We often see the term ‘digital marketing’ across many marketing forums and marketing groups. But would employing digital marketing in every campaign guarantee success? Digital marketing consists of many tools, from online banners, landing pages, SEO, to social monitoring tools, and many more. Just imagine that the world of marketing is like a supermarket. If you want to throw everything in your basket, you will be surprised (most probably shocked) when the bill comes out.

The troubling issue that brands face nowadays is not the lack of tools, but rather, how to pick the right tools to achieve campaign objectives while maximizing budget. This article will find out the steps to prepare a digital marketing campaign for branding purposes.

1. Objective

There’s a saying that you should ‘know where you’re going’. Similarly, brands should determine campaign objectives before spending their money on advertising. Branding campaigns usually aim to raise brand awareness and build positive images about the company, product, or services in consumers’ minds. With such a nature, branding will prioritize digital tools to gain mass coverage and build brand recall.

Some famous branding strategy in Vietnam includes:

• ‘No Excuse – Wear a Helmet’ by Ogilvy & Mather to raise awareness on wearing helmets while driving motorbikes among Vietnamese in 2007.
• A series of advertising videos from ‘Dien May Xanh’ – a local electronics supermarket in 2016. These videos combined funny choreography and mind-blowing visuals that make viewers unable to forget. (See it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PcpklycEtM&ab_channel=CocaBabyTV)
• The launch of Biti’s Hunter (a Vietnamese footwear provider) in 2017 had successfully rebranded the brand image, from basic and out-fashioned, to trendy and young.

2. Preparation

To approach the mass audience, branding strategies usually integrate multiple communication channels, from traditional 1-minute TVC, 6-second Youtube Ads, to online banners, etc. With the varied time frame and screen size, the brands need to thoroughly adapt their content for each channel to ensure that the message is unified across all platforms. 

Example: For Youtube Ads, the brand name should appear in the first 5 seconds. Otherwise, the dreaded SKIP button will blow away the brand’s advertising effort.

3. Launching time

With the help of digital marketing, a brand’s message is made ready to air anytime, anywhere. This helps brands shorten their preparation period compared with in the past. Brands could consider to kick-off their branding campaigns according to their current needs and the on-going situation, such as:

• Before new market entry
• Before releasing a new product line to the current market
• Before the opening of a new store
• When the brand attempts to reposition

4. Message and design

Needless to say, message and visual are the cores of any advertisement. In branding, the information that a brand wants to convey to its consumers should be condensed into a key message. And these messages should be coherent on all communications platforms, as mentioned above.

To attract audience, these messages can be adjusted for special holidays, such as ‘OMO – Seeding happiness in Tet holidays, dirt is good while doing good deeds’ or ‘Get your lucky money with Momo’ during new year days; or to express the brand positioning such as ‘A champion made by Milo’ vs. ‘Ovaltine – As long as you enjoy it, you don’t need to be champions’; or to transmit the brand’s mission such as ‘Vinamilk – Vietnamese rises high,’ etc. Key messages can be decided depending on the feeling that the brands want to convey.

At the same time, the overall tone and layout of the advertisement should reflect the brand’s spirit. For example, in Coca Cola branding output, we can easily see two familiar dominant colors – red and white. This would help customers quickly recall Coca Cola’s logo and recognize the brand.

5. Advertising

Again, the purpose of branding is to approach the target audience and potential new users – as many as possible! Therefore, branding would prioritize the use of digital marketing tools that help the brand to achieve this goal, which include:

• Facebook Ads: increase engagement, reach and brand awareness
• Youtube Ads: high coverage and help to transmit the message under a catchy form
• Google Display Network (GDN): banner placement on a high-traffic website, increase exposure

With the aid of technology, digital marketing tools will help brands approach the right target audience with much less budget than traditional TVC or OOH. Especially for smaller companies with a tight budget, digital marketing would be a wise choice.

6. Measurement

The effectiveness of a campaign does not always translate into direct sales, and this applies to branding campaigns. To measure branding activities’ success, marketers can evaluate and compare data on reaches, engagements, and follows before and after the campaigns.

Besides, brands can also combine other social listening tools to see what consumers are saying about the campaign and the product/services. From these insights, brands can learn about the strengths and weaknesses of their offers, and make product innovations in the future.

Before selling a product, branding should come first to build trust and credibility. Nowadays, there still exists prejudice that branding is only for large and established corporations with large budgets. However, with digital marketing, smaller companies or niche industries can proceed with branding activities. After building reputation and credibility for the brand, the marketing department can continue to follow up with a sales campaign (see part 2, coming soon).

That is easy to say, but the catch here is how to run the campaign effectively without stumbling on unfamiliar technical problems. A smart choice for brands is to work with a digital marketing agency for delivery of a fruitful campaign. EloQ Communications has profound experience in running digital campaigns. Our in-house experts are confident in assisting to achieve their objectives with meaningful number.

Hanh Le, Assistant to Managing Director at EloQ Communications. Hanh is supporting EloQ in connecting and maintaining relationships with more than 10 partner agencies in Asia and other global PR networks to execute global projects, as well as to leverage service quality in the communications industry.