I'm conflicted between brand (Nike style ads) and direct marketing (FB ad talking about how awesome your product is and telling people to buy it now). Direct marketing has made us the most money so far, but there must be a reason why big companies are doing brand marketing. What percentage of your marketing strategy should be brand vs direct marketing?
It depends on your size - but the answer for the vast majority of companies will be to focus almost entirely on direct.
Not only will direct likely have a higher return on investment, but because of your ability to attribute the performance to the actual marketing investment you can optimize over time.
If you decide to put up a billboard in your city, you can barely target who sees it and who doesn't, you can't properly A/B test messaging, and you can't know which of your increased conversions were impacted by that billboard vs some other marketing channel.
Big brands have the massive budgets and the huge scale in data to be able to get value out of brand marketing. The rest of us generally don't.
