The Golden Ratio for Brand Growth

How do you achieve the right balance between growing brand salience and growing search visibility in your marketing planning?

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. 

We’ve taken a couple of key insights and used these to help inform those decisions. 

The first is showing that brand salience – often thought of a difficult (read - expensive) to measure – is correlated to ‘branded search’. You now have a easily-accessible data source for this previously hard-to-penetrate metric. 

The second is introducing ‘The Golden Ratio’ – a happy balance within your organic search traffic. A ratio of 60:40 between your branded and unbranded search traffic. 

The third insight is how we, at Bottle, use the Golden Ratio to inform the weighting of 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. 

We’ve shown these insights at work, looking at a series of Direct-To-Consumer (DTC) brands – and together with our guest panellists Luke Berry, Senior SEO Specialist at gousto and Megan Copnell, UK Manager at Papier, we discuss: 

  • The importance of brand salience 

  • How unbranded search can translate into traffic 

  • Getting the balance right between the two 

You can also download the slides to see how DTC brands across different consumer sectors are already using ‘The Golden Ratio’ are proving success.