As Mark Ritson recently said, “The whole point of seeing the world from the true viewpoint of customers is to realise that your brand is not ‘top of mind’ most of the time.”

Consumers don’t go around thinking and feeling about your brand all the time. Instead, building memory structures – or ‘mental availability’ as Prof. Byron Sharp called it – grows brand salience. That’s the ease with which your brand springs to mind in the purchase situation.

For brands where digital channels are part – or all – of that purchase journey, you also want to be easily found in search. That ‘findability’ is where brand salience connects with consideration and purchase intention.

Of course, when it comes to planning how to spend your marketing budget, both these things cry out for investment, and you’ve got to make choices, especially during these (dare we say) uncertain times, where spending money can seem slightly scarier than usual.

However, it doesn’t have to be scary or expensive, and now is the perfect time to focus your marketing planning on brand building and brand awareness.

And we have the perfect strategy, the strategy involves:

The importance of brand salience:

Brand salience is a very particular kind of awareness. It is often thought of a difficult metric (read – expensive) to measure. However, it’s a vital part of looking into your brand awareness, as you want your audience to think of your brand first when they come to purchase a product like yours.

But it doesn’t have to be a difficult thing to measure. Instead of converting brand trackers, and / or conducting consumer panels, you simply need to look at your branded searches, to gain an idea of your brand salience. Good brand salience means your brand building strategy is strong, as people remember your name and will go looking specifically for you when they need you.

Introducing the Golden Ratio:

While brand salience should be a key part of your brand strategy, it’s important not to get lost in simply looking at your branded search. To compliment your marketing planning you need to take a look at your unbranded search, which means people who are searching for things related to your brand, who naturally come across you, therefore growing your audience. But you need the right mix of these, as too much focus on unbranded search means your brand building becomes neglected, however too much focus on brand salience halts your brand growth, as you aren’t prioritising reaching new audiences.

The perfect mix between branded and unbranded search is called ‘The Golden Ratio’ – a happy balance within your organic search traffic. A ratio of 60:40 between your branded and unbranded search traffic is considered the ideal balance for both brand awareness and brand growth.

How to get the right balance:

So now you know how much focus you need on both brand salience and brand growth through branded and unbranded search, but you need to know how to implement it within your marketing strategy. Here is some insight into how we, at Bottle, use the Golden Ratio.

We focus our digital PR plans for clients’ brands, with a balance between stories designed to grow brand fame, and stories designed to increase findability in search.

The fame stories are the big, wide reaching stories, designed to hit as many eyes as possible, and making the readers remember the brands name. The findability stories are designed to bring in as many links as possible, and for relevant audiences of brand’s to see the story.

So, there you have it, a simple way to improve your marketing planning, to improve brand salience and brand awareness, even on a smaller budget. This way you stop your current audience from forgetting you, and you reach new audiences to help your brand grow.