Successful marketing is long-term work that starts with a carefully prepared brand strategy. Jukka Ihalainen, Strategy Director of Dagmar’s creative team, explains ten factors that make marketing more effective and efficient.

Finnish companies waste their marketing budgets year after year. The reason is that they focus on short-term advertising, when marketing should focus on long-term investments and brand building.

So how do you do long-term strategic marketing that would be effective and efficient? And how do you get a sufficient budget for that?

You should start by adopting the basic principles of marketing. When these factors are taken into account, the results will certainly rise.
Data and researched information also make it easier to justify the importance of marketing for business.

1. Research

Research plays a huge role in the success of the campaign. This is not surprising – after all, you need to understand the market.

In addition to research, marketing consists of strategy and tactics, and they all play an equal role. When we do good research, we can use it to create a strategy and tactics that work. All of these are required to make marketing effective.

2. Goals

It’s important to be able to create the right goals to measure marketing effectiveness. Business objectives are broader entities that define, for example, the takeover of a new market. Tactical objectives focus more on channel-specific KPIs. In between, brands should be able to create strategic marketing goals that tell us what we need to achieve. An excellent technique for this is to create SMART goals that define the things to be achieved.

How to achieve a certain amount of sales or conquer a whole new market? With clear and measurable strategic marketing goals that are the glue between business goals and tactical goals.

However, there should not be too many goals, because excessive goals will distract the focus. The correct number of goals is two to four per campaign. Only then will there be a clear direction for the campaign.

3. Differentiation

It’s important to understand the history of differentiation in order to understand how it should be thought of and utilized today. Rosser Reeves’ USP, Al Ries’ and Jack Trout’s positioning theory, and Simon Sinek’s famed purpose thinking are all great theories. In reality, however, we need to take into account the advantages of all of these and take advantage of them to the extent that they create a competitive advantage for our brand.

According to Byron Sharp, today’s biggest marketing thinker, the key to growing your brand and sales is coming to mind at the time of purchase and being close to the customer mentally and physically.

Personally, I think that by taking the best of these theories, we can create the right perspective on how we can create differentiation in the minds of customers and increase efficiency in marketing.

It’s also important to understand that differentiation is only half of positioning. The more differentiated our products or services are, the more people are willing to pay for them.

Read also: How to see your brand affects your sales and marketing affects your brand

4. Multi-channel advertising

Should digital or analog channels be used in marketing? The answer is clear: effective marketing is built on multichannel advertising. The more channels there are, the better the message gets across to different target groups and the effectiveness of marketing increases.

A great example of multichannel advertising is the City of Pori’s Pori Relationship Advisor, which came across everywhere in Finland in spring 2022. The campaign had been run with little money, but it immediately went viral and became big.

5. Mass marketing and targeting

Finnish companies do not invest much in brand growth, but invest euros in tactical advertising, such as digital advertising and targeting. The reason is probably that the value of brand growth can be difficult to discern when time goes into tactical work.

In order to improve the situation, in addition to tactical advertising for certain segments, the brand should be built through mass marketing. In this case, tactical advertising pays for brand building.

6. The Long and the Short of it -theory

According to the theory of marketing effectiveness by Les Binet and Peter Field, long-term strategic marketing is successful. If you market one tactical campaign at a time, sales can be increased efficiently, but it will also decline just as quickly.

Brand building, i.e. increasing brand value, increases sales in the long run, while tactical advertising leverages increased brand value. If brand building is forgotten, it will weaken overall sales in the long run.

Read also: Marketer – what else can you compete with when in price of domesticy?

7. ESOV (Excess Share of Voice)

In ESOV, i.e. the extra vote share, the share of brand advertising exceeds its market share. This is the formula according to which a brand is able to increase its market share if it increases its percentage of the amount of advertising in the category.

When you invest more in visibility and your competitors don’t react, your brand wins even more. This is the reason why marketing investments should be made, for example, in a recession.

ESOV proves the importance of money in building a brand. The impact can be seen in many things, such as short-term sales, increasing market share, increasing the power of pricing and customer retention.

8. Brand codes

Positioning is the basis of professionally executed marketing. Half of the positioning consists of brand codes, i.e. brand differentiation, individualisation and recognizability. We create uniqueness and recognizability for brands through logos, fonts, packaging design, characters, founder, product features and celebrities used in advertising, among other things.

Kantar BrandZ conducted a study on which brand codes work best. In the results, the founders rise high, which is not surprising when you consider, for example, the importance of Steve Jobs to Apple. Also, when thinking of, say, McDonald’s, Luis Vuitton, Coca-Cola and Barbie, recognizable brand codes are the first things that come to mind.

Read also: Now is the moment of destiny for your brand. Will you lose or strengthen your valuable brand assets?

9. Creativity

According to studies, creativity explains half of the effectiveness of marketing. The share is high, which is why it is worth investing in.

I asked a couple of creative directors what creativity is. Here’s how they responded:

“Creativity is finding a new solution to a problem.”
“Problem-solving in an exceptional way.”
” Endless curiosity and the ability to combine things in a new way.”

When brands are able to solve their customers’ problems creatively and meaningfully, they are also more memorable. While investing in creativity is extremely important, brands often put too much effort into buying media space. Therefore, finding a marketing partner who understands this balance is terribly important.

10. Brand size

It is a good idea to grow your brand systematically, because at the time of purchase, customers often think of a large or well-known brand. This is because big brands have been implementing brand advertising for years, thereby securing their place in the minds of customers. Large brands also often have tangible benefits, such as shelf space in stores and an image of quality in the minds of customers.

A brand is grown with the right kind of marketing, and when a brand is big, it affects the effectiveness of advertising, i.e. sales. There is no one without the other, which is why it is worth growing the brand in the long term.

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