Three signs your marketing could be working harder (and how our approach can get you there)

Do you ever worry that, for all your best efforts, something just isn’t right in your marketing mix?

For all the data and KPIs and dashboards modern marketers are presented with, most still don’t have confidence that what they’re doing is working as hard as it could.

Marketing isn’t an exact science, and the hardest-working types of marketing pay off in the long term, not in instant results.

But here are three warning signals you can’t ignore, telling you it’s time to bring your brand in for a check-up.

1. Rapid declines in uplift after a burst of advertising

The best advertising works at two speeds – driving an initial spike among people already ready to act, and a smaller but longer lasting uplift among people the idea resonated with, who don’t act on it until later but bring your brand to mind when they do.

It’s easy to get addicted to the quick hits of the spike, but it’s the longer lasting effects that both brands and improving rates of ROI are built on. Advertising that isn’t delivering a sustained impact means you have to keep rebuying customers you’ve already reached.

To have a lasting impact, brands need more than initial attention, they need memorability and recall-ability. They have to leave a memorable impression on their audience, that’s easily brought to top-of-mind at the moment the category does become needed.

Does your advertising build this kind of mental availability? Do you have distinctive assets and consistent patterns that will stay with your customers? Have you built links with emotions or category associations that will evoke your brand in future?

Our Brand CACHE tool can tell you how you compare to the category, and whether you need to do more to be top-of-mind when it matters.

2. An unexplained or disproportionate dip in conversion rates somewhere in your customer journey.

Perhaps an email that’s getting good open- and read- rates, but no click throughs, a high basket-abandonment rate, or a seemingly good promotion that’s getting no traction.

All buying behaviour is a series of choices – whether it’s one retailer over another, one product over another, whether to click or not. Most of these decisions are made on autopilot, driven by habit or very quick, subconscious calculations.

Perhaps the most important kind of consumer decision for marketers is whether to act or not to act. It’d be nice to think choosing your option would be better than nothing. But being better than nothing is harder than it sounds!

Because the option of doing nothing is almost always the consumer’s easiest option – it’s free, it’s no effort, it’s immediate, it’s low risk and requires very little thought….

Fortunately it’s exactly these kinds of automatic, fast thinking calculations that behavioural science excels at targeting. Because they’re subconscious processes, they’re prone to cognitive biases, and small deliberate signals can rebalance the calculation and tip the scales in your favour.

Our METRIC tool can tell you how to optimise communications to make the action you want from your customers feel easy and natural, showing how to remove risk and uncertainty, thought and effort, time and money.

3. You and your competitors increasingly look and sound alike

In every market, there comes a time where every brand is chasing the same customer with pretty much the same proposition. The market stagnates around the same idea about what customers want.

At this point, it’s tempting to try and be the brand that zigs while the others zag. Being different is sometimes a good strategy. But it’s also possible you’ll stand out in a bad way.

So perhaps it’s worth looking more deeply at what is driving customers in the category.

Motivation is an underlying desire that needs to be satisfied. It’s the potential energy in the gap between what the customer has now and what they could have.

Tapping that energy is the key to reinvigorating a brand and a category.

We can help root your brand in what behavioural science has shown to be the fundamental drivers of behaviour, which are found in the balance between hopes and fears, self and others.

Our MOTIVATION MAP tool uses the behavioural science of motivation to interpret customer motivations and position your brand or campaign to appeal to them.

We're The Behaviours Agency.

At every stage of the customer journey we find creative ways to give our clients the advantage. We do it by creating preference.

Preference is being ahead of the competition in the customer’s mind. That means being more motivating, more top-of-mind and easier to choose.

If you want help being the preferred choice for your customers, get in touch today.

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Steve Brunt Planning Director

By Steve Brunt

Planning Director