You’re here because you want to see sustainable growth for your business. At some point, someone convinced a lot of people that growth needs to be complicated.
The good news? It doesn’t have to be.
You know you’re supposed to have good branding, marketing, and sales.
Branding is the visual shortcut we use to remind buyers who you are and what you do.
Marketing is taking that brand to exposing the right types of people to it.
Sales, while often seen as the most important activity, exists better with strong brand marketing.
Brand Building and Sales Activation are two activities that can make an impact on your bottom line.
Often looked at as competing strategies, we’d like to shed light on why they’re both integral to your success.
But first, let’s more fully define both then describe why together, they’re a recipe for growth.
Brand Building
Branding is the act of creating a visual shortcut in peoples’ minds that ties back to what your comapny does for them. A brand is the whole package of your business. Branding is the process of putting all the essential elements of that package together. It’s an emotion (brand) versus a tool (branding).
Sales Activation
Sales activation focuses on generating sales. It’s when a customer is in the decision-making stage and they decide to make a purchase. Brand Building and Marketing is often how a customer arrives in this stage.
If you have a marketing campaign that is geared towards influencing potential customers to make a sale, that is a sales activation effort. It’s a short term tactic, but important because it generates revenue.
How Do These Efforts Work Together?
Think of brand building and sales activation as a partnership.
Partnerships are best when there’s balance.
Sales activation efforts will not be as successful without brand building. Without strong branding, consumers haven’t the trust or connection in and with your product. There needs to be a connection that your potential buyers have with your product in order to purchase.
Your efforts in brand building happen before you make a sale. Think of it as a marketing tactic that taps into brand equity via targeted, compelling, and specific messaging.
If your only focus is growing your brand, and you make no marketing efforts to persuade your customers to buy, you’re not spending your energy and time wisely.
Don’t just take our word for it. Take a look at this article from Marketing Week, where they discuss that “winning” brands, or brands that see a good deal of revenue growth, “are more likely to take a combined approach to brand building and sales activation.”
In a survey of 270 B2B and B2C marketers, 72% agreed that the most effective way to generate growth is to utilize both sales activation and brand-building.
Les Binet and Peter Field established the 60/40 rule. 60% of a brand’s marketing resources should be dedicated to brand building, and 40% to sales activation.
The chart below, developed by Les Binet and Peter Field in “The Long And Short of It” shows the relationship between these two strategies.
The effect long term brand building has on sales is undeniable. To read a bit more about it, check out our post on the ROI of Great Branding. Creating and implementing a strategy for all this can seem daunting, but good news: we’ve mapped it out for you in our Brand Strategy Guide.
