u/DM-wizard

For some, the title might look wrong and if yes then I’m on your side. it’s not Branding v/s Marketing - It’s always Branding led by Marketing.

Initially when I started the journey in marketing, it was somewhere going in trend that marketing starts by first getting the business then going and looking for keywords, frame the content and then it’s on google how it takes and spread, mainly how it ranks. 

I personally call it “Volume based marketing” rather than “Personalized or Identity based marketing”. 

Marketing is done mainly to position the brand. That positioning is linked to the mindset of the person behind the business, not the keyword. If this is missing, a marketer always suffers to think beyond “General” tactics. 

See, there is almost no business in today’s time that can say, it is selling something different. 

Now in most cases, this part is missing because in certain cases there might be no unique intention the business has. They might simply be following trends or traces of other shoes in the sand. But in that case - a marketer role becomes more diverse to connect every single dot around the business owner's life, experiences and thinking.

1. The overall intention is only to give a certain voice to the brand - THE PURPOSE. 
2. Purpose to which customers can connect. Customers always need to have a REASON before making any purchase. 
3. Once the PURPOSE is designed, the content on the shortlisted keyword becomes more prominent and unique.

 

For eg - Marketing without Brand purpose make the topic look like this -
“How digital marketing boost your business”

The same topic can look completely different once Brand Purpose is integrated:
“How businesses lose trust online before losing customers” 

In a more precise way - I see marketing as a systematic distribution of Brand Purpose across the channels and content. Because no single platform can help achieve it and when done with uniform content - it makes the marketing more easy, established and recognizable .

I’ve noticed this trend in online marketing that the conversion is really scary for the one who is revolving around the traditional pieces of the platform.

Ads are running everywhere and in big numbers. Some of them getting conversion at first but seeing downfall at later parts. If a closer look has been given to this, I personally think it’s not the algorithm that manipulates the stats (in few cases - it is), but it’s the next action that we are taking after getting the conversions. 

Based on how I treated the campaigns, there are failures from which I learned and one of them is when any one campaign was started giving me the conversion I got more excited and on the very next phase I did something that was never supposed to happen.

I started making very tiny tweaks hoping to get better results and in return it turned out to be the opposite. The conversion which was initially looking good and giving 5X ROAS now came down to 2X. 

From here I started to feel that Selling & Scaling are very close to each other and impact very hard if prioritized by any one. Rather than being a complimentary it looks more like individual Subordinates. 

From this, I’ve just figured out :- 

1. Selling focused campaigns tell that the targeting of the campaign is going in the right direction, but scaling the same can absolutely break that thing completely. 
2. Scaling the selling campaign turns the focus and direction of the campaign from specific to broad and that’s when the game begins to change, the garbage begins to fill. 
3. The selling campaign sets the foundation for the scaling campaign and if any change is made by focusing the Scaling on Selling - the entire thing comes down to almost zero. 
4. Scaling should be made away without disturbing the Selling campaign. The algorithm may hit the selling one too since both are running in the same account, but that depends on the approach and action taken on the Scaling campaign. If there is something new being tried - it will affect the Selling Campaign.

 

I’ve seen one comment where a person stated that they build a platform that works with AI by doing some automation to some manual work on a website. But it works very effectively if AI is trained and well learned about the structure you want to follow, the kind of language you want to allow for your brand etc etc.

This what I somehow feel lies in this case as well. With the emerging AI trend, algorithms look to start functioning as an AI.. where it matters the most that how well it gets trained with the initial targeting and once sales start to come, Scaling might hamper that learning based on the volume. 

AI based algorithms look biased towards the volume of data. If a major portion of data says something, it starts following it even if that data never bring the conversion.