Brand Marketing: How to build a brand?

Let’s answer a question first: what is a brand?

What everyone knows is the brand. Then there is another question: everyone knows about it, but no one buys it. Is such a brand valuable?

The answer is no. There are too many products like this on the market that are well-received but not popular. They are very noisy in publicity and promotion, but when you look at the sales volume, it’s only in the single digits. Do you know how painful the boss feels?

Why does this happen?

Through the product operation and promotion in the Internet and traditional industries in recent years, as well as dealing with various bosses and persons in charge, I found that they all have a misconception in thinking: they believe that product sales conversion is real-time, that is, when the advertisement is released on the same day, there will be purchase conversion on the same day, and sales will increase, and the same is true for building a brand.

This way of thinking cannot be said to be completely wrong, because performance advertising is indeed like this, it is effective as soon as it is invested, especially for mobile games, apps, and black five products, which are very suitable for performance advertising.

But the biggest problem with performance-based advertising is that it is impossible to build a brand. So when I saw a meal replacement product being advertised crazily on WeChat Moments recently, I was shocked. This is not taking the sponsor’s money seriously at all.

Why did we come to the above conclusion?

This is because brand building needs to go through three stages: awareness, recognition and loyalty. The three stages can be shortened through full-coverage advertising, but they must never be skipped. Next, I will explain these three degrees in detail. Once you understand these three degrees, you will know why you have not been able to create a brand.

1. Stage 1: Popularity

Awareness refers to how many people have seen our brand.

This is the product promotion in our daily work. What we do, such as influencer recommendations, light box ads, and information flow ads, is all for the purpose of letting more people know about our brand.

Those companies that have financial backers, even when they are not profitable, spend money like crazy on advertising in order to attract users' attention and build a brand.

If the company has sufficient budget, it can achieve some results through concentrated and phased advertising.

If a company has insufficient budget and can only run one or two advertisements, it would be difficult to expect to create a brand. Taking influencer promotion as an example, when I was launching fast-moving consumer goods products, I initially used dozens of influencers, but it did not bring about any obvious conversions.

At one point I doubted whether this approach would work, but later I continued to invest in dozens more. When I invested in more than a hundred influencers, Taobao’s off-site traffic gradually increased. But the dozens of influencers I invested in later did not produce any explosive articles. Why did the effect suddenly improve?

This is actually a process from quantitative change to qualitative change.

I came to this understanding when I was promoting my new book "Full-Stack Operations Master".

When a new book is published, you must definitely promote it with all your might to increase sales. I immediately posted soft advertisements on WeChat Moments, Weibo and other platforms, which indeed brought in sales, with about 50 books sold.

You should know that I have nearly 5,000 friends on WeChat, but I only sold 50 books, which is lower than expected. If the conversion rate was 1%, I should have sold 500 books.

The conclusion drawn at that time was that the market for paper books was indeed not doing well. Everyone was reading e-books, and the demand for paper books had weakened.

Later when I posted to my Moments, I didn’t advertise intentionally, I just occasionally said: Books for sale! Selling books! What surprised me was that every time I called out, there would always be a few people coming to consult and finally place an order.

I also noticed that these people knew about the book at first, but had not placed an order before. It was only after seeing my recommendations (advertisements) many times that they hesitantly placed an order.

The sales brought by this repeated screen swiping far exceeded the first wave of orders. Because I personally experienced the entire process from knowing to cognition to transaction for a small and fixed group of users, I felt it deeply and then understood a truth.

Are there users who place an order the first time they see an advertisement?

Yes, everyone has a different personality. Some people are generous and will buy something as soon as they see it, but are there many of them?

Not much really. Most people's purchasing habits require multiple researches and repeated considerations before deciding whether to buy. Some people even asked me for the book's catalog before purchasing to determine whether it was necessary to buy it.

Did you see it? Everyone's decision-making path is different.

However, many bosses mistakenly believe that all users are the former, they buy when they see it, and if they don’t buy, they are not the target users. The difficulty of advertising and branding increases sharply with this kind of thinking. It is really like picking up sesame seeds and losing watermelons.

2. The second stage: awareness

Why are sales after continuous screen swiping much greater than the first wave?

This is because through screen swiping, the product’s popularity among users gradually turns into recognition.

Awareness refers to users' understanding of a product, which is different from its popularity. Awareness means that users have heard of your product, while recognition means that users have not only heard of it, but also clearly know what features your product has and whether it is what they need.

Let’s continue with my example of selling books. After the book came out, I promoted it in three operation groups. Just like the advertisements posted on WeChat Moments, when everyone saw the book for the first time, a few people placed orders to buy it, while others were more likely to wait and see. What were they waiting to see?

Should I buy it? Is this book worth 60 yuan? I discovered this psychological process later, and I really missed a lot because I was so slow to realize it.

In keeping with the operator's habit of tinkering, I also made two funny emoticons at the time, using this book as the background, and added the words "Study hard and read every day" and "I am a scholar".

I made this thing just for fun in the beginning. Who doesn’t have a few emoticons of their own now?

When this emoticon package often appeared in the group, surprisingly, a friend sent me a private message asking me to buy the book. He said: "I saw that many people bought it, so I also want to buy a copy to read."

What does subtext mean? I already know a lot about this product and can place an order.

Therefore, everyone must understand the case mentioned above. The birth of a brand is definitely not brought about by a one-time exposure, but by continuous screen exposure and entering the minds of users, which gives you a chance to create a brand.

At that time, I was promoting fast-moving consumer goods on Xiaohongshu, and later I promoted more influencers to bring about results. In essence, it was similar to me repeatedly swiping the WeChat Moments and showing my face in front of the same user many times, thereby bringing in more transactions.

When I was running performance ads in the past, I also had this question: users didn’t click on the ads the first time they were shown; they still didn’t click on the ads the second time they were shown. You should know that performance ads will not be charged if users don’t click on them.

From an ROI perspective, this is not cost-effective. If users don’t click, there will be no customers and no profit. But from the perspective of brand building, this is a big profit.

As long as they are the target users, even if they do not place an order after seeing the advertisement for the first few times, when they see it multiple times, they will start to wonder: What are the functions of this product? How many people use it? Is it suitable for me to use?

If users have answers to these questions, congratulations, users have become aware of our products. With awareness, we are one step closer to building a brand.

3. Stage 3: Loyalty

I only drink Yili milk, I only eat Master Kong instant noodles, I only wear Adidas shoes, etc. What is this?

This is the user's loyalty to the product. Once there is loyalty, the brand will emerge.

I think gaining user loyalty to their products is every boss’ lifelong wish. Let me ask you a question first. You want users to be loyal to your products all the time, but have you ever thought about how to provide better products and services to meet their needs?

If you haven’t thought about this, don’t even think about brand loyalty, because loyalty is mutual.

Any brand on the market that has user loyalty is an expert in product research and development, such as the Apple mobile phone. Take me as an example. Why do I always choose to drink Yili milk? It is because of the milk incident at that time. It was not on the list. It is safe and reliable, so I have always stuck with it.

To cultivate user loyalty, you need to establish connections with users. Today’s private domain traffic is a great way to do this. Merchants and users can communicate smoothly, unlike in the past when after a product was sold, users couldn’t even find a way to provide feedback or suggestions.

Some businesses now even provide users with evaluations of their products before they are launched on the market.

Such merchants are quite cunning. Others gain loyalty only after they have gained fame and recognition. They, on the other hand, focus on building loyalty right from the start, and their products are invincible once they are launched on the market.

There is an internet celebrity coffee brand that does this. After the product is launched, it does not need too much promotion itself. These influencers who already have loyalty will spontaneously promote the product, and as a result, the brand quickly becomes popular.

Until now, they are still having a lot of fun with their users, and their loyalty is getting deeper and deeper, so the brand is naturally becoming more and more stable.

4. Final

All you need to understand is that building a brand needs to go through these three stages. Don’t think that you have a brand just by having exposure. Remember, only with continuous exposure in front of the same group of people and the high quality of the product itself can a brand be finally established.

Precisely because many people have misunderstandings about brand building, there are problems such as lack of continuous exposure, poor product quality, and inability to interact with users during execution, so it is not surprising that 98% of companies cannot build a brand.

Because it is difficult, there is a threshold. Because there is a threshold, when we really build a brand, the days of lying down and counting money will not be far away.

Author: Tiger Talks Operations

Source: Tiger Talk Operations