can’t get around this one: it truly is about streamlining and optimization of a future-proofed marketing strategy.

Here are some of the ways we do that, simplified (because we’d be here for hours hosting a webinar if we didn’t summarize):

— A brand marketing analysis. This is essentially a gap analysis of where you are in your industry and where you want to be.

— Determining YOUR difference between branding, marketing, and public/press relations.

— An audit of your UI and UX – whether that’s fully online or all about that foot traffic. We take down bounce rates and your competitors in one fell SEO swoop.

— Finding the story that drives your passion – what’s your identity? If you have your “What” and “How”, what’s your “Why”?

Everything after that, yes, after all of that is when you’re safe to launch and optimize marketing campaigns — what the “ad spend” is precisely for. The content syndication, the Facebook ads to generate leads, the content marketing, the fearless media mentions creation… We won’t bother breaking that down when you can just check out our Services and Case Studies pages, though. Optimization, right?

If you see yourself in any of those three categories, if you see your passion as a business when it really needs to be a brand, or if you’re even on your way to full optimization but need some guidance or help, that’s what we’re for. It’s what we do.

Sit down with our CEO to learn more, but we have a feeling you know what you need.