Often online marketing budgets fall into two camps: direct response and branding. The purpose of direct response is pretty obvious – to make money at a return that is aligned with the business’s goals. The other camp – branding – I’m kind of convinced is always a waste of money (at least the conventional idea of brand marketing is).

Boiled down to it’s most simple terms, advertising is when you are trying to persuade someone to purchase your product. Too often the idea of a “branding” campaign is something that is far from persuasive – it mostly consists of showing people your logo. Persuading someone is about highlighting the product benefits and differentiation with similar products. Customers rely on their own experience with products more than anything else. Showing your logo to more people is not enough to overcome the inertia of  purchasing habits and get someone to make a change. Persuasion isn’t easy; trying new things is high on the list of things people most want to avoid.

From the Ad Contrarian:

“Next we have to realize that successful brands are by-products. They don’t come about by “branding.” They come about by doing lots of other things well. Like making great products; satisfying our customers; differentiating our products in advertising.”

Trying to quantify the value of branding ads usually ends up being very anti-climactic. You can count the amount of impressions that were delivered to the targeted demographic, use click-through-rate as a way to evaluate relevancy – of those that click through you can measure page depth, return visits, bounce rate – all of which give you an idea of the kind of impact you made on the visitor – hopefully an indication that they will buy from you next time when they are ready.

So why would anyone want to do “brand advertising”? Because your direct response budget has such high return on ad spend targets that you end up only advertising to those people at the bottom of the funnel – you’re preaching to the converted. You’ve got to pay to add more people at the top of the funnel right? Yes, but you can do better than “brand advertising.”

Maybe it’s just semantics but when you think about your next media buy, your display ads, or the next bit of content you create, make sure that it has something to it that will persuade someone to buy instead of having the sole purpose of “branding.”