WHAT’S MORE IMPORTANT, BRAND BUILDING, OR SALES ACTIVATION?

When it comes to revenue generation, should your emphasis be on sales activation or brand building?

Sales activation, making sales happen, may seem a more obvious priority. Others will argue that a balance between the two is needed, but that answer seems trite. Brand building on the other hand, could be viewed as just a ‘nice to do’ — particularly by medium and mid-market companies.

Recent research, however, reveals that successful brands do focus on both, while less successful brands are more focussed on sales alone.

According to Marketing week, “Marketing approaches will vary by category, but the survey reveals that although the brands focusing on short-term sales activation may see an uplift in immediate sales, they will lose out when it comes to long-term growth.”

Specsavers head of marketing, Shaun Briggs, told Marketing Week that Specsavers is successful because, “lead generation and conversion are two of the most important components of the marketing funnel.

“Without leads we’ve nothing to convert, and without conversion I’m wasting leads,” he says. “Nail both and I’m delivering optimum short-term results. Of course, if I’m ignoring the longer term (brand building) when doing this, future leads are likely to be harder and more expensive to acquire.”

At Attain New Zealand, we believe that activities like public relations, publishing blogs, distributing your newsletter and advertising on social media are important brand-building activities, but they need to be balanced with a sales activation and conversion process — once you generate the interest and the traffic, you should have a funnel process to capture and convert that traffic; everything from landing pages, strong calls to actions, sales calls, workshops, and special offers.

Colin Kennedy – Director of Strategy and Content
M: +64 27 245 6060
E: colin@weareattain.com
W: weareattain.com