If you were starting a brand from scratch which channels would you prioritize?

I had a consultation call with a small business in it’s second year, trying to get their marketing in order. There’s so much to do when it comes to digital, it’s super overwhelming when time and cash are tight, so she wanted to know: where do we start? What should we prioritize?

Q: if you were to launch a brand completely from scratch today, what would be the very first step in your digital marketing strategy?

Nicolas Mertens, President, Genuine Sadness: I think everything's going to come down to the audience first. 

Marketing at its core is reaching the right people at the right place with the right message. So when we build a strategy, we want to understand those elements as well as we can.

People like to throw out these blank statements, like “TikTok is the easiest platform to grow on” or “Instagram is a dead platform” but I don’t think brands really have the luxury of choosing which platform is easiest.

There's no one really obvious one platform to start with that works for all brands, whether it's B2B or B2C. 

We use software like SparkToro to find out where your audience is spending their time — even beyond social, we start looking at what other websites, news platforms, etc. they might use.

Q: So once you've identified where they are, would you lean more towards organic content first, or would you jump into paid advertising right away?

NM: The good thing about organic is it's an amazing testing ground. So you can start to figure out what works and what doesn't. 

And organic social is free, other than the time invested. 

To advertise a business anywhere else, you usually have to pay money to get seen. Whether that's getting a placement on TV or on the radio or a billboard, something like that. But on social, we have this opportunity to get stuff seen for free. 

One of the ways that the platforms are evolving (read: as everything becomes more and more like TikTok) is that it matters less how many followers you have and it’s more about getting a piece of content recommended to people and winning on relevance and entertainment. 

The right piece of content can get seen by thousands and thousands of people without any followers. 

To put that in an example from an actual client, I took over this brand Instagram page and it had like 20K+ followers or something like that. 

Instagram pages should organically reach about 10% of their followers. And it was reaching like 1% of its followers. Sure, part of that was due to inactivity and mismanagement before I took it over, but still, it's really struggled to reach beyond that. We needed to shift efforts to be more entertaining and more authentic instead of glossy lifestyle images.

So if an established page with 20K followers is only reaching like 200 people, that’s not that much different than a page with a hundred followers or so.

Q: Building on that idea, once you've got that organic content strategy figured out and you're starting to see what resonates with your audience, at what point would you say it's time to invest in paid advertising? What would be the indicators for you that it's time to take that leap?

NM: I think we got to consider the funnel altogether first. 

There's definitely a good argument to be made about launching with paid right away because when you're new, it is all about brand awareness: letting people know who you are, what you do, and why they should give a shit. 

For a new brand, that's especially important, because they need to know who you are, and you need to stand out. 

There are advantageous organic tactics you can do because you’re new. People always want to know about new news, even if it’s is B2B. There's earned media potential there if you're this new offer on the block, but you really have to have your positioning figured out. 

You might not have that right away, and that's a really great time to bring on a marketer to help you figure out what that thing is that's going to make you stand out to your audience. 

To go back to your question, I do think the easiest way to get eyeballs is through paid, but I think you need to do organic and paid at the same time. Organic is going to be the most reliably effective during the consideration phase and the loyalty phase, so if they liked your paid content, hopefully, they’ll follow you organically during their consideration phase.

Consideration phases are super long these days, and worsening in this endless recession. All the more reason to get people to follow you on social media so you can have all those touchpoints over time.

Q: Using paid advertising to get those initial eyeballs and build brand awareness, while also working on your organic strategy so that you have that authentic engagement and that testing ground to see what resonates is a really solid combination.

NM: Part of this is a numbers game, right? 

People come to me all the time where they haven't done much advertising or invested much in content, and they go, “Oh, well, I've gotten all this business before, and I've never had to spend on it.”  But it's just not reliable enough to say to solely rely on word of mouth. 

We need to know how much your customer acquisition cost is. We need to know what it will take to get a cold customer in the door for those stagnant times when people aren't just showing up. We need to know what some of those base costs are and build that into the business. 

When you have those lulls, and maybe revenue is down, you're not going to have the funds in the bank on year two or year three or year five or year 20 to invest into marketing all of a sudden and start that groundwork from scratch. 

I find a lot of brands, even established brands, don't really understand what their customer acquisition cost is or ever look at their MER. There's always going to have to be some investing in the top-of-the-funnel awareness of letting people know who you are and why they should care. 

If you're an established brand, you need to let people know why you're still relevant. If there's all these new people coming around trying to take your market share, you've got to come out swinging and tell them who you are and what you do and why you're better.

Q: Thinking about the different channels out there, like social media, search engines, email marketing, and so on, do you have any favorite channels that you think tend to work especially well for new brands, or does it really just depend on the industry and the audience?

NM: Again, I kind of go back to the funnel. Email can be really great because it can have really direct impact on conversion. But it is a funnel. You’re not going to have any customers on your email list without investing in the top of funnel first. And depending on your offer, how many times can they repurchase anyways?

I think we've gotten into a really bad habit over the last, you know, five to ten years of digital marketing and this “performance marketing” mentality where we say, “Oh, we're going to cut out all of the top of the funnel, all of the awareness and prospecting, and just only go to people who are ready to buy.” 

I don't think that leaves enough room there for you to, introduce people to the problem that you're solving and show how you're solving it — building trust in the brand before you ask them to make a purchase. 

I think that's why so many people feel like they have to compete on price, because once you get to the bottom of the funnel, it is just about price. That's why people sign up for emails: to get deals. Maybe to get exclusives. Who gives a fuck about a seasonal message? Or a banal “just checking in”? 

Maybe people should think of their email strategy more like brand journalism: what will it take to get me attention? Like if I hardly ever open the New York Times news recap, why the fuck would I open your “tips” email.

Q: Focusing on top-of-the-funnel awareness might seem too broad or not directly tied to immediate ROI for some brands. How would you justify that investment?

NM: You have to do prospecting. There's ways to do it smart, though. 

Like, if you are running paid, that does give you some more control than other tactics. We can remove audiences that have already been on the website before because they don't need that top-of-funnel awareness. 

One of the things I have been doing with some of my brands that are on the product side of things is we only target based on stores that have the product in stock right now instead of keeping targetting totally wide open. 

And if your ad spend is limited, you need to be more precise. We need a smaller target so we can get ad frequency and brand recall. 

I had a North America-wide home services client once that emphasized something called “Five Mile Famous.” So everything within a five-mile radius of your service area, they wanted to just hammer with marketing. Lawn signs, guerrilla marketing, putting flyers in mailboxes or door hangers, anything in that five-mile radius, spending the time to do what you could there. Charity sponsorships.

People saw the results of that pretty quickly because they'd see you around, they would recognize you. We try to do the same thing on digital.

I understand the concern about wanting these easy wins, but you need to invest before that, otherwise you're just going to be competing on price and that’s a race to the bottom. 

One easy efficiency win in on digital could be something like taking your sales pitch that you might be doing door-to-door or on a cold call, and making a social media version of that. Whether it's a talking head video, for example, or capturing an actual door-to-door transaction, and then you put some ad spend behind that. 

You're basically doing a digital version of what you would be doing face-to-face, that same sales pitch, that same script, and then you're spreading it as widely as possible with some targeting behind it.

Q: Some people might feel overwhelmed by all the different channels out there and wonder how to prioritize without spreading themselves too thin. So, how would you advise brands to navigate that and figure out which channels to really focus on?

NM: Well, the first thing we do is find out where your people are. If you're a new brand, you might not have much website traffic or store traffic or anything like that to base this on. 

So one of the things we try and do is scrape some data off of other websites where we think people that would be interested in your brand might be going. So if you have a more established competitor, for example (maybe you're the artisanal version of a big box brand), we can go onto the big box brand site and see who is engaging with them in Canada.

Then we can see what social platforms they're using, based on visitors to that website or maybe visitors that read an article about that brand or something like that. 

We have different software we can use as an agency to kind of come up with those answers. 

Maybe we come up with a content strategy that is optimized for the top two platforms, and we syndicate onto the other platforms that are relevant, knowing that it might not be a home run on those other platforms, but at least there's content there already being posted regularly. So at least you can be on multiple channels and start building over time. And then when you're ready to activate, you're just not starting from scratch. You still have some signals, you're going to acquire some audience, either way.