Connect with us

MARKETING

Building a brand strategy: Essentials for long-term success

Published

on

brand strategy

Brand strategy is built on a platform of differentiation, where a company can use its value prop to create competitive advantages and satisfy customer needs. The key to long-term success is using brand strategy to define your market position in order to create market share and revenue growth.

brand strategy

A brand marketing strategy is a set of guidelines that help businesses determine their core values and what they want to achieve with the business. More importantly, it also helps outline how those values can be applied to the marketplace. For one brand strategy to be successful, it’s not enough to simply have a few bullet points of what you want to do.

To develop a great brand strategy today, you need both a thorough understanding of why you choose certain types of brand strategies and a detailed outline of what your strategies will be.

Why?

Because the more detailed your brand strategy framework is, the easier it will be to succeed when you execute those strategies.

Knowing the detailed answers to each question will help determine what your goals should be, how you should approach your customers, and how you’ll measure your success in meeting your goals.

Advertisement

Why is branding important?

  • Consumers who connect with a brand emotionally have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV).
  • Companies with poor branding end up having to pay 10% higher salaries.
  • 90% of customers expect to have a similar brand experience across multiple channels, so make sure your branding spans all of the channels and platforms you have a presence on.
  • 84% of marketers say brand awareness is the most important goal.
  • Branded content is 22 times more engaging than your standard display ad.

Emotionally connected customers have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV) for your brand.

How to develop a brand strategy?

A brand development strategy can be hard to define but encompasses:

  • What your brand stands for.
  • What promises your brand makes to customers.
  • What personality your brand conveys through its marketing.

As you can see, many of these things are intangible. How do you measure how successful you are at conveying a certain personality? How do you measure if you’ve successfully stood for what your brand represents, or if you could be doing it better?

The one main metric for successful new brand development is brand sentiment. And just because it’s hard to measure, it doesn’t mean that you should dismiss it. It may not be as easy to quantify, but it’s too easy for analytical CEOs to dismiss the qualitative work involved in branding. 

As Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made so clear: “The designing of experience is a different part of your brain than the scaling [of] your experience. It’s a different skill set. The scaling of an experience is a highly analytical, operations-oriented, and technology-oriented problem. The designing of experience is a more intuition-based human, empathetic, end-to-end experience.”

It seems almost trivial, but in a larger company, these two different skill sets would be handled by two entirely different teams that probably don’t often commingle, let alone agree on everything. That’s how you waste time, money, and energy. In a smaller company, you’re often missing a “creative” team altogether. Brian knows how to build a brand because he understands the real levers at play here.

For example, when my agency helped the Shark Tank company, Plated, scale to $100M in revenue in just 18 months, and then exit, you have to understand they had a team of 15 marketers who were struggling with customer acquisition(!), despite having a beautiful brand and a perfectly functioning website and funnels.  So, I really appreciated the founders Nick and Josh saying something along the lines of, “We are the least creative guys in the room … so if you guys say this is what we should do, then let’s do it.”  Great! That’s why you hire experts on the matter, and it’s ok to take a back seat, to a degree, if you don’t have a strong understanding or opinion on the direction.

It’s amazing how many funded startups are in a rush to build their marketing team. The story above should help you realize that there is much to resolve before doing that — otherwise you’ll be burning cash at a higher rate than needed.

Advertisement

Does this resonate? Some claim many people see branding as fluffy, touchy-feely emotional stuff and that’s why they often fail with branding. First, that’s a superficial way to describe it. Branding is critical to your brand’s existence! It also feeds your entire team’s culture.  

Let’s dive into this skill set.

Developing intuition

Branding strategy definitely involves the intuition side of your mind. But you can also use data to guide your direction and long-term goals. One way to understand if your brand is on the right track in its branding strategy is to think of your brand strategy as a story you are telling.

A good story is not just something to read on a page — it’s an experience. And for something to be an experience, it needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the end of the experience, there must be some kind of change from the beginning.

What causes a change in a story? Tension. There must be tension between your antithesis and your thesis.

In marketing terms, your “antithesis” is your customer’s pain point. Your “thesis” is your solution to that problem. The tension, therefore, is the customer’s problem itself. This is the core of your entire product-market fit, viewed at a subatomic level. If you don’t have any tension there (problems to solve), then you don’t have a business, period!  There also needs to be tension in your customer insights to help inform the most relevant positioning possible.

Advertisement

So, at the end of the day, brand strategy boils down to one thing: storytelling. Your brand’s strategy is its story, its vision, its heart, and soul.

For example, every cinematic film basically has a core thesis inside the protagonist, typically starting with a “vision” of how things could be, or should be — but they are not able to reach it. The antithesis is the harsh reality that’s pulling the character away from that vision of how things could or should be.

1647382970 543 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success

This push and pull escalates while the character finally makes a change, internally, externally, or ideally, both. In the climactic ending, the hero’s previous reality is replaced by his vision, which now becomes his new reality.

Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
“Don’t Look Up” movie poster. Source: Netflix

In the case of “Don’t Look Up,” Leo Decaprio’s character has to transform from his quiet, inside voice, to one of rage and frustration upon learning how hard it is to get an entire planet prepared to deal with a major catastrophe, all while combating multiple saboteurs with alternative and selfish agendas.  The reality at the top of the film stays exactly on course. So, where is the change, you ask? It comes from within himself and his associate Kate, as they each lose their families and a bit of their sanity over the truth of their discovery, which drives the narrative, until they finally find themselves again, while the impending doom lives in the background through the final reveal.

That narrative is the same as classic B2B customer journey mapping. Nailing who your supporters and advocates are, as well as potential saboteurs to a purchase, is critical to building a pathway through the phases of brand awareness and consideration.

Looking at AirBnB’s recent campaign, one can only assume that the business problem was lack of new hosts signing up due to the pandemic, while consumer insight would have been something like: “potential hosts are afraid to host strangers.” Their response to address this crippling objection head-on is the campaign: “Strangers aren’t that strange. Try hosting.”

Now look at the creative response to that simple but powerful six-word statement:

Advertisement

Is your brand messaging and campaigning this sharp?

Notice, they’re not saying everything to everyone? They have one clear message and a story that builds up to make just that one point and nothing else.

If you’re thinking, “Well Allen, that’s great for them but we’re a B2B SaaS platform, but what does that have to do with me?” It has everything to do with you too.  In fact, the more complex and techy your brand is, the more you need storytelling! No one wants to see marketing and advertising all about your “features,” I promise you. Get your audience out of their head and into their emotions and you’ll see your sales go up and your sales cycle reduced. It’s that simple and complex.

The more complex and techy your brand is, the more you need storytelling!

Tension has been the basic building block of storytelling since the first Greek plays were performed in the Theater of Dionysus, at the beginning of the fifth century. The plays and storytelling were engineered around the logical flow of crisis and emotional journeys, and this process has carried over to modern times — mostly because human nature has hardly changed since that time.

This is exactly what good branding does as well — it inspires action, change, aspiration, or in some cases, gets your customers to fix something that ails them or change their minds. When your brand is an awesome experience, it transforms your users!

Advertisement

If you don’t believe story matters, then you’re going to have a hard time creating the kind of message that evokes emotion and action. At the end of the day, all your brand has is one amazing story, broken into snackable bits and pieces, told over time, across various touchpoints and pain points. That’s it!

Beyond brand strategy: Brand position and building a strong brand identity

Today, most businesses cannot count on being the only organization offering a particular service or product. Chances are good that your niche is heavy with competitors. The challenge is making your offerings stand out from others. Sure, you can pack in feature after feature, but what comes next?

For instance, if your SaaS platform space is already maxed to the gills in features? What do you do? Cramming more features in does you no good, so how do you make yourself stand out in an ever-more competitive market?

1647382970 868 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
G2 Grid® for CRM. Source: G2

In a sea of competition, you have to compete either on innovation or brand, which means storytelling and effective brand positioning, or, if tapping into a well-funded and robust R&D department that can base new features on actual user problems. If not, that’s ok. For most companies an easier entry point is to become a leader in the pack and to stand out, you have to go all-in on brand position and you need to be consistent, memorable, and distinct.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Before starting my agency Noble Digital in 2012, in another life, I was a TV commercial director. My role was to lead a team and execute national campaigns for the largest brands on the planet. In one case, Budweiser hired me to produce six commercials with $600 million in media spend alone over a one-year campaign. So, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest brand managers out there. In total, I have $25 billion in media spending behind my life’s work, so I want to share what I’ve learned from my “traditional” days of branding as well as now in the current age of branding.

Where did branding start? Many point to Mesopotamia where trading and selling took place at a very high rate. It was a time when the seller could not always be present, so the branding acted as a marker of quality.

Advertisement

The quality of a brand is measured at a high level with attributes like: culture, values, reflection, personality, archetypes, promise, reward, benefit, reasons to believe, advantages, discriminators, and differentiators.

However, there are also attributes about the space that your brand operates in, such as category, competition, source of business, target groups, relevance, and insights.

1647382970 834 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
Source: Allen Martinez

As we zoom in on the business model canvas, we start to see where the impact of branding falls. In fact, the value canvas has a “value proposition” at dead center of the canvas.

1647382970 318 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
Source: Allen Martinez

That’s because no matter how amazing your product is, if it doesn’t resonate with your audience, you’ll be dead in the water. Your product-market fit and value proposition form the engine that makes everything flow.

What your customers value is just as important (if not more important) as what your brand values. It informs what you make and how your entire company operates, down to how you speak to individual customers.

Modern branding is about architecting success through both storytelling and engineering.

Branding is not a superficial exercise in making things “look pretty”. Great branding means customer acquisition performance, hitting sales goals, and scaling revenue streams. Modern branding is about architecting success through both storytelling and engineering to achieve a strong brand experience while meeting fiduciary goals. 

Here’s the key: the brand story should always come first. The first step in comprehensive brand strategy development is to define who you want to be and what you’re trying to say. Engineering should follow that organizational direction as it’s way easier than trying to take the bigger, emotional factors and retrofit that onto what was already engineered. (This is how website initiatives easily steal a year of your life away.)

Advertisement

Characteristics of a strong company brand

What makes a good company brand? It’s more than having the right visual elements or a solid brand story. Below, we’ll break down the components required to ensure you have the right brand architecture in place to support your marketing plan.

  • Physical characteristics: At the base level, we have the physicality of your company brand – its visuals, including your brand logo, typography, company colors, and other visual cues that help consumers identify your brand amidst a sea of competitors. 
  • Personality: What is your brand’s personality in your customers’ eyes? Is it playful and witty? Straightforward and dependable? Innovative and creative? Picture your brand as a living thing – how does it act in the world? 
  • Culture: Brand culture and company culture are related but different. Here, we’re talking about how the set of values you espouse come together to create the foundation of a company brand. 
  • Relationship: How does your company intersect with your customers? What’s the relationship between your products/services and those who buy them? 
  • Self-image: How do your customers see themselves with your brand? Do they feel more capable? More innovative? Better prepared? Use this to flesh things out and create a strong visual identity that helps your customers see themselves differently. 
  • Reflection: How do you view your customers? How do you portray them in your ads and other marketing collateral? 

Developing a strong brand identity

Using the information in the previous section, you can now begin building a strong brand identity. The goal here is simple – connect what matters to your business with what matters to your customers. For instance, how do your goals connect with the goals of your customers? How does your mission address your customers’ pain points? Effective brand positioning requires that you move the needle from how your customers see your brand now to how you want them to see it.

One brand positioning tool at your disposal is, to begin with, a benefits ladder that takes you from the base customer problem through the various benefits that help solve that issue.

To do that, create a mission statement that encapsulates your organization’s purpose. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to create a single guiding statement (brand positioning statement) that connects with every aspect of your brand, while supporting the emotional benefit that you offer customers. Doing so ensures brand consistency across all touchpoints.

Finally, it’s also important to remember that no brand is built overnight. It requires time. How long did it take for Apple to become what it is today? What about Reebok or Nike? In point of fact, it took almost 20 years for Nike to even arrive at the brand strategy the organization follows today, with much trial and error along the way. For instance, they began by targeting top athletes but realized they would have to broaden their scope to include anyone who valued health and fitness if they were ever going to see success.

Digging deeper into effective brand positioning

Dual Process Theory explores how our brains go looking for shortcuts to process things.  It helps people make fast decisions on an intuitive level. It can also hijack other memories we have and attach themselves to them.  This is why getting into emotions and qualitative research is important as emotional decisions can override our mental decisions. Translation: This helps us cut a 120-day sales cycle down to 45 days.  What would that mean to your bottom line? Go ahead, pull out a calculator and do that math. Whatever that number is, you could easily spend roughly 10% of that total amount (rev + growth) on rebranding — and more if you want to be aggressive.

Your digital brand strategy is a long-term plan that documents specific principles to help keep your brand consistent, memorable, and distinct with time which keeps you at top of mind with your audience. It can also help align employees to the core beliefs and aims of the brand – something I had noticed the power of during my time while working and consulting the brand Subway, on a campaign.

Advertisement

At the tip of the spear is the business strategy, which leads into brand strategy. What is included in a brand strategy? It covers things like purpose, vision, mission, beliefs, values, attitudes, audience, proposition, and positioning. Once set, the goal is to use that documentation as a guide for every decision you make, whether it be a TV commercial, website build or a search ad sentence.

As you move from purpose to impact, you’ll find your brand system, which is the visualization of your brand persona: brand logo, tone of voice, colors, composition, photography, typography, and motion.

We’ve seen business strategies. They tend to be about growing, with charts that go up into the top right quadrant. Yes, you want to make more revenue. We get it. But how will we actually accomplish that?

Moving into modern brand positioning is really about customer-centric messaging and then making that actionable. But how do you make branding actionable while ensuring brand consistency? It’s all about your brand activations.

Telesign CPaaS platform

As a B2B brand strategy example, Telesign a CpaaS (and IT security) was a C-series funded platform with 500 employees that I was consulting. Telesign pioneered text verification notifications and the company serves large, multinational clients like Microsoft, and has since been acquired by BICS. However, the complexity of their offerings made it challenging for potential clients to understand their services and they were in a loaded space.

The result? Long sales cycles. Basically, sales was doing most of the work and the marketing was missing the mark on how to warm up prospects into warm leads, ready to purchase.

Advertisement

To overcome the disconnect here, we rebranded and updated Telesign’s brand message house, brand pillars and overall brand messaging, working from data first. The end result was an update to their content marketing funnel that decreased the time it took for qualified leads to become clients, by half.  That literally means millions more in revenue per year!  This is how branding and marketing strategy intersect into: digital media branding strategy and social media branding strategy. A critical messaging change at the top of their messaging pyramid helped optimize all the content builds that came after, which then gave marketing a better alignment and hand off to sales and assisted them in revenue growth year after year from that point on. Branding can be tethered to sales and if you start your branding strategy off on the right foot, you’ll see a change in all departments. Including your data being segmented better for future optimization.

1647382970 355 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
TeleSign catalog. Source: Allen Martinez

LEGO

LEGO’s history dates back nearly a century. Throughout that time, the company’s mission has been “to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow”. By defining that mission early on and then baking it into the company’s very DNA, LEGO has been able to create a thriving brand. You can see this in everything the company does, from the design and creation of new sets to their communications.

For LEGO, it’s not (just) about selling toys. It’s about helping its customers develop. By focusing on developing people, the brand has been able to evolve and grow over time and continually elevate its brand position.

1647382970 307 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
LEGO company mission. Source: LEGO

A brand architecture framework

Creating a brand architecture framework can’t get very involved and could be an entire article on its own. Just use the outline below and it becomes easier to account for your existing products or services, as well as build out future product branding or services.

  • Make it easy for people to navigate what you offer.
  • Reinforce individual products or services that are your biggest draws/hottest sellers.
  • Make sure that you’re able to build a strong company brand and brand equity without damaging the brand of your assets.
  • Focus on creating economies of scale by tying asset brands to the parent brand.

The secret to growth

As a brand strategist, I find that one of the most important ingredients for success is talent, and in many cases, that talent may come from outside your organization. Some of the strongest brands in the world were built by advertising agencies, not internally.

The culture of a successful brand is often repeating the same thing over and over for success.  One important goal for any corporation is to be somewhat predictable with their fiduciary responsibilities. Oddly enough, to get to that place, they often need outside help, since they are not wired for this. Why would a company that relies on predictable results for growth know anything about creativity and breaking molds? If they’re any good at their business, they often won’t even have that kind of talent and thinking internally.

The question of brand management versus brand building

There are two types of people – procedural workers and creative/inventive people. In fact, Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings’ famous culture deck, (now with 20 million views) made it clear that there is a much lower ceiling for procedural work vs. creative/inventive work, where the more you invest in creative talent, the greater the rewards you reap.

1647382970 727 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
Netflix company culture presentation. Source: Netflix

What this means is that you shouldn’t expect an individual who has outstanding organizational task management and soft skills to be amazing with creative builds. These are two very different types of people and it’s very rare to find both quality management talent and creative skills within the same individual.

You shouldn’t expect an individual who has outstanding organizational task management and soft skills to be amazing with creative builds.

This is why the strongest, most recognized brands on the planet rely on creative advertising agencies to help them refine their brand story for outward-facing initiatives and create a comprehensive brand strategy. Rarely has our own agency seen a corporation do better internally. Internal teams often fail flat-out to deliver effective brand strategies.

Advertisement

Companies with poor branding end up having to pay 10% higher salaries.

Creating the right message

Story matters, so to be successful in motivating consumers, you need to create the kind of message that evokes emotion and action.

Why do we do this? Because a well-told story is unforgettable, it translates to people caring about your brand, which inspires loyalty and helps with recall. These are things no amount of tech or media can or will ever do.

Tech and media merely amplify those sentiments. If you don’t have this level of depth to your story, it will just be garbage in, garbage out.

The Importance of Creative Messaging

As CEO of BBDO, Andrew Robertson mentioned at an AT&T Shape event that media leaders like Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook made one thing clear to him: “80% of available return is a function of the creative and the content.”

Let’s unpack that. A brand’s success is attributed to having the right creative message and not just being in the “right time” or “right place.” It’s about more than meeting your potential customers where they are. You must be able to effectively communicate with them when you do, and that requires creative messaging that ties in with your brand positioning and brand identity.

Advertisement

What does Robertson’s comment mean? It means that your focus shouldn’t be solely on the tech involved; instead, concentrate primarily on story and positioning.

What does focusing 80% of your energy on messaging look like? Well, for one thing, it doesn’t look like this:

MarTech Landscape 2020 via Chiefmartec

Instead, it should look more like this:

1647382970 825 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success
Source: Allen Martinez

Everyone is mostly focused on finite/numerical data, so I find the opposite to be true. Companies are spending thousands to millions on media (blank “billboard” placements) with next to no thought on the story part. So, it’s more like 99% media/tech/stacks and only 1% on creative — and they wonder why they seldom hit performance goals.

1647382971 867 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success

The issue here is that marketing is seldom a “math problem”— it’s always a story problem.  The real math happens later, at $50M+ in revenue, when you’re milking a cash cow. Until then? You need emotional stories to engage new customers, regardless of how big or small you are (to create the math problems you’re hoping for). So it is important to understand your strategy first before you focus on the execution of the strategy. 

Translation: Don’t worry about media until you have a creative strategy that translates your brand into an outward-facing campaign for your marketplace.

Define your brand and its objective

Your brand’s objective is simply its purpose. Knowing why your brand exists, what purpose it has in the world, and what it stands for is what defines it from the very start.

When you want to define your brand, you’ll need to ask yourself some questions:

  • What problem does my brand solve?
  • Who is my ideal customer?
  • Who is my competition?
  • What does my brand make my customers feel?
  • Why do my customers trust me?
  • What is the story behind why my brand was created?
  • If my brand was a person, what would their personality be like?
  • What are my customers wanting/needing or struggling with?

Once you answer these questions, you can begin to worry about things like brand logo colors and font, your motto or tagline, and other marketing elements to communicate your brand’s overall story.

Let’s look at an example and put this into action.

Advertisement

Let’s say you have determined your brand’s ideal customers are young women getting ready to get married. Your competition includes high-end bridal companies with very elegant looks, but you are presenting yourself as more youthful.

You are trustworthy because you don’t sugarcoat the reality of expensive weddings. Instead, you help brides have their special day without going into debt. You have your story of why you created this brand, and if your brand was a person, she would be a young, thrifty bride who wants a beautiful day but has a practical head on her shoulders.

With all that in mind and knowing you are targeting younger brides, you can stay away from elegant and mature logo colors. Go with fresh, trendy bridal colors that are feminine and pretty. That’s how you translate your brand story into your marketing.

Want some real-world examples? Consider Uber, Webflow, and Airbnb, all three of which have mastered the art of brand positioning.

Target market research

Once you understand your brand strategy, you may be ready to jump right into executing your marketing. But before you get started, there is another important step you need to do first: target market research.

Researching your market — and understanding who your audience really is and what will grab them emotionally — is a big part of executing your brand strategy correctly. There are some things you’ll need to do in your target market research, including creating a customer persona.

Advertisement

A customer persona is a detailed description of the ideal buyer who would not be able to resist buying your product or service. This persona helps you understand what type of person you are targeting with your marketing. You can’t have an emotional impact if you don’t know who it is you are trying to connect to.

The key to a creative team’s output is to give them sharp insights. Insights unlock the problem at hand and shine a new light on it. Since your marketing is working against the common enemy of attention, you don’t have time to explain it. The insight should be shocking or disruptive. It should have a truth that makes you laugh or cry. Quite often, it’s not even something brand new. Rather, an insight, framed the right way, makes you look at something you already know in a new way.

Jim Gaffigan is a master of shining a new light on things we rarely question:

This helps unlock humor and ah-ha moments for people who are barely paying attention to your marketing. You have to do some work to get their attention. You have to be this sharp.

Understand the consumer journey

The next thing to understand about your ideal customer is where they are in the consumer journey. The consumer journey is a map that shows how a consumer is connecting with your brand at any given moment. It can range from “not connected at all” to “loyal brand advocate and repeat customer.”

Advertisement

Along the way are points like “interested in your product,” “interacting with you on social media,” or “first-time buyer.” Understanding the consumer journey as it relates to your business will help you come up with a roadmap to move consumers along to the ultimate goal.

For example, if you find many of your consumers are dropping off the journey map after their first purchase and never returning to your store, you may need to consider creating a loyalty rewards program or optimizing for a higher quality audience.

Invest in creative brand guidelines

Too often a brand wants to start a branding engagement with us ‘developing brand guidelines’.  I don’t recommend this. This is like walking into a restaurant and letting the chef decide what you want to eat.  It’s all fine if they happen to match your expectations. Realistically, you need to get involved and communicate.  You need your creative partners to start with conceptual ideas of what your brand could be, first. Explore concepts and even design rough, ad-like objects and manifesto scripts to help envision what your brand could look and feel like before locking things down that haven’t even been considered or tested.

Once you understand your brand and your audience on a very deep level, it’s time to think about how you will deliver your message. This is where you’ll start to get creative with things like the logo design, the fonts you use on your website, the colors you choose to represent your brand, the general tone of your advertisements, and the imagery you use so that you can make that execution repeatable.

These elements are very important for creating a long-term recognizable brand. Once people have connected to your brand, they’re no longer considering your values because they know them. Now they are just recognizing your brand’s colors, brand logo, and font and instantly adding you to their basket. So you need to ensure that these elements are chosen carefully and that they truly relate to your message.

Brands do evolve, but it’s important to set the creative guidelines before additional marketing executions. This allows you to ensure that even in the future, your branding will match your story.

Advertisement

Competitive analysis

Another thing that brands need to research before executing a marketing strategy is the competition.

Competitive analysis is extremely important because it helps you understand what specifically differentiates you from the competition, and that is something you’ll want to focus on in your marketing message. Even if you’re a new product in a new space, you still need to understand your neighboring spaces. When we helped Biohm probiotics, they were essentially a new product but they didn’t have the capital to go out in a naked market where no customers were looking, so we piggy-backed by entering them in the probiotic space and then doing education campaigns to help them understand the critical differentiators.  This is why they launched selling out of inventory three times in opening months — because we did our homework right.

If you attempt to execute your marketing first, you may end up saying the same thing as every other company out there, which doesn’t inspire the customer to shop from you over them.

Summary

Overall, branding has not dramatically in the last decade or two. What has changed is the explosion of placements and applications for expressing your brand across new and upcoming outlets, platforms, and opportunities. 

The most important takeaways about brand strategy in 2022 are:

  • You need to research and understand your customer, including insights.
  • You must know what your brand stands for, and what your brand story is.
  • Craft your brand story and know how it intersects with your audience. 
  • You must build your marketing techniques on an understanding of your customer and what your brand stands for before you ever begin executing marketing campaigns.
  • You need people with both good organizational/management skills and great creative skills. They are usually not the same people and quite often not in the same building.
  • Don’t be afraid to look outside your organization for help when it comes to creativity and strategic branding/brand positioning. The biggest brands in the world work with ad/creative agencies for that very reason.

It’s that easy and that complex. Take the time to do this right from the beginning, and you will have a much more successful marketing strategy.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

Advertisement

About The Author

1647382971 437 Building a brand strategy Essentials for long term success

Allen Martinez has $25 billion dollars of media spend behind his career’s work. He works as a fractional CMO and Chief Strategist at Noble Digital agency, which he founded. Allen knows how data is done and can translate data into meaningful and compelling stories to supercharge brands in the digital age. He has launched and even exited all types of brands – from funded platform startups like: Fundrise and Telesign, to SharkTanks like: Plated and big brands like New Balance, Mutual of Omaha, Coca-Cola, Subway, Nestle, and AT&T to name only a few. Allen continues to leverage Noble Digital as a platform to launch, scale and exit products and brands.


Source link
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

MARKETING

Effective Communication in Business as a Crisis Management Strategy

Published

on

Effective Communication in Business as a Crisis Management Strategy

Everyday business life is full of challenges. These include data breaches, product recalls, market downturns and public relations conflicts that can erupt at any moment. Such situations pose a significant threat to a company’s financial health, brand image, or even its further existence. However, only 49% of businesses in the US have a crisis communications plan. It is a big mistake, as such a strategy can build trust, minimize damage, and even strengthen the company after it survives the crisis. Let’s discover how communication can transform your crisis and weather the chaos.

The ruining impact of the crisis on business

A crisis can ruin a company. Naturally, it brings losses. But the actual consequences are far worse than lost profits. It is about people behind the business – they feel the weight of uncertainty and fear. Employees start worrying about their jobs, customers might lose faith in the brand they once trusted, and investors could start looking elsewhere. It can affect the brand image and everything you build from the branding, business logo, social media can be ruined. Even after the crisis recovery, the company’s reputation can suffer, and costly efforts might be needed to rebuild trust and regain momentum. So, any sign of a coming crisis should be immediately addressed. Communication is one of the crisis management strategies that can exacerbate the situation.  

The power of effective communication

Even a short-term crisis may have irreversible consequences – a damaged reputation, high employee turnover, and loss of investors. Communication becomes a tool that can efficiently navigate many crisis-caused challenges:

  • Improved trust. Crisis is a synonym for uncertainty. Leaders may communicate trust within the company when the situation gets out of control. Employees feel valued when they get clear responses. The same applies to the customers – they also appreciate transparency and are more likely to continue cooperation when they understand what’s happening. In these times, documenting these moments through event photographers can visually reinforce the company’s messages and enhance trust by showing real, transparent actions.
  • Reputation protection. Crises immediately spiral into gossip and PR nightmares. However, effective communication allows you to proactively address concerns and disseminate true information through the right channels. It minimizes speculation and negative media coverage.
  • Saved business relationships. A crisis can cause unbelievable damage to relationships with employees, customers, and investors. Transparent communication shows the company’s efforts to find solutions and keeps stakeholders informed and engaged, preventing misunderstandings and painful outcomes.
  • Faster recovery. With the help of communication, the company is more likely to receive support and cooperation. This collaborative approach allows you to focus on solutions and resume normal operations as quickly as possible.

It is impossible to predict when a crisis will come. So, a crisis management strategy mitigates potential problems long before they arise.

Tips on crafting an effective crisis communication plan.

To effectively deal with unforeseen critical situations in business, you must have a clear-cut communication action plan. This involves things like messages, FAQs, media posts, and awareness of everyone in the company. This approach saves precious time when the crisis actually hits. It allows you to focus on solving the problem instead of intensifying uncertainty and panic. Here is a step-by-step guide.  

Identify your crisis scenarios.

Being caught off guard is the worst thing. So, do not let it happen. Conduct a risk assessment to pinpoint potential crises specific to your business niche. Consider both internal and external factors that could disrupt normal operations or damage the online reputation of your company. Study industry-specific issues, past incidents, and current trends. How will you communicate in each situation? Knowing your risks helps you prepare targeted communication strategies in advance. Of course, it is impossible to create a perfectly polished strategy, but at least you will build a strong foundation for it.

Advertisement

Form a crisis response team.

The next step is assembling a core team. It will manage communication during a crisis and should include top executives like the CEO, CFO, and CMO, and representatives from key departments like public relations and marketing. Select a confident spokesperson who will be the face of your company during the crisis. Define roles and responsibilities for each team member and establish communication channels they will work with, such as email, telephone, and live chat. Remember, everyone in your crisis response team must be media-savvy and know how to deliver difficult messages to the stakeholders.

Prepare communication templates.

When a crisis hits, things happen fast. That means communication needs to be quick, too. That’s why it is wise to have ready-to-go messages prepared for different types of crises your company may face. These messages can be adjusted to a particular situation when needed and shared on the company’s social media, website, and other platforms right away. These templates should include frequently asked questions and outline the company’s general responses. Make sure to approve these messages with your legal team for accuracy and compliance.

Establish communication protocols.

A crisis is always chaotic, so clear communication protocols are a must-have. Define trigger points – specific events that would launch the crisis communication plan. Establish a clear hierarchy for messages to avoid conflicting information. Determine the most suitable forms and channels, like press releases or social media, to reach different audiences. Here is an example of how you can structure a communication protocol:

  • Immediate alert. A company crisis response team is notified about a problem.  
  • Internal briefing.  The crisis team discusses the situation and decides on the next steps.  
  • External communication. A spokesperson reaches the media, customers, and suppliers.
  • Social media updates. A trained social media team outlines the situation to the company audience and monitors these channels for misinformation or negative comments.
  • Stakeholder notification. The crisis team reaches out to customers and partners to inform them of the incident and its risks. They also provide details on the company’s response efforts and measures.
  • Ongoing updates. Regular updates guarantee transparency and trust and let stakeholders see the crisis development and its recovery.

Practice and improve.

Do not wait for the real crisis to test your plan. Conduct regular crisis communication drills to allow your team to use theoretical protocols in practice. Simulate different crisis scenarios and see how your people respond to these. It will immediately demonstrate the strong and weak points of your strategy. Remember, your crisis communication plan is not a static document. New technologies and evolving media platforms necessitate regular adjustments. So, you must continuously review and update it to reflect changes in your business and industry.

Wrapping up

The ability to handle communication well during tough times gives companies a chance to really connect with the people who matter most—stakeholders. And that connection is a foundation for long-term success. Trust is key, and it grows when companies speak honestly, openly, and clearly. When customers and investors trust the company, they are more likely to stay with it and even support it. So, when a crisis hits, smart communication not only helps overcome it but also allows you to do it with minimal losses to your reputation and profits.

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

Should Your Brand Shout Its AI and Marketing Plan to the World?

Published

on

Should Your Brand Shout Its AI and Marketing Plan to the World?

To use AI or not to use AI, that is the question.

Let’s hope things work out better for you than they did for Shakespeare’s mad Danish prince with daddy issues.

But let’s add a twist to that existential question.

CMI’s chief strategy officer, Robert Rose, shares what marketers should really contemplate. Watch the video or read on to discover what he says:

Advertisement

Should you not use AI and be proud of not using it? Dove Beauty did that last week.

Should you use it but keep it a secret? Sports Illustrated did that last year.

Should you use AI and be vocal about using it? Agency giant Brandtech Group picked up the all-in vibe.

Should you not use it but tell everybody you are? The new term “AI washing” is hitting everywhere.

What’s the best option? Let’s explore.

Dove tells all it won’t use AI

Last week, Dove, the beauty brand celebrating 20 years of its Campaign for Real Beauty, pledged it would NEVER use AI in visual communication to portray real people.

Advertisement

In the announcement, they said they will create “Real Beauty Prompt Guidelines” that people can use to create images representing all types of physical beauty through popular generative AI programs. The prompt they picked for the launch video? “The most beautiful woman in the world, according to Dove.”

I applaud them for the powerful ad. But I’m perplexed by Dove issuing a statement saying it won’t use AI for images of real beauty and then sharing a branded prompt for doing exactly that. Isn’t it like me saying, “Don’t think of a parrot eating pizza. Don’t think about a parrot eating pizza,” and you can’t help but think about a parrot eating pizza right now?

Brandtech Group says it’s all in on AI

Now, Brandtech Group, a conglomerate ad agency, is going the other way. It’s going all-in on AI and telling everybody.

This week, Ad Age featured a press release — oops, I mean an article (subscription required) — with the details of how Brandtech is leaning into the takeaway from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, who says 95% of marketing work today can be done by AI.

A Brandtech representative talked about how they pitch big brands with two people instead of 20. They boast about how proud they are that its lean 7,000 staffers compete with 100,000-person teams. (To be clear, showing up to a pitch with 20 people has never been a good thing, but I digress.)

Advertisement

OK, that’s a differentiated approach. They’re all in. Ad Age certainly seemed to like it enough to promote it. Oops, I mean report about it.

False claims of using AI and not using AI

Offshoots of the all-in and never-will approaches also exist.

The term “AI washing” is de rigueur to describe companies claiming to use AI for something that really isn’t AI.  The US Securities and Exchange Commission just fined two companies for using misleading statements about their use of AI in their business model. I know one startup technology organization faced so much pressure from their board and investors to “do something with AI” that they put a simple chatbot on their website — a glorified search engine — while they figured out what they wanted to do.

Lastly and perhaps most interestingly, companies have and will use AI for much of what they create but remain quiet about it or desire to keep it a secret. A recent notable example is the deepfake ad of a woman in a car professing the need for people to use a particular body wipe to get rid of body odor. It was purported to be real, but sharp-eyed viewers suspected the fake and called out the company, which then admitted it. Or was that the brand’s intent all along — the AI-use outrage would bring more attention?

To yell or not to yell about your brand’s AI decision

Should a brand yell from a mountaintop that they use AI to differentiate themselves a la Brandtech? Or should a brand yell they’re never going to use AI to differentiate themselves a la Dove? Or should a brand use it and not yell anything? (I think it’s clear that a brand should not use AI and lie and say it is. That’s the worst of all choices.)

I lean far into not-yelling-from-mountaintop camp.

When I see a CEO proudly exclaim that they laid off 90% of their support workforce because of AI, I’m not surprised a little later when the value of their service is reduced, and the business is failing.

I’m not surprised when I hear “AI made us do it” to rationalize the latest big tech company latest rounds of layoffs. Or when a big consulting firm announces it’s going all-in on using AI to replace its creative and strategic resources.

I see all those things as desperate attempts for short-term attention or a distraction from the real challenge. They may get responses like, “Of course, you had to lay all those people off; AI is so disruptive,” or “Amazing. You’re so out in front of the rest of the pack by leveraging AI to create efficiency, let me cover your story.” Perhaps they get this response, “Your company deserves a bump in stock price because you’re already using this fancy new technology.”

Advertisement

But what happens if the AI doesn’t deliver as promoted? What happens the next time you need to lay off people? What happens the next time you need to prove your technologically forward-leaning?

Yelling out that you’re all in on a disruptive innovation, especially one the public doesn’t yet trust a lot is (at best) a business sugar high. That short-term burst of attention may or may not foul your long-term brand value.

Interestingly, the same scenarios can manifest when your brand proclaims loudly it is all out of AI, as Dove did. The sugar high may not last and now Dove has itself into a messaging box. One slip could cause distrust among its customers. And what if AI gets good at demonstrating diversity in beauty?

I tried Dove’s instructions and prompted ChatGPT for a picture of “the most beautiful woman in the world according to the Dove Real Beauty ad.”

It gave me this. Then this. And this. And finally, this.

She’s absolutely beautiful, but she doesn’t capture the many facets of diversity Dove has demonstrated in its Real Beauty campaigns. To be clear, Dove doesn’t have any control over generating the image. Maybe the prompt worked well for Dove, but it didn’t for me. Neither Dove nor you can know how the AI tool will behave.

Advertisement

To use AI or not to use AI?

When brands grab a microphone to answer that question, they work from an existential fear about the disruption’s meaning. They do not exhibit the confidence in their actions to deal with it.

Let’s return to Hamlet’s soliloquy:

Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

Advertisement

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

In other words, Hamlet says everybody is afraid to take real action because they fear the unknown outcome. You could act to mitigate or solve some challenges, but you don’t because you don’t trust yourself.

If I’m a brand marketer for any business (and I am), I’m going to take action on AI for my business. But until I see how I’m going to generate value with AI, I’m going to be circumspect about yelling or proselytizing how my business’ future is better.

Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to workday or weekly emails from CMI.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

Advertisement



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

MARKETING

How to Use AI For a More Effective Social Media Strategy, According to Ross Simmonds

Published

on

How to Use AI For a More Effective Social Media Strategy, According to Ross Simmonds

Welcome to Creator Columns, where we bring expert HubSpot Creator voices to the Blogs that inspire and help you grow better.

It’s the age of AI, and our job as marketers is to keep up.

My team at Foundation Marketing recently conducted an AI Marketing study surveying hundreds of marketers, and more than 84% of all leaders, managers, SEO experts, and specialists confirmed that they used AI in the workplace.

AI in the workplace data graphic, Foundation Labs

If you can overlook the fear-inducing headlines, this technology is making social media marketers more efficient and effective than ever. Translation: AI is good news for social media marketers.

Download Now: The 2024 State of Social Media Trends [Free Report]

In fact, I predict that the marketers not using AI in their workplace will be using it before the end of this year, and that number will move closer and closer to 100%.

Advertisement

Social media and AI are two of the most revolutionizing technologies of the last few decades. Social media has changed the way we live, and AI is changing the way we work.

So, I’m going to condense and share the data, research, tools, and strategies that the Foundation Marketing Team and I have been working on over the last year to help you better wield the collective power of AI and social media.

Let’s jump into it.

What’s the role of AI in social marketing strategy?

In a recent episode of my podcast, Create Like The Greats, we dove into some fascinating findings about the impact of AI on marketers and social media professionals. Take a listen here:

Let’s dive a bit deeper into the benefits of this technology:

Benefits of AI in Social Media Strategy

AI is to social media what a conductor is to an orchestra — it brings everything together with precision and purpose. The applications of AI in a social media strategy are vast, but the virtuosos are few who can wield its potential to its fullest.

Advertisement

AI to Conduct Customer Research

Imagine you’re a modern-day Indiana Jones, not dodging boulders or battling snakes, but rather navigating the vast, wild terrain of consumer preferences, trends, and feedback.

This is where AI thrives.

Using social media data, from posts on X to comments and shares, AI can take this information and turn it into insights surrounding your business and industry. Let’s say for example you’re a business that has 2,000 customer reviews on Google, Yelp, or a software review site like Capterra.

Leveraging AI you can now have all 2,000 of these customer reviews analyzed and summarized into an insightful report in a matter of minutes. You simply need to download all of them into a doc and then upload them to your favorite Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) to get the insights and data you need.

But that’s not all.

You can become a Prompt Engineer and write ChatGPT asking it to help you better understand your audience. For example, if you’re trying to come up with a persona for people who enjoy marathons but also love kombucha you could write a prompt like this to ChatGPT:

Advertisement

ChatGPT prompt example

The response that ChatGPT provided back is quite good:

GPT response example

Below this it went even deeper by including a lot of valuable customer research data:

  • Demographics
  • Psychographics
  • Consumer behaviors
  • Needs and preferences

And best of all…

It also included marketing recommendations.

The power of AI is unbelievable.

Social Media Content Using AI

AI’s helping hand can be unburdening for the creative spirit.

Instead of marketers having to come up with new copy every single month for posts, AI Social Caption generators are making it easier than ever to craft catchy status updates in the matter of seconds.

Advertisement

Tools like HubSpot make it as easy as clicking a button and telling the AI tool what you’re looking to create a post about:

AI social media caption generator step 1

The best part of these AI tools is that they’re not limited to one channel.

Your AI social media content assistant can help you with LinkedIn content, X content, Facebook content, and even the captions that support your post on Instagram.

It can also help you navigate hashtags:

AI social media hashtags generator example, HubSpot

With AI social media tools that generate content ideas or even write posts, it’s not about robots replacing humans. It’s about making sure that the human creators on your team are focused on what really matters — adding that irreplaceable human touch.

Enhanced Personalization

You know that feeling when a brand gets you, like, really gets you?

Advertisement

AI makes that possible through targeted content that’s tailored with a level of personalization you’d think was fortune-telling if the data didn’t paint a starker, more rational picture.

What do I mean?

Brands can engage more quickly with AI than ever before. In the early 2000s, a lot of brands spent millions of dollars to create social media listening rooms where they would hire social media managers to find and engage with any conversation happening online.

Thanks to AI, brands now have the ability to do this at scale with much fewer people all while still delivering quality engagement with the recipient.

Analytics and Insights

Tapping into AI to dissect the data gives you a CSI-like precision to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and what makes your audience tick. It’s the difference between guessing and knowing.

The best part about AI is that it can give you almost any expert at your fingertips.

Advertisement

If you run a report surrounding the results of your social media content strategy directly from a site like LinkedIn, AI can review the top posts you’ve shared and give you clear feedback on what type of content is performing, why you should create more of it, and what days of the week your content is performing best.

This type of insight that would typically take hours to understand.

Now …

Thanks to the power of AI you can upload a spreadsheet filled with rows and columns of data just to be met with a handful of valuable insights a few minutes later.

Improved Customer Service

Want 24/7 support for your customers?

It’s now possible without human touch.

Advertisement

Chatbots powered by AI are taking the lead on direct messaging experiences for brands on Facebook and other Meta properties to offer round-the-clock assistance.

The fact that AI can be trained on past customer queries and data to inform future queries and problems is a powerful development for social media managers.

Advertising on Social Media with AI

The majority of ad networks have used some variation of AI to manage their bidding system for years. Now, thanks to AI and its ability to be incorporated in more tools, brands are now able to use AI to create better and more interesting ad campaigns than ever before.

Brands can use AI to create images using tools like Midjourney and DALL-E in seconds.

Brands can use AI to create better copy for their social media ads.

Brands can use AI tools to support their bidding strategies.

Advertisement

The power of AI and social media is continuing to evolve daily and it’s not exclusively found in the organic side of the coin. Paid media on social media is being shaken up due to AI just the same.

How to Implement AI into Your Social Media Strategy

Ready to hit “Go” on your AI-powered social media revolution?

Don’t just start the engine and hope for the best. Remember the importance of building a strategy first. In this video, you can learn some of the most important factors ranging from (but not limited to) SMART goals and leveraging influencers in your day-to-day work:

The following seven steps are crucial to building a social media strategy:

  1. Identify Your AI and Social Media Goals
  2. Validate Your AI-Related Assumptions
  3. Conduct Persona and Audience Research
  4. Select the Right Social Channels
  5. Identify Key Metrics and KPIs
  6. Choose the Right AI Tools
  7. Evaluate and Refine Your Social Media and AI Strategy

Keep reading, roll up your sleeves, and follow this roadmap:

1. Identify Your AI and Social Media Goals

If you’re just dipping your toes into the AI sea, start by defining clear objectives.

Is it to boost engagement? Streamline your content creation? Or simply understand your audience better? It’s important that you spend time understanding what you want to achieve.

Advertisement

For example, say you’re a content marketing agency like Foundation and you’re trying to increase your presence on LinkedIn. The specificity of this goal will help you understand the initiatives you want to achieve and determine which AI tools could help you make that happen.

Are there AI tools that will help you create content more efficiently? Are there AI tools that will help you optimize LinkedIn Ads? Are there AI tools that can help with content repurposing? All of these things are possible and having a goal clearly identified will help maximize the impact. Learn more in this Foundation Marketing piece on incorporating AI into your content workflow.

Once you have identified your goals, it’s time to get your team on board and assess what tools are available in the market.

Recommended Resources:

2. Validate Your AI-Related Assumptions

Assumptions are dangerous — especially when it comes to implementing new tech.

Don’t assume AI is going to fix all your problems.

Advertisement

Instead, start with small experiments and track their progress carefully.

3. Conduct Persona and Audience Research

Social media isn’t something that you can just jump into.

You need to understand your audience and ideal customers. AI can help with this, but you’ll need to be familiar with best practices. If you need a primer, this will help:

Once you understand the basics, consider ways in which AI can augment your approach.

4. Select the Right Social Channels

Not every social media channel is the same.

It’s important that you understand what channel is right for you and embrace it.

Advertisement

The way you use AI for X is going to be different from the way you use AI for LinkedIn. On X, you might use AI to help you develop a long-form thread that is filled with facts and figures. On LinkedIn however, you might use AI to repurpose a blog post and turn it into a carousel PDF. The content that works on X and that AI can facilitate creating is different from the content that you can create and use on LinkedIn.

The audiences are different.

The content formats are different.

So operate and create a plan accordingly.

Recommended Tools and Resources:

5. Identify Key Metrics and KPIs

What metrics are you trying to influence the most?

Advertisement

Spend time understanding the social media metrics that matter to your business and make sure that they’re prioritized as you think about the ways in which you use AI.

These are a few that matter most:

  • Reach: Post reach signifies the count of unique users who viewed your post. How much of your content truly makes its way to users’ feeds?
  • Clicks: This refers to the number of clicks on your content or account. Monitoring clicks per campaign is crucial for grasping what sparks curiosity or motivates people to make a purchase.
  • Engagement: The total social interactions divided by the number of impressions. This metric reveals how effectively your audience perceives you and their readiness to engage.

Of course, it’s going to depend greatly on your business.

But with this information, you can ensure that your AI social media strategy is rooted in goals.

6. Choose the Right AI Tools

The AI landscape is filled with trash and treasure.

Pick AI tools that are most likely to align with your needs and your level of tech-savviness.

For example, if you’re a blogger creating content about pizza recipes, you can use HubSpot’s AI social caption generator to write the message on your behalf:

Advertisement

AI social media generator example

The benefit of an AI tool like HubSpot and the caption generator is that what at one point took 30-40 minutes to come up with — you can now have it at your fingertips in seconds. The HubSpot AI caption generator is trained on tons of data around social media content and makes it easy for you to get inspiration or final drafts on what can be used to create great content.

Consider your budget, the learning curve, and what kind of support the tool offers.

7. Evaluate and Refine Your Social Media and AI Strategy

AI isn’t a magic wand; it’s a set of complex tools and technology.

You need to be willing to pivot as things come to fruition.

If you notice that a certain activity is falling flat, consider how AI can support that process.

Did you notice that your engagement isn’t where you want it to be? Consider using an AI tool to assist with crafting more engaging social media posts.

Advertisement

Make AI Work for You — Now and in the Future

AI has the power to revolutionize your social media strategy in ways you may have never thought possible. With its ability to conduct customer research, create personalized content, and so much more, thinking about the future of social media is fascinating.

We’re going through one of the most interesting times in history.

Stay equipped to ride the way of AI and ensure that you’re embracing the best practices outlined in this piece to get the most out of the technology.

New call-to-action

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS