Is there such a thing as brand fatigue?
The 100s of emails I get a day from countless people and brands would say yes - and I’m sure it’s not just me that gets bombarded every single day. Brand fatigue is a more recent term to describe the excessive messaging that a brand outputs in the modern world of marketing. We’ve all seen the constant stream of branded posts, emails, tweets and content pieces that fill our inboxes to the point of bursting. But does this over-sharing from a brand actually harm its image? As someone inundated with branded messages, the answer is most likely yes.
Going back to a time before information was so easily shareable, marketers used to use a more scatter-gun approach to gain awareness for their brand. Due to the lack of real consumer data, it was very difficult to create highly personalised, targeted campaigns that reached your perfect audience. With the advent of digital and the marketing techniques derived from it, we are no longer constricted to sending out messages en-masse in order to hopefully reach the right people. But for some reason, we have lost our way.
I was always told at school; “It’s not quantity, but quality of work that matters”. This has always rang true with me, and I certainly can’t think of a better way to describe how marketers should be approaching communications in the age of information. As legendary search marketer, Rand Fishkin, states in his recent Whiteboard Friday - “Brand fatigue can happen when the value provided to your customer is too low, or too infrequent to deserve attention”.
So how can you effectively remove yourself from the huge amounts of messaging noise?
It might be difficult to resist hitting share, but the following rules might help keep your brand relevant and stop your avid consumer fans from being worn down…
1 - Create content that actually helps or entertains your customer
This sounds like it should be a given, but we’ve all seen the countless social posts & emails about “our new product range”, “a new case study” or even “our latest addition to the team”. These might seem interesting, but if I’ve signed up to gain information about how to build my business - I expect exactly that. Everything else is just noise.
Create content that is genuinely insightful and stop worrying about the frequency of posts, otherwise you will only drown yourself in brand noise.
2 - Utilise unique strategies for each digital channel
As digital marketers, we have an extremely large amount of tools at our disposal to distribute any marketing materials that we create. Sounds fantastic… at first. This ease of distribution has made many marketers lazy about messaging. “We have a new blog out, can you post it on ALL the social media channels, send it to our email subscribers and have it beamed to mars for satellite distribution?”
It’s too much, and people that are following you on multiple channels will be forced to see the same message across all of their mediums. If we go to different channels to experience different things, then why are we as marketers sending the same messaging across everything? Be smart with your distribution strategies, create something unique for each channel - it sounds like hard work, but nothing good ever comes easy.
3 - Be conservative with marketing automation
I might get in trouble with some marketing technologists for saying this, but marketing automation can create extreme laziness. Sending emails out after every single consumer action is sloppy, and comes off very impersonal. We should be crafting fantastic experiences and using marketing automation as a means to introduce our customers into our person-to-person ecosystem.
Stop letting automations run your business and instead, use it as a tool to facilitate actual conversation between your brand and its avid consumer fans.
In the end, no one likes to be spammed. Keep your marketing personal, high-quality and at a reasonable output level and you will have no worry of creating brand fatigue with your customer base.
By Chris Donnelly, MD of Verb Brands.
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