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Can you afford multi-million dollar TV and mass-media campaigns? For most of us, the answer is “Hell no.” Instead, budgets are tight and you're being asked to achieve more with less.

Smart marketers like you know that video is the backbone of building a strong brand because it's the most effective medium for delivering an emotional, engaging story at scale.

Different advertising mediums are suited to different types of marketing objectives

But how do you build your brand if you can't afford to advertise on TV?

STEP 1

Create one video to rule them all

Here's how you turn one low-cost online video into a big budget mass-media campaign.

  1. Create a < 60 second hero spot with your big brand promise (Awareness)
  2. Cut the spot into 15 second shorts to act as reminders (Consideration)
  3. Turn the shorts into GIFs or static images with a CTA (Purchase)

Important: the hero ad needs to be designed to work as shorter cuts from the start. Tell your creative or video team to design the video so that the core message can be delivered in 15s or less.

STEP 2

Use the 2-4-5 digital branding-building framework

Now stick your 3 video assets into the 2-4-5 framework to deliver low-cost video ads at scale.

Source: Brand Building on Social (Whitepaper), Born Social

Like TV ads, the fame builders and short stories creates familiarity, trust, and increases future demand.

Spend 50-60% of your budget pumping them out to the masses across different social and online channels (Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc.) where the average cost per view is around $0.10.

Then put the rest of the budget into performance marketing campaigns to convert all the juicy demand you're creating.

STEP 3

Get TV results from a digital-only budget

We recently used this framework with huge success for Penny Appeal Canada, a relief and development charity.

The video campaign introduced thousands of new people to the organization, and created a huge retargeting audience that drove CAC down when we switched to more targeted and persuasive donation ads a few weeks later.

Video (left): Builds familiarity
Video (right): Persuades to take action

The extra reach helped them raise $3.6 million dollars in 4 weeks – more than double their campaign donations compared to the previous year.

Click here to see the videos we created and how they were adapted to the 2-4-5 media framework.

Watch: Why brand marketing is the secret to scaling profitably [01:24]

Outsmart the competition

This article is an excerpt from How to build a big brand on a small budget, our report that uses the latest marketing effectiveness data and research to clearly explain how businesses and startups can build a big brand on a smaller marketing budget.

Topics covered include:

  • The secret to building a big brand
  • Why most brands fail to grow
  • How to get TV/mass-media results on a digital-only budget
  • How to supercharge your marketing against the competition

The way we work, works

We’re a flexible, fast-moving, group of strategists and creatives. We work as an extension of your team, relying on evidence not hunches to deliver real results, fast.
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