How To: Increase Your Resilient Base of Organic New Customer Revenue

The key driver of the asset value at the acquisition was having a machine that could effectively, and predictably, drive BOTH short-term activation AND our resilient base of revenue, WHERE the percentage of total revenue coming from that resilient base was consistently going up over time (see image). This is what it means to have a strong Brand.

At the beginning, we had no idea what Brand building was, much less how to tie it to and improve, financial results.

However, when we learned how to define it, we could deconstruct the customer behaviors that drove Brand Strength.

This informed exactly how to build our Brand, which, when combined with effective short-term activation, translated into consistently increasing profits.

—

Most of us understand how to drive the short term activation.

However, the resilient base of revenue, and how to grow it, has historically been much less understood.

So you don't have to waste years in the valley of misunderstanding, here’s the 4 step process to growing your resilient base.

--


Step 1: Define The Strength of Your Brand in Terms of Specific Business Results

* Our Brands are quantified by the revenue we have when we turn ads, discounts, and promotions off, AKA our resilient base of revenue.


Step 2: Define the Specific Purchase Behaviors That Lead to These Business Results

* Customers will come to your site and purchase either by searching for your Brand terms or directly entering your URL in their browser

* They’ll show up as organic or direct session or other 'unpaid' traffic source, or in retail as sell-through at reg price.

* Importantly, this doesn’t mean we didn’t spend dollars to drive these high quality purchase behaviors.

* Most likely, you did spend dollars to create, and distribute, content that drives the responses in Step 3.


Step 3: Define the Short-Term Customer Responses that Best Drive Those Purchase Behaviors

4 key things we learned on this front:

a) All marketing is Direct Response marketing. Every marketing activity - including "brand" - should drive short term responses.

b) Customer responses are a reflection of a mental shift in your customer. They no longer need to rationally evaluate multiple brands when they are in-market for your category. Rather, they decide your Brand is the option for them.

c) Examples of these responses: all digital interactions (social, search, list subscription, etc) customers perform on behalf of your Brand.

d) Note the word “Best”. We learned the key is not only to identify these behaviors, but to be able to prioritize them based on the ones that best drive Step 3, Step 2, and ultimately, Step 1.


Step 4: Define the Actions You Can Take to Drive Those Customer Behaviors

* Now that you have the metric to optimize (the short-list of prioritized responses), you can create a feedback loop where you constantly try stuff, learning more and more about how best to drive these behaviors.


Bingo. You're done.

—
Thanks for reading. If this post was helpful, here are 4 things you can do right now to 

• Get more strategic + tactical nuggets on brand building, 

• Tactics on connecting brand building to financial impact, 

• And specific things you can do to build strong emotional connections with your audience: 

1) Subscribe to the Brand Builders podcast on YouTube or Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. 
2) Apply to join our brand builders slack community (suuuuper small group exclusively for brand founders and operators), 
3) Follow Tom and Preston on Linkedin for regular posts on this stuff
4) And heck, share this with someone