In marketing, visibility is everything. Visibility increases revenue, decreases costs, and increases credibility. Most important, visibility creates top of mind position for your brands among your customers. That position is what you need in the current global economic crisis.
The 3 Laws of Marketing Visibility
If we look at economic downturns in the past, we see the same pattern. Businesses that advertised, survived the crisis. Those that decreased their marketing budgets, did not. So why is that? Because they followed the three laws of marketing visibility.
The Law of Association
People’s brains are funny things. The more we see something, the more we remember it. And the more we remember something, the more our brain attributes characteristics to it. This is the first law of marketing visibility: the law of association. In our brain visible brands equal quality.
The law of association applies in any situation. But it holds up even more during an economic crisis. Why? Because consumers spend cautiously during a crisis. They shop around longer before they buy. This means that there is a larger time span in which they can consider your brand. If your brand remains visible all that time, they will be exposed to it for a longer period, and associate it more easily with quality. When they finally decide to buy, your brand will be their first choice.
The Law of Continuity
Our brains are funny in another way also. The more it sees a brand, the more it becomes aware of its existence. Only through continuity will a brand settle itself in your brain. In other words: if a customer never sees your brand, the chance that she will buy it, are slim. But the chance of buying increases if she sees your brand continuously. The law of continuity is the second law of marketing visibility.
The law of continuity applies in all situations. However, it intensifies during an economic crisis. Why? Because we associate invisibility with ‘having gone out of business’.
For example, we assume that a restaurant that stops posting on Instagram, has gone out of business. When a friend reminds us of its existence, we will probably answer with something like: “I have not seen anything from them lately, they must have gone of business”. That is why, more than ever, during a crisis you need to remain visible.
The Law of Ranking
The third law of marketing visibility is the law of ranking. We live in a world where consumers receive hundreds of messages every day. Our brain unconsciously ranks all these messages. The more the brain registers a brand, the higher it ranks. Only the brands that our brain sees many times make it to the rank of ‘very important’.
That ‘very important rank’ is called top of mind position. It is the rank you need to be in for customers to consider your product. Anything below that does not make it through the brand noise in your brain.
The law of ranking applies under all circumstances. We would not be able to function otherwise. However, in an economic crisis, the brain reduces the number of brands it remembers. You could say that it frees up cache to process the overwhelming amount of information thrown at it during a crisis. So, more than ever, you need to be visible during a crisis to maintain top of mind position.
Marketing Visibility Webinars
There are several ways to increase your visibility during a crisis. Social media and online advertising are your least expensive options. But even traditional channels like radio stations and newspapers tend to lower their fees during an economic crisis.
Our marketing visibility webinars help you understand how to generate visibility for your brand and products with social media. They also give you key insights into how to use traditional media and how to set your budgets.
The marketing visibility webinars are part of our Online Learning Center. Through this center Social Bizz-Buzz offers 12 different webinars for the month of November. As key learnings we have used the input of the 250-plus small and medium sized businesses in the Caribbean that we have coached since the Corona outbreak. While coaching them, we have seen them reinvent themselves by applying the marketing tweaks we suggest. Our webinars are offered at a fair price, and sometimes even for free.
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