Most brands don’t fail, they just lose momentum

This is your kick in the pants to realise if you only show up when things slow down, you’re already behind your competitors that never stopped.

My father-in-law is a real train enthusiast, a proper train spotter, and his favourite is the Australian C3801 steam locomotive engine from the 1940s. Now just the engine alone weighs 200 tons. Add another 500 tons for the tender and coal, water and carriages filled with passengers and it’s hauling a 700-800 ton train. The amount of power required to start moving that load is obviously immense. The C3801 was fast too, getting up to speeds of over 120kmh (80mph) and once it had momentum, maintaining that speed was far easier than getting it up to that speed. But if you didn’t maintain the boiler, it would obviously run out of steam and slow to a halt. 

What does this have to do with a brand? Well, momentum is what keeps businesses and brands growing. Because when you have momentum, growth becomes easier to sustain, just the same as a steam train. And just like a steam engine, if you don’t maintain your momentum and sustain your brand presence, your brand stops going anywhere while other competitors steam right past you. Which might leave people to question if you’re actually open for business.

So where are brands failing at this and how can we keep the momentum going?

The high when you start

It feels great when you have all your branding in place either when starting your business or after a rebrand, as it puts you on track to start getting it out there in your market. You’ve got clarity, you have a plan and you might even have started implementing a lot of your marketing efforts. It feels great and you’re on a high of confidence and might even be seeing short-term payoffs already as customers start seeing and buying your brand.

Momentum is a funny thing in business, we’re always striving to keep the engine running and stay on track. But what can end up happening really easily for many small businesses, medium sized businesses and even big businesses, is that we stray into the busy lane of working in the business and serving customers.

When it gets busy

You’d be mad not to prioritise your customers when they start flowing through the doors as a result of your branding and marketing efforts that have created a strong brand presence. The problem though for many is that our brands stray as less of a priority. And don’t get me wrong here, I experienced this myself last year too after a bumper 8 months of business dropping into my inbox. So this is as much of a cathartic tale from experience as it is an observation of other businesses I’ve worked with and those I’ve seen from a distance. 

We do this big push to get our brand out there and seen so that people think of us, consider our offer and convert into a sale. And usually it’s through the quieter periods where we have the capacity to give it our time, attention and budget from busy periods because we need more business again. Now you know what happens next, right? We get busy again and out the window goes our brand presence. Business then tapers off gradually as the effects wear off because we're not showing up.

Now I don’t blame any business for doing this. We only have so much capacity sometimes and for most, marketing and brand building isn’t what most people got into business to do…unless you’re a branding or marketing services provider too, then quite frankly, what the hell are we all doing when we don’t have that excuse (I say in jest). So it slides down the priority list. You know you should be keeping up with the Jones’, so to speak, but you let it slide until it becomes a priority.

Your brand isn’t Christmas

I’ll be honest, the amount of brands I see only pop up one or two times a year, especially the e-commerce ones, is quite astounding. Even the big brands do it and it’s often at peak times of buying like Christmas, End-Of-Financial-Year, or Black Friday. Obviously these are times where you’re either trying to get your remaining stock out the door, or using these high peaks of consumer spending habits to get your business in the black (hence the name Black Friday) before the end of the financial year, which for businesses in the Northern Hemisphere like in America, this makes total sense. But for Australia when our financial year ends on June 30, we’re just jumping on the bandwagon.

Additionally if you’re only showing up to spruik a short-term, once-off offer, 71% of B2B ads fail to generate sales because they focus on immediate sales instead of building brand recognition for future purchases. Marketing specialists, Peter Field & Les Binet also found that around 60% of advertising’s impact comes from long-term brand building, and only ~40% from short-term activation. Meaning that if we’re only focusing on a “SALE!”, then we’re not building a brand that creates cumulative value.

My point here is that if you're only doing one, two or three big pushes only each year to get your brand out there, especially if it’s tied to a sale, then it might not be enough to sustain brand growth over time and you end up at square one each time.

Additionally, this may be detrimental to the value of your brand too, as it ends up training most of your customers to only buy when you’re offering a sale. Which doesn’t position your brand with a valuable customer perception above your competitors.

Impatient to see long-term results

Another common reason for businesses to let their brand presence fall by the wayside is the lack of immediate pay-offs when engaging in marketing activities to get the attention of potential customers. I’ll say this forever and a day until I turn blue, that brand building and its efficacy is an investment. Meaning that it will appreciate in value over time and is more likely to reward your business in the long-term rather than the short term.

I’ve seen this many times with clients I’ve worked with where the marketing just stops because they don’t see instant results from marketing efforts. I get it, you put money into something and hope for return on investment. That said, it’s more than likely to pay off when you keep at it for longer. And I’m talking 6-12 months at least, not 3 months like most businesses give up at.

It’s not to say that just showing up for a longer period of time will guarantee results either. There still needs to be effective creative in your branding and marketing to get attention and convert, as well as the correct implementation of your brand presence in things like Meta ads on Facebook or Instagram to show up in the right places in the most effective way. However, if you’ve got good branding and marketing that has every reason to work, it could just need more time in the market for consumers that are ready to buy to find you. By doing so, you’re priming the market, and depending on the type of offer and who you’re targeting, that ROI can be sooner or it can be later. 

The things I always come back to is that the brands that we’ve come to know, think of, and buy from, did so by always being present and available. So instead of throwing the toys out of the stroller when we don’t see an immediate impact, there is a method to what might feel like chasing smoke at some points, but there does need to be a level of patience to see the fruits of that labour.

The best time to show up is when you don’t need to

So I’ve painted a fairly broad picture of the problem, and it all comes down to this thing we call in the marketing space, ‘mental availability’, or in layman’s terms, is your brand coming to mind? Salience is what helps move your brand into the front-runner, go-to spot for customers, and it happens simply because you’re in their peripheral at the time of need.

Now that’s all well and good to be in the right place at the right time, but that can often be coincidental. Just like when you see a Facebook ad for something you were just chatting to a friend or family member about and think Zuckerberg is listening to you through your phone. 

However, what does indeed help to create strong mental availability at the time of need, is mental availability that is created when it’s not needed AND when you don’t need the business too. Might sound a bit counter-intuitive or better yet, a less effective use of your capacity, because why have your brand out there when it’s not needed?

Unless you run something like a Christmas decorations business, you likely run a business that has an offering customers could need or want at any time of the year. There will always be customers that are not in the market at the time of seeing your brand, in fact it’s as high as 95-97% (in both B2B & B2C) at the time consumers are exposed to your brand that won’t be in the market for what you have to offer.

But good marketing and a strong brand sticks. It sticks in the mind of consumers so that when it is needed, it is thought of. However, mental availability is only successful if they think of your brand again when needed and to improve those chances your brand needs to be present once again to jog that memory they have. Couple that with this other thing we call ‘physical availability’, meaning that you’re easily accessible for that consumer to buy at the time/place needed, and you’ve achieved a great outcome.

So if you’re not easy to mind and easy to find, how can we expect a customer to choose your brand when needed? We’ve gotta stay present as much as possible and do so with consistency. 

This is what we really mean by brand consistency

Many branding and marketing people bang on about brand consistency. However they only really focus on all your touchpoints like a website, social media content, stationery, signage, packaging, customer service, etc all looking and sounding and procedurally the same for a consistent brand experience. Don’t get me wrong, that stuff is 100% important, but I don’t believe it’s as important as a consistent brand presence in your market.

So my tips to round this article out are the following things we can all do to maintain an ‘always on’, ‘always open’ type of brand presence so that your brand doesn’t lose momentum:

• Automated Meta/Google ads: set them up once and they require minimal maintenance. Oftentimes the longer you keep publishing ads, the better retargeting your ad campaigns can be over time, rather than just spurts of turning them on and off. For a more hands off approach to managing your ads, hire a digital ads manager.

• Social + Website content: staying active on social media and your website will keep your brand present, even from a level of consumer perception to see that your business is actively maintained when they go stalking you and you can publish the same post across all the different social media accounts so that you’re present everywhere digitally possible. Constant presence in your blog can potentially aid in search engine optimisation so that your brand shows up in google results.

• Evergreen content: if creating consistent bespoke content on your social media is a nightmare to maintain that cadence, you can do either or a combination of these two things: Hire a social media content creator/manager to create your content, or create a set of content posts to last you 4 weeks and repost these on your social media accounts - these can even be scheduled so that you only need to spend an hour each month to reschedule them for then next 4 weeks.

• Make 1 ad: Rather than feeling the need to create a new ad every time, create an ad that can work agnostically at any time of year and focuses simply on your brand and its value to your market, instead of a specific offer. If you can make one commercial ad, you can play that for years and often the longer it plays, the more effective it can be. Make it for local radio, newspaper, TV (digital and free-to-air), YouTube pre-roll and even social media.

• Sponsorships: If you’re a local business that can support local sporting or community groups, this can be a low-effort way of achieving an always-on brand presence. Be it permanent signage, newsletter shoutouts, or team jersey placements, etc, these are a win win for your brand and community.

• Google Business Profile: Most small businesses ignore this, but it’s one of the highest intent touchpoints. Keep photos updated, respond to reviews, post occasional updates. It shows your business is alive when people are actively searching for you.

• Email marketing: It might be a little bit of effort each month but even one email a month keeps your brand in someone’s inbox. No need to overcomplicate it. Share updates, insights, or reminders you exist. It’s owned attention, not rented like social.

• Partnerships / collaborations: Align with adjacent businesses and cross-promote. You tap into each other’s audiences without needing to create new demand from scratch. Works especially well locally.

• Signage and physical presence: Your shopfront, vehicles, uniforms, even job site signage all act as 24/7 brand assets. Done right, they’re always working without any ongoing effort. Make them prominent, make details easy to see, especially driving past.

• Non-negotiable days/times: Sometimes it just means etching out non-negotiable times during your week to prioritise your marketing. Because when we value something, we’ll make time for it. So put it in your calendars, make it a team effort for accountability or find accountability partners if you’re a solo business owner.

• Marketing team: just like you would hire an employee to help you do the jobs you don’t have the capacity to do yourself, hiring marketing professionals is the obvious answer to ensuring a consistent brand presence. This can be done by hiring an internal marketing person or team, engaging with a contractor that can work as a ‘fractional chief marketing officer’, or engage a marketing agency. This isn’t an ad for my services either as this stuff isn’t my schtick, but having a dedicated marketing person or team, depending on the size of your business, is just the same as having a sales team and will ensure a proactive, ‘always on’ presence for your brand…just don’t leave it to your receptionist or the like, as many small businesses often do, as they already have core priorities to manage in your business.

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Like I said at the beginning of this article, momentum is an amazing thing for brand growth. Because brand-focused efforts compound over time, as it increases your reputation, perceived value and preference as more and more customers experience your brand and advocate for it to others. The trouble is that if you lose that momentum and go dark, it can often be like starting from scratch when you fire it back up again. The good news however is that we can do a bunch of things to maintain that momentum and see steady or exponential growth as a result of giving our brand a shot by staying present because of better branding and marketing efforts that achieve better business success.