Brand Growth Strategies That Protect Margin, Perception and Trust

Most marketing agencies are paid to produce marketing, so marketing is what they recommend. We start one step earlier, with the business the marketing is supposed to serve. If an order loses money, a campaign will only bring in more of those orders, and bring them in faster.

That comes from where we started. Get Found's founder started a tech and ecommerce company in the late 90s, and in the words of our own service page, "Our founders have been on all sides of business, from brick and mortar to full online development and engagement." You can see who we are on the Get Found team page. Between us, we have sat on the side of the table where the stock has to be paid for before it sells.

So a growth plan with us asks business questions first: what an order earns, what a customer costs to win, how long it takes for that cost to come back and where the cash is tied up. The choice of marketing, the budget for it and the order it runs in all come after those answers.

Price is the fastest lever on profit and the easiest one to damage. A price that is too low leaves nothing for marketing. Discounting as a habit is worse, because it lowers the price permanently while pretending it is temporary.

What we recommend instead of a code on every page

• Plan sales events, do not reach for them. A few planned events a year beat a code every time revenue dips.
• Reward the right behaviour. Loyalty offers for repeat buyers instead of blanket discounts for anyone with an email address.
• Raise order value instead of cutting price. Bundles, sets, and shipping thresholds set just above the average order.
• Protect the price across channels. If wholesalers or marketplace sellers undercut your own store, your best customers learn to buy elsewhere. Minimum advertised price policies exist for a reason.
• Test price increases. Many brands are underpriced for what they deliver, and a careful test costs far less than a year of thin margins.

Marketplaces make price discipline harder, because sellers compete for the same listing on price alone. David's 2017 guide put it bluntly: "More Sales Doesn't Always = More Profit."

Perception sets the price a customer is willing to pay before they have read a word. Photography, packaging, the design of the store, the tone of the copy and the speed of the site all tell a shopper what kind of brand this is. A brand that looks cheap ends up having to price cheap.

None of this calls for expensive design for its own sake. What it calls for is a store that fits the product and the price, built around how your buyers actually shop. David's line from our design work is that "standing out is more important than ever", and our custom ecommerce website design work is built on it.

Perception is also damaged by things marketing teams do to hit a number: discount banners that never go away, pop-ups stacked on pop-ups, ad creative that promises more than the product delivers. Each one trades long-term brand value for a short-term sale, and the bill arrives later as lower prices and lower trust.

Sometimes our growth advice is to wait, because scaling a business with a leak makes the leak bigger. We tell founders to hold, or slow down, when:

• The cost of winning an order rises faster than the margin on it. Each extra sale is costing more than the last.
• Returns, complaints or review scores are slipping. Growth is reaching buyers the product does not suit, or operations are stretched.
• Stock cannot keep up. Advertising products that sell out produces refunds, angry customers and wasted spend.
• Service is already behind. More orders will make it worse, and the reviews will show it.
• Cash is tied up. Growth that needs more inventory than the business can fund is a cash crisis on a delay.
• One channel is carrying everything. Doubling down on a platform you do not control raises the stakes of its next rule change.

Holding steady while the cause is fixed is what keeps a business going long enough to grow.

Often the fix is not more marketing at all. A store that converts more of the visitors it already has makes every later dollar of advertising worth more, which is why conversion rate optimization for the store usually comes before a bigger budget. When the margin and the store are ready, ads managed to protect margin are how the scaling is done, one measured step at a time.