Lead Generation vs Branding – how businesses must utilize it from digital investments?

Date: August 30, 2024

August 30, 2024 August 30, 2024

Lead Generation vs Branding – how businesses must utilize it from digital investments?

We’ve often had business owners and marketing managers approach us ‘asking for more leads.’

They are the same business that invest in a digital team without applying marketing logic throughout, to generate leads.

While they succeed in their pursuit of gaining that many leads, they may be losing a significant proportion of their investments. We like to call it ‘lost opportunities on digital investments.’

For instance, many buy into content strategy and inbound marketing, but they overlook how significant SEO is to their overall success online. Many even fail to optimize their website for mobile platforms. While the rest still relies on cold calls, indiscriminate paid advertisements ignoring ethical brand presence.

Lead generation may fall under the general brand marketing umbrella, but it’s a specific part of the process that requires its own specialist skills and tactics. Where brand marketing efforts help expand audience size, lead generation helps target a group of individuals willing to know more about your product/service.

Mixing up branding and lead generation can mean missing out on leads and paying far more for leads than you need to.

ColorWhistle calls out these businesses to understand digital investment as their sole commitment to engage a like-minded digital marketing agency right from strategy planning to implementation & analysis stage and further, measure the ROI on the basis of how much more can these agencies offer them.

How Are Digital Investments Spanning Out Across The World?

People are getting used to the convenience of accessing an e-commerce store, buying a product, paying the price, booking a cab anytime and anywhere. This is the reason why the digital landscape has grown exponentially all these years.

With the power of social media, ever-adapting Google Search Engine algorithms, user-intent ads, and many more techniques, businesses can improve their online visibility.

The three pillars of digital transformation strategy include Design, Development & Marketing. Various channels to execute it include:

The U.S. Small Business Administration suggests allocating 7-to-8% of gross revenue to marketing, spending more than 50% on digital marketing alone. Also, regional companies across the USA, UK, Europe, Australia are investing more in automation including Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Machine learning, and Data analytics.

Automation tools, Engaging content strategies are some of the preferred techniques employed by Marketers in these regions to maintain a long-lasting customer relationship than simply cold-selling their products/services.

However, in developing markets such as India, regional companies are still dependent on Telemarketing for lead generation and social media for branding. Most B2B companies are still operating without any digital presence. Further, investing heavily in automation may not bring in good returns as digital literacy is almost non-existent among more than 90% of the Indian population.

In MENA (Middles East & Northern Africa) regions, social media & video marketing are leading the growth in digital investments.

Also Read

Why Should Small Businesses in Canada Focus on Branding?

Investing in Good Logo-Design

Image Source: The offending logo (left) and the revised logo (right)

The very recent logo design controversies involve big global brands such as Amazon and Myntra. Without dwelling much into the details about the controversy, it was enough to create a social embarrassment for the brands to the extent that they had to revise their new logo.

Lead Generation vs Branding – how businesses must utilize it from digital investments (Myntra) - ColorWhistle

Image Source: The offending logo (left) and the revised logo (right)

While it is highly skeptical to draw any conclusions based on the controversies, it has surely kept the brands in a negative light for quite some time.

For emerging businesses, having an impactful logo design in its early stage distinguishes them from the competition, invites new customers to know them better, and builds brand loyalty.

If you don’t feel 100% confident in creating your own logo design, then you will likely need to outsource the process to a professional service that can handle it for you. Understanding the process of business logo design, means you need to make sure they fully understand your company including your mission statement and the look and feel of your products and packaging. This is what will allow them to properly handle the mood board/idea generation process.

At ColorWhistle we do all this and more!

You may also explore some of our previous blogs to learn more about logo design:

Behind CRED’s Viral Advertisements – branded content

Lead Generation vs Branding – how businesses must utilize it from digital investments (CRED) - ColorWhistle

Image Source: A screenshot from CRED ad

CRED is an emerging Fintech platform based in India.

Here are two screenshots from the recent viral advertisements from CRED.

For instance, Mr. Rahul Dravid, a former Indian cricketer, is known to display a sense of calmness and patience throughout his professional career. In this advertisement, he is seen displaying anger and frustration which is an unimaginable sight for any Indian cricket fan. The second screenshot is of some Indian cricketing legends from the ‘90s. Even here, their individual personalities have been reimagined in a fictional world.

Lead Generation vs Branding – how businesses must utilize it from digital investments (CRED Viral Advertisement Examples) - ColorWhistle

Image Source: A screenshot from CRED ad

CRED’s focus to increase awareness about the platform is being met through such engaging branding campaigns. They have used humor in the most unimaginable way which is enough to create a long-lasting brand image.

Awareness leading to consideration and purchase (app download in CRED’s case) is something that the brand must be planning for, going forward.

Interestingly, the team behind the viral creatives is a bespoke team brought together for the project & not any agency.

Misleading Soap Advertisement – avoid such campaigns

If you’re a fan of Indian TV commercials, you may remember Bunty, the boy scout, in a certain soap advertisement that first featured in 2013.

The commercial saw a boy scout who is obsessed with hand hygiene and goes on to wash it with soap for at least a minute. Just then the protagonist appears with the “advertised soap” which claims to be 10x times faster.

However, since the current pandemic has come to light, the World Health Organisation’s recommendation of washing hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds or more has come to everyone’s attention.

So, how does it make sense to our discussion here?

Branding through video marketing, commercials, social media marketing, etc. sometimes needs to be responsible for disseminating the correct & scientific information transcending the scope for entertainment.

Brands that incorporate informative posts/humor posts in their social media campaign are ones that create a buzz in today’s online space. Read more about building a large social media following by clicking here.

In the future, Digital Investments will concentrate more on:

Brand activism: Consumers are only willing to associate with brands or businesses that share the same values as them. Failing to do this, marketers are at risk of losing an entire generation of consumers.
With demographic change set to take place in India from 2026 onwards, we could see more and more regional companies truly adapting to digital transformation and reducing their dependency on telemarketers.
Marketers will rely on Micro-videos to create traction on video streaming platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and even Linkedin.
Rise of branded content as in the case of CRED as discussed here. Research says that branded content is about 20 times more engaging than display ads and has the potential to attract more consumers.
Companies will prefer single-code-based solutions to build web apps across multiple platforms.
Outsourcing to digital partners will be even more prominent to maximize returns from digital investments.

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Recommended Branding Channels

1. Use SEO for Branding:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should not come as an afterthought!

Google recommends incorporating SEO strategy into website designing as early as possible. Because SEO is all about enhancing the user experience – that’s why search engine algorithms care about a site’s speed, web design, high-quality content marketing, mobile-friendliness, and so on.

Lead Generation vs Branding – how businesses must utilize it from digital investments (Use SEO for Branding) - ColorWhistle — *Image Source: Peter Morville’ UX Honeycomb*

Backing up our line of argument with Peter Morville’s user experience honeycomb, most of its attributes, like being useful, usable, findable, accessible, and credible map directly to SEO. After all, search engine algorithms are designed to gauge the overall user experience and then decide if your site is the best result to show.

Get inspired from the following case studies:

2. Instagram

How often have you ended up stalking a new actor on Instagram after watching their performance on web series?

Yes, brands are more or less, the same.

This is why 97% of the fortune 500 companies rely on social media for branding.

A study in India found that when fashion brands engage customers on social media, they become more intent on buying the brand’s products, thus making them loyal customers.

Learn about SEO on Instagram by clicking here.

3. Quality content to keep the user engaged

Businesses need to embrace content marketing along with SEO and avoid running behind lead generation indiscriminately.

Spilling out a little secret, We at ColorWhistle do not believe in engaging a dedicated team to track lead generation through our blogs. We create and value our blogs to keep users engaged and this is sufficient to improve our brand presence online. Leads will follow automatically.

Time Tested Strategy For Lead Generation

1. Google Ads: Here is a list of resources to make the best use of Google for your lead generation:

2. LinkedIn Ads: The platform is popular to build professional connections through peer reference. In fact, LinkedIn is used by 94% of B2B Marketers for content marketing, followed by Twitter (87%).

Start using the techniques mentioned in this blog to get targeted leads daily on LinkedIn.

Find more such effective channels on lead generation in our previous blogs.

The good news is that you do not have to let brand awareness and lead generation strategies constantly battle it out. When used strategically and effectively, the two methods complement each other.

Your investment in digital channels will yield better results when you work in sync with a like-minded digital agency.

You may rely on ColorWhistle’s proficiency in SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, and just about all the digital marketing fields.

Looking for Designing & Branding Services / Solutions?

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Connect on a business call with Sankar, Founder at ColorWhistle, to discuss your requirements in detail. We are also available to answer your queries at +91-944-278-9110.