Understanding how the market responds to the key elements of your brand strategy – the emotional benefits that your brand delivers, the three things that your brand means to your market, your brand personality traits, your promise, your brand story, your brand name – will enable you to understand whether you’re communicating effectively and which areas need improvement.

Following this step-by-step brand audit process will enable you to understand how your market feels about that brand experience – both your internal market (your stakeholders) and your external market (your customers and prospects).

Brand Audit Step 1: Create Brand Summary

The first step in your brand audit process is to create a brand summary. If you’ve completed a written brand strategy, this is simply a list of the key components. You’ll use this to compare to the results of your internal and external surveys.

If you’re not sure how to answer some of these questions, you may want to take more time to fully define your brand strategy before conducting your brand audit. Or, you may want to have your team work together to complete the brand summary.

Here are elements you may wish to include:

• Primary Value Proposition
• Secondary Value Proposition
• Most Powerful Emotional Benefits Conveyed to Our Customers
• The Three Things Our Brand Should Mean to Our Customers
• The Five Human Personality Traits that Describe How We Want the Market to View Our Brand
• Our Brand Promise
• Our 25-Word Brand Positioning Statement
• Our Brand Story
• What Our Brand Is Known For

Note: We have an entire module devoted to a brand audit in our Brand Strategy Toolkit if you want more comprehensive guidance.

Brand Audit Step 2: Determine Your Survey Method

The survey complexity and the number of participants will depend upon your company situation. You’ll want sufficient detail to evaluate the true perception and a sample that is large enough to ensure that the results are relevant.

First, list the people who can participate in your survey. Then, determine your survey format. You have a number of options to choose from.

• Email – Use an online survey program like Jotform,  Survey Monkey or Typeform to launch your survey and tally your results.
  1. Email Survey Pros
     1. Easy to set up
     2. Helps you structure your survey questions
     3. Tabulates responses and provides reports
     4. Inexpensive
     5. Keeps costs low
  2. Email Survey Cons
     1. May need to be deployed several times to get people to respond
     2. Viewed as impersonal
     3. Requires a compelling headline and intro to get people to participate
• Direct Mail – Send a self-addressed stamped envelope with a cover letter and a paper survey.
  1. Direct Mail Survey Pros
     1. More space to create a compelling message, to thank the customer for participating and communicate any incentives
     2. More effective than email for reaching customers who don’t use computers
  2. Direct Mail Survey Cons
     1. Needs to look very professional
     2. May be viewed as tedious
     3. Doesn’t fit with the “innovation” value proposition
• Telephone – Place calls directly or use a third party to make impartial calls.
  1. Telephone Survey Pros
     1. Great way to get detailed answers and probe for more information as needed
     2. May bring to your attention unhappy customers who you can help immediately
  2. Telephone Survey Cons
     1. Dissatisfied customers may be uncomfortable telling employees about their issues
     2. Customers voicing a concern to another live person often expect action to be taken immediately
     3. Can be expensive if using an outside group
• Combination – Contact the customer via two methods – for example, call or email them about a survey, then send it by mail.
  1. Combination Pros
     1. Improves your response rate by improving your awareness
     2. Reinforces the importance you place on customer loyalty
     3. Offers another chance to communicate with your customers
  2. Combination Cons
     1. More costly

Brand Audit Step 3: Compose Your Questions

Some suggested questions are below. They’re designed to be open-ended rather than multiple choice or ratings, so that you gain true unsolicited, uncolored feedback. These work well with a fairly small group of survey recipients (as you’ll need to manually evaluate each response and assign it a rating afterward), but it will lead to more accurate, actionable results.

1. • What do you think {insert your product or company name} stands for?
   • What are the key benefits {product/company} delivers?
   • How would you describe your experience working with {product/company}?
   • When purchasing from/working with {product/company}, what’s a word or phrase that describes what you expect from us each time?
   • If {insert your product or company name} were a person, how would you describe him/her? What human personality traits match the brand?
   • What is the main thing you think of when you hear {insert your product or company name}?

If you have a large survey sample, use a rating system from 1-10.

Brand Audit Step 4: Determine Your Sample Size

You don’t need to collect a survey from every recipient. Instead, you’re aiming for a “statistically valid sample size,” or the number of responses you need so you can confidently apply those results to your entire group of customers. Statistics is a complex field, and consumer marketers must take into account all sorts of calculations to accurately measure and apply their results. There are a number of key metrics for a marketer to consider, including:

• The total number of people to whom you want to apply the survey results (A)
• The % of those people who respond to your survey (B)

When your “total number of people” (A) is very small, you need a higher percentage of them to respond (B) so you can be confident in your results. If A is very large, you can confidently use a smaller percentage. Statisticians and researchers use the term “confidence rating” to indicate how statistically accurate a survey’s results can be considered. Ninety-five percent is a standard confidence goal.

Here’s how to calculate:

• Number of potential respondents in this group (A) (population)
• Percent who should respond to the survey (B)
• Number of completed surveys desired (C = A*B)
• Projected minimum response rate (D) (as a decimal)
• Number of surveys to send out (C / D)

It’s very difficult to estimate a response rate if you haven’t conducted a similar campaign with a similar group of people. Here are some tips:

• A phone survey will deliver the highest response rate but will be the most expensive survey to implement. You can probably reach 80% of your list, depending on the amount of time you spend making calls.
• A mail survey will produce a far lower response rate than the phone. You can raise your response rate by calling or emailing recipients ahead of time and asking them to respond.
• An email survey is very simple for participants but is subject to the same factors as any other email campaign – you need a compelling headline and a solid message to get them to participate rather than deleting the message. An email survey is the least personal for the recipient, and thus they may not take as much care with their responses.
• If you offer an incentive, you can dramatically increase your response.

As you get ready to launch your survey, here are a few additional tips to keep in mind:

• If you’re not using an online survey system, set up your worksheet to tabulate your results BEFORE you finalize your survey. That way you can make sure you’re asking your questions in a way that can be captured and measured in your spreadsheet.
• People are busy. Keep the survey as short as possible.
• Ask people to respond within a fairly short but fair period of time – for example, 10 days. A deadline is important or else the piece may end up in a pile of unimportant mail.
• If the deadline comes and goes and you haven’t received your minimum number of surveys, call or email the people who haven’t responded and ask them if they’d be willing to help you improve.
• Consider providing an incentive to respond.
• Thank recipients who invested the time to participate. A personal note, a letter or even a small thank you gift is a simple but effective gesture.

Brand Audit Step 5: Analyze Your Results

After you’ve collected your survey results, it’s time to analyze them. Your end goal is to determine whether your existing brand matches the market’s perception and your team’s perception of your brand. If it doesn’t, you’ll want to identify the disconnects.

If you’d like to create analyses and reports for separate groups (such as customers, prospects, vendors, employees, etc.), complete this task for each group. The first step is to determine how you’ll rate the responses. This depends upon the survey type and the volume of responses, but your end goal is to evaluate how well the majority of the responses reflect your brand summary.

If you used open-ended questions, read through all of your questions and determine the average rating for each question. Rate the response to each question based on the following scale:

5 = the response is an extremely strong match to your brand strategy

3 = the response is a general match to your brand strategy

1 = the response does not match your brand strategy at all

Now, take a look at the different groups you sent the questions to. Record the average rating for each group. Do you see any trends? What can you conclude from the data?

For each group, determine your results. If your audit matched your brand summary, congratulations! Keep up the good work. If not, continue to determine how you can strengthen your brand. Then apply those changes to the materials and messages you use in the market, along with your operational requirements (because your brand is an experience – not just a logo or creative).

If you want additional guidance, check out our comprehensive brand strategy toolkit.

The post A Step-by-Step Brand Audit Process appeared first on Marketing MO.

Yet from my experience, few small to midsize businesses bother to create one. (And many don’t even create a written annual marketing plan, opting to simply operate from a budget instead.)

Why? Part of the reason is due to a lack of bandwidth. And partly it’s due to insufficient understanding of strategic marketing. While MBA graduates can recite the 4Ps and create a SWOT analysis, these are rarely helpful at the SME (small to midsize enterprise) level, where a handful of people and decisions shape the direction of a brand and how it’s perceived by the market.

The biggest reason, however, is caused by confusion between the marketing strategy and marketing tactics. I commonly hear marketers and executives referring to tactics when discussing their marketing strategy. They think they have developed a clear strategy, saying things like “we’re going to grow by ramping up our digital and inbound marketing” or “we’re going to hire an agency to revamp our website to increase online sales.” But while tactics are important, they are simply techniques and actions used to solve immediate problems.

Strategy answers the higher level question of “where are you going and what do you want to accomplish?” It looks to the future and focuses on the long term. At the SME level, most marketers focus on executing tactics and most businesspeople focus on meeting revenue targets, but many fail to align those with an overarching, long-term marketing strategy.

Like great buildings, great brands aren’t built without a carefully crafted architectural plan.

7 Questions to Assess Your Current Marketing Strategy

To create a clearer picture of what a good strategic marketing plan addresses, I often prefer to remove the marketing jargon and use a “plain English” approach by asking these questions about a brand:

• Who are you, and what does your brand stand for?
• What does your typical buyer look like, and what inspires them to be loyal to you?
• How is your brand perceived by the market when they’re evaluating their other options?
• Why does a typical customer buy from you, instead of your competition?
• What do you do better than your competition?
• What does your market think of when they see your name and logo or hear your name? Does that match what you want them to think?
• How do you influence them to take action to become a customer?

Strong brands have answered these questions, and thereby have everyone aligned so their marketing and sales team can focus on tactical execution.

At the SME level, it’s more common to see a chaotic approach: tactical marketers saying one thing, sales teams saying another, as everybody makes their own decisions about how to generate customers. This works sometimes, but more often it creates friction amongst marketing, sales and executive leadership, and presents a disjointed brand to the marketplace.

If you don’t have a written marketing strategy, I highly recommend that you create one. A mediocre strategy that everyone is aligned with is better than having no strategy at all, much less competing strategies.

The Value of a Written Strategic Marketing Plan

Completing the strategic marketing planning process with your executive leadership team and marketing and sales team not only helps you to clarify the answers to the above questions – which can be an incredibly enlightening process, but it can also help your team to:

1. Work together to define what you truly stand for and how to communicate that to influence your market
2. Create a set of brand standards so you consistently deliver a unified brand to the marketplace
3. Understand how you’re truly different and why the market actually buys from you
4. Identify what you want to be known for in the future – the mindshare you wish to own

Creating this alignment will almost certainly improve the effectiveness of your marketing and sales activities throughout the year – even if you’re not totally confident in numbers 1, 3 and 4 above.

It’s always exciting for me to see the energy teams discover after coming together to create and understand their marketing strategy – where they’re heading, why they’re going there and the high-level things they need to do to accomplish it. This is empowering work, as it provides the guidelines teams need to select and measure their tactics. A good marketing strategy makes everything work together.

Getting the team together to complete the work and create the plan is the first step. You can always battle-test and refine your plan’s elements in the future. But you can’t be sure of where your brand is heading if you haven’t defined the strategy.

Our Brand Strategy Toolkit walks teams through these steps. It’s not easy work, but it’s powerful, and immensely valuable. I invite you to check it out.

The post Top 4 Benefits of a Written Strategic Marketing Plan appeared first on Marketing MO.

Your brand’s personality and voice are what allow your business to make a personal connection with your audience. Just as people have values, goals, beliefs (and even flaws), so do organizations.

If your brand was a person, how would describe him or her?

Would your brand be a man or a woman? Young or old? Friendly or edgy? Smart or funny?

When you’re developing your brand strategy, identifying human personality traits can help crystallize the experience you want to deliver. Human personality traits are a powerful element that can help you win the mindshare you want to own (to be known for that certain something). People want to see the humanity within a business.

You’ll also be able to use your brand personality traits as a check-and-balance mechanism for your campaign creative and messaging. And, if you conduct a brand audit and find that your brand personality traits aren’t what you’re hoping for, you have an opportunity to change them.

Identifying Your Brand Personality Traits

There’s been a lot of great research on dimensions of brand personality. If you want to dive deep into this subject, we highly recommend reading this paper – “Dimensions of Brand Personality” – by Jennifer L. Aaker of Stanford. Even though it was published in 1997, it contains an excellent discussion of well-known brands and their human personalities.

Many business leaders struggle to come up with their brand personality traits. Understanding the five key dimensions of brand personality always helps.

Brand Personality Trait #1 – Competence

Rolex is a brand that scores high on competence. The brand is known for producing the world’s finest watches.

Brand Personality Trait #2 – Sincerity

Amazon is one of the world’s most trusted brands. It’s very sincere, supported by industry-changing shipping and return policies and exceptional product accessibility. CEO Jeff Bezos is extremely customer-focused, telling the customer exactly what to expect when interacting with Amazon and backing it up. Some Amazon suppliers don’t like it, but he has built Amazon into one of the world’s most trusted and sincere brands. While Amazon continues to break new ground, not all products are successful; Bezos is unafraid of failure, which helps make it more human.

Brand Personality Trait #3 – Sophistication

Even though Apple is a technology company, its brand is very sophisticated. Upon Steve Jobs’ return in the late 1990s, the company placed a heavy emphasis on design for its hardware, software and retail stores. Apple products are elegant, as is its packaging, software and marketing.

Brand Personality Trait #4 – Excitement

Virgin is an example of an exciting brand. It’s much like its creator, Richard Branson, and it’s differentiated through its unusual name, bold colors, innovating marketing and unique advertising.

Brand Personality Trait #5 – Toughness

Carhartt has been protecting the hardworking men and women of the United States since 1889. Their work boots, jackets and pants shield people from extremely cold temperatures, fire and water. The brand has been known for its toughness for over a century.

Do any of these five dimensions of brand personality directly apply to your brand? You may wish to bring your team together and write down all of the adjectives that they might use to describe your brand. If possible, limit each trait to one word: for example, “knowledgeable,” “fun,” “visionary,” “friendly,” or “creative.” Write down everything that is said.

Finalizing Your Brand Personality Traits

After you’ve finished your brainstorming session, organize the adjectives into similar groupings on a fresh sheet of paper. You’re seeking the most common groupings and the most accurate descriptions.

Discuss each grouping with your team and select the five that best describe your brand. Then select the best adjectives from each group.

Good work! But you’re not done yet. This is only your internal view of your brand. What does your market think? Before you decide on your final brand personality traits, you should survey your market to see what others think ­– it’s often surprisingly different from what your internal team perceives.

Use SurveyMonkey or Typeform if you don’t already have a survey tool in place. Here are written step-by-step instructions for conducting a brand audit.

If your results don’t match your desired brand personality, then update your brand strategy to better represent them.

***

This is an example of content contained in Module 4 – Brand Architecture of our comprehensive brand strategy toolkit. This module is about defining the elements of your brand that shape your brand experience.

The post Crafting Your Brand Personality appeared first on Marketing MO.

And a brand strategist is important when the economy is booming, or you’re reinventing yourself after the pandemic.

Yet there’s little training on how to become a brand strategist. While some believe that strategists are born, not made, if you have a mix of analytical skills, an appetite for learning, and an understanding of creative and human psychology, you can learn to become a good brand strategist.

There’s no specific educational background for this role. Brand strategists come from a variety of educational training: psychology, writing, design, business and the arts. My degrees were in economics and communications. If I had the bandwidth in undergrad to add a third major, it would have been psychology; behavioral economics – the intersection of microeconomics, communications and psychology – has been one my new fields of study over the past decade, along with data science.

I tend to group brand strategists into two buckets:

• Architects of big consumer brands and lifestyle brands
• Architects of company brands, B2B brands and small to mid-level consumer product brands

The former typically have a natural gift for creativity and understanding what makes people tick, and will have thrived at an agency or big consumer product company. Their natural creative talent is apparent early on, both as a child growing up and early in their career.

The latter describes the rest of us, or the majority of brand strategists (in sheer numbers). This is the group that I’ll focus on for the rest of this post.

Base Skills to Become a Brand Strategist

Good brand strategists emerge from pursuing a conscious plan for gaining experience and honing skillsets. Strategic thinking is a must, but the rest can be learned. But you won’t learn in any academic program. What follows is discussion of the skills base you will need to develop.

Gain Industry Experience

When you start in marketing, you’ll probably start at the bottom as a coordinator or assistant. That’s fine, and it will expose you to the basic functions. Observe how your managers, directors and other business leaders approach the marketing function.

Learn Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a critical component of almost every business. Learn about building websites, SEO, SEM, online advertising and email marketing (since you’re probably already familiar with social media).

Hone Your Copywriting Skills

In the Mad Men heyday, the copywriters led the creative vision. Copy, when paired with the right creative, works in harmony to influence and persuade. Learn to write headlines, summaries, body copy and perhaps some technical writing. Content marketing dominates the marketing landscape in 2019, so these skills will always be relevant.

Learn How to Art Direct

You don’t have to be a designer to art direct. Art direction is about understanding principles of design and how copy + imagery work together to convey a message or induce an action.

Learn the Different Types of Designer Profiles

Designers have specialties. There are logo designers, print designers, digital designers, brand creators and production designers. Learn the differences and be able to review a designer’s work and understand how to best utilize her skills.

Study Persuasion and Human Psychology

Humans are imperfect, but do follow certain patterns. For example, art directors know that a person will follow the eyes of the person in an image. When you use an image of a person looking straight at you on your landing page, the user will lock onto that person’s eyes. When you use an image of a person looking down at your CTA form, the user will follow that gaze to the form. Understanding how to harness human pattern-following will be valuable over the course of your career.

Get Some Agency Experience

Working in an agency will expose you to the creative process, the account management process and all of the complexities of putting together a complex campaign. It’ll help you select and manage agencies in your future work and understand how to get the best out of your own in-house resources when you’re managing an entire team. 

Executing Brand Strategy Work

Building this skills base could take three to five years of your career, or perhaps longer. Once you have that base, you’ll have the foundation for becoming a brand strategist.

Next, you’ll want to be able to execute a number of strategic and tactical projects, which you’ll encounter at numerous times throughout your career.

Brand Positioning

This is the fundamental element of any brand strategy – the positioning of your brand in the marketplace. This is a strategic exercise (which is sometimes called competitive positioning), which defines how you’ll differentiate your offering to win mindshare in the market and be known for a certain “something.” This decision will drive the rest of your branding decisions.

Buyer Personas

A form of market segmentation, a buyer persona is a representation of a fictional character who is a buyer of your product or service. You’ll need to create a complete profile of this person, identifying her age, life stage, goals, challenges and want and needs. Your team will use this representation to attempt to make an emotional connection to her.

Brand Audits

You’ll probably conduct at least one brand audit per year, so it’s important to be comfortable with your step-by-step brand audit process, and have the proper tools to conduct them often. Conduct a brand audit whenever you begin working on a new brand, and use a brand audit every 12 to 24 months to ensure that your strategy is on track.

Brand Naming

Your name is such a critical part of your brand; sometimes, a great name becomes obvious after a creative session with talented people. Yet often a great brand name is the result of a lengthy research and creative process. Agencies follow a structured process with a number of people. You should too, for each time you need to choose a name for a company or offering.

Brand Architecture

A brand is an experience, and your brand experience is shaped by a number of elements that comprise your brand architecture: your brand creative, your logo, your brand messaging, your marketing campaigns, and how the people that represent your brand interact with your market and customers, including salespeople, customer service and support, and the people performing services. This defines your brand personality – the perception of your brand – and should be aligned with the mindshare you wish to own in the marketplace.

Brand Creative

As your brand grows, keeping your brand creative consistent with your brand strategy becomes an operational exercise. It’s a good idea to use a brand asset management system and have a defined creative review process to ensure that all of your brand creative – presentations, sell sheets, social media, digital and print ads – are consistent with your brand strategy.

Rebranding

You may run across the need to rebrand a company, product or service, so it’s a good idea to understand the dos and don’ts of rebranding and have a process for determining when and how to handle it.

Being a brand strategist is a fun, rewarding career. It’s a job that is always interesting and challenging. For most, it’s worth investing three to five years of work to build the skills and experience to do a good job.

***

Jim Sagar is the co-founder of Qlutch Marketing, Inc. – creator of the Brand Strategy Toolkit and CEO of Rehinged where his team leverages artificial intelligence for marketing and sales teams.

The post How to Become a Brand Strategist appeared first on Marketing MO.

One of my favorite quotes is from the late Peter Drucker: “Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

On first glance, it’s not an earth shattering quote. But there are plenty of case studies about companies that delivered average products yet became distinguished because of their marketing (think Coca Cola, Nike, Corona, Microsoft, Red Bull).

It’s easy to argue that marketing is the single most important function of any business. For some, marketing effectively today is more difficult than it was five to ten years ago. For others, it’s much easier, distinguishing their brand and creating tremendous value.

There’s rarely a single cause that separates the former from the latter; marketing in today’s economy is far more complex than in previous decades, with more complexity on the way. (As of June 2017, we’re about 20 years into a transformational communications revolution that is having a dramatic effect on our behaviors, expectations, lifestyles and even core values. You can learn more in my interview with Brian Solis here.)

Two Simple Questions

For those seeking a solution for distinguishing their business and marketing effectively today and in the future, the answer isn’t complicated. Tune out the noise and think about what’s most important in marketing:

• Is your brand in front of the right people? The people who will become your customers?
• When they see your brand, are they inspired to take action that could lead to them becoming a customer or creating a customer?

The first question is about distribution and making sure you’re staying visible where your potential customers are interacting. But what if you’re already doing that well and you’re still not growing?

The second question is about inspiring people to take action. It’s about getting people’s attention and connecting with them on an emotional level.

If your marketing communications are still focused on talking about your products and services via old school persuasion, think about this quote from Ad Age:

Here’s a message to CMOs: Consumers don’t trust your ads. In fact, fewer than 25% of U.S. online consumers trust ads in print publications, and the numbers are even worse for digital media. The truth is, campaigns alone just won’t cut it anymore – no matter how good you are at tuning them.

Let’s face it: Your brand is defined by the interactions people have with it. Despite all the activity that you try to catalyze through campaigns, individuals more commonly interact with your brand outside of those carefully orchestrated messages.

Uncover Your Purpose

One of the results of today’s digital communications revolution is that people are getting very good at finding information and misinformation, at tuning out messaging and at becoming more elusive.

They’re also becoming more impatient, more demanding and more discerning, which means that most people tune out most marketing messages and don’t even realize it. It’s become a natural habit.

But that doesn’t mean marketers should stop communicating. It means they should change what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.

Twenty years ago, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras uncovered the link between sustainable, long-term financial performance and having a strong set of core values, a clear vision and a purpose that is the higher calling of your company.

Ten years ago, Simon Sinek introduced the “golden circle” and how to communicate with why:

Simon Sinek showed that most companies communicate by sharing what they do and how they do it, expecting that to be enough to cause people to make a behavioral change (e.g. purchase your product). But since humans make emotional decisions, even in B2B, and then find reasons to justify their decisions, a more effective method for getting people to buy your product or service would be to reverse the flow of your marketing communication by communicating from the inside out, starting with your why.

Communicate with Meaning

Instead of pitching what you’re selling, talk passionately about why you’re in business. What do you stand for? What is your purpose?

A company’s purpose never changes, is never completed and isn’t tied to a goal or a product, service or market. Here are a few that Collins and Porras shared:

Your purpose isn’t something that works as a marketing campaign message or slogan, but it does set the frame for the types of things you should be communicating to your market. These are the things that create emotional connections with your audience. People who believe what you believe and support what you’re trying to accomplish will purchase your product or service, so shift from trying to persuade people to take action to inspiring them!

Warby Parker, Nike and The Honest Company aren’t focused solely on pushing eyeglasses or athletic shoes or soap; they’re communicating ideas that align with what they stand for.

Get Your Executive Team Involved

David Packard of Hewlett-Packard fame once observed that “marketing is too important to be left to the marketing people.” Yet marketing is still avoided by top management at most companies, who instead focus on things like

• finance
• sales
• production
• management
• legal
• people

If marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business, then it’s something your executive team and key stakeholders should be a part of.

When you’ve discovered your purpose and what you truly stand for, ideas for your “marketing” communication flow naturally and become much more effective.

They can make an emotional connection with your audience.

They can inspire others.

They can become the distinguishing, unique function of your business.

For more detailed guidance, read the classics Built to Last or Start With Why, or I’ll walk you through the process of discovering your company’s purpose and core values in our Brand Strategy Toolkit.

The post Marketing with Purpose appeared first on Marketing MO.

Brand messaging addresses the written and verbal statements that quickly describe what you do and how you’re different. Brand messaging is used throughout your interactions with your market, such as:

• The “elevator pitch” – the 30-second response to “what do you do?”
• Sales and marketing materials – sales literature, websites, presentations and campaigns all use messages of various lengths
• The introductory statement in a phone call
• Press releases – the blurb at the bottom of the release that explains what the company does
• Slogans
• Your mission statement

Good brand messaging takes your competitive positioning and brand strategy to the next level. It hones in on what’s important to your market and communicate it consistently and effectively.

Brand Messaging Key Concepts & Steps

Before you begin

Before you start writing your brand messaging, define your brand strategy – it will help you identify what your messages should convey. If you need messages for a marketing campaign or program from your marketing plan, map them out so you’ll know exactly what kind of messages you need. If you haven’t finalized your name, you’ll want to do that before messaging as well. If you’re revamping the messaging for an existing brand, start with a brand audit and consider defining your brand personality traits.

Define your writing style and requirements

Before you start writing, define your style requirements — tone, voice, style, vocabulary – to ensure the writing will be consistent and match your brand strategy.

Create an elevator pitch

The elevator pitch describes who you are, what you do, who your customers are and why they should buy from you. When you’ve written it, say it out loud it to hear how it sounds and how long it takes (no more than 30 seconds).

Create your brand positioning statements and brand story

Write statements of various lengths – 25, 50 and 100 words – so you have a message length that fits a variety of materials. The shorter statements focus on the value and brand position; the longer ones also include features and benefits. Then write a compelling brand story.

Create a tagline/slogan

Your tagline/slogan is a more succinct phrase used in campaigns. It can be one word or a short phrase — and for most business writers, it’s harder to create. You may want to hire a copywriter for this one. It should flow naturally with your brand name.

Create your mission statement

An average mission statement describes why you’re in business. A great mission statement is compelling, shows why you’re different and conveys your company’s personality.

Determine where to use your brand messaging

Make sure to use your new messages consistently. Train your team to use the messages and audit your materials periodically to make sure they’re still working in the future.

After Brand Messaging

Your brand messaging feeds all of your communication with your market. Use it in your corporate identity, sales literature and tools, your website and all of your marketing campaigns.

Check out our comprehensive brand strategy toolkit if you’d like step-by-step guidance.

The post Brand Messaging appeared first on Marketing MO.

Yet for many B2B marketers, the pricing strategy in their marketing plan is challenging to write; many aren’t even involved in creating their pricing strategy.

There are many factors to consider when developing your pricing strategy, both short- and long-term. For example, your pricing needs to:

• Reflect the value you provide versus your competitors
• Match what the market will truly pay for your offering
• Support your brand
• Enable you to reach your revenue and market share goals
• Maximize your profits

When you offer a truly unique product or service with little direct competition, it can be challenging to establish your price. Define a strong strategy and competitive analysis so you can view:

• What your prospects might pay for other solutions to their problems
• Where your price should fall in relation to theirs

When your price, value proposition and positioning are aligned, you’re in the best situation to maximize revenue and profits.

Deviating from Your Pricing Strategy

If sales are slow, many companies lower their price. That’s not always the best option. Here are three price change examples:

What would happen if these companies used a different pricing strategy?

Do you see your company in one of these scenarios?

Pricing Strategy Key Concepts & Steps

Before you begin

It’s best to define your positioning, create your brand strategy, and identify your distribution channels before you develop your pricing strategy in the marketing plan. By doing so, you’ll ensure that your pricing reflects your value and reinforces your brand.

For example, if your method for delivering value is product leadership, you shouldn’t discount heavily or compete on price; you should also minimize pricing conflicts with any channel partners.

Your pricing influences how the market perceives your offering. If you’re perceived as a commodity, you must either change the market’s perception via a new positioning strategy, or compete on price and focus on innovating to keep costs low so you can still make a profit. You may need to gather market research and market intelligence – either via your own efforts, via third-party toolkits or applications, or by hiring a market research firm.

Match your pricing strategy to your value proposition

Your price sends a strong message to your market – it needs to be consistent with the value you’re delivering.

• If your value proposition is operational efficiency, then your price needs to be extremely competitive.
• If your value proposition is product leadership or customer intimacy, a low price sends the wrong message. After all, if a luxury item isn’t expensive, is it really a luxury?

Understand your cost structure and profitability goals

Companies calculate these costs differently, so verify the exact calculations your company uses for

• Cost of goods sold (COGS): the cost to physically produce a product or service
• Gross profit: the difference between the revenue you earn on a product and the cost to physically produce it

In addition, understand how much profit the company needs to generate. You’ll be far more effective when considering discount promotions – you’ll know exactly how low you can go and still be profitable.

Analyze your competitors’ prices

Look at a wide variety of direct and indirect competitors to gauge where your price falls. If your value proposition is operational efficiency, evaluate your competitors on a regular basis to ensure that you’re continually competitive.

Determine price sensitivity

A higher price typically means lower volume. Yet you may generate more total revenue and/or profit with fewer units at the higher price; it depends on how sensitive your customers are to price fluctuations. If they’re extremely sensitive, you may be better off at a much lower price with substantially greater volume.

Estimate how sensitive your customers are to fluctuations – it will help you determine the right price and volume combination. More importantly, you can estimate how a price change can impact your revenue.

After Designing Your Pricing Strategy

Once you’ve finalized your pricing strategy in the marketing plan, it’s time to design your marketing campaigns. But first, it’s always a good idea to craft your brand strategy. Learn more about our brand strategy toolkit.

The post Pricing Strategy appeared first on Marketing MO.

These aren’t only examples of dedicated customers, this is brand loyalty in action, and it’s the holy grail of brand marketing. Brand loyalty is when a customer chooses to buy one brand of products or services over and over, excluding the competition. Apple is notorious for this type of loyalty from its customers; 78% of iPhone users can’t imagine having another brand of phone and 59% won’t even research other phones before upgrading.

Brand Loyalty vs. Customer Loyalty

When customers are loyal to a brand, asking them to switch brands is like suggesting that a New York Yankees fan cheer for the Boston Red Sox. Brand loyalty represents an emotional connection that turns customers into dedicated fans. This kind of emotional connection doesn’t happen by chance. Companies create brand loyalty through a deep understanding of their customers’ priorities and buying behavior, and by aligning what they stand for with what their customers care about. Effective brands have a strong creative identity that their customers relate to, and this identity remains consistent over time.

Brand loyalty is not the same thing as customer loyalty, which is usually associated with customer rewards programs, free offers, coupons, sales, rebates, and other incentives. Customer loyalty programs aim to keep buyers coming back for more with a steady stream of perks. While the distinction between brand loyalty and customer loyalty may seem subtle, the difference is significant. Whereas customers with brand loyalty have an emotional connection to the brand that extends beyond price, buyers who fit into the customer loyalty category usually won’t hesitate to check out the competition if prices go up or the special deals stop being so special.  

Effects of Brand Loyalty on Customer Retention and Sales

While all businesses would obviously like to win customer fans for life, brand loyalty isn’t just a “nice to have.” The cost of acquiring a new customer is five to seven times higher than the cost of retaining an existing customer. And according to a 2019 brand loyalty survey, customers are 27% more likely to try multiple products and services from their favorite brands. The long-term financial benefits of customer retention and repeat purchases make brand loyalty a “need to have” for every successful business.

In addition, brand loyalty leads to, well, more brand loyalty. More than half of customers recommend products and services from their favorite brands to other people. This is an important factor to consider since customers who have been referred by someone they know have a 25% higher average lifetime value compared to other customers—probably because they’re more likely to develop brand loyalty as well. According to a study from the Wharton School of Business, referred customers end up being 16% to 24% more loyal than non-referred customers.

Net Promoter Score, or NPS, is a good way to measure brand loyalty. NPS is related to customer retention and revenue growth, and some of world’s most valuable brands have a high NPS.

7 Steps to Build Brand Loyalty

Developing brand loyalty is the pinnacle of most marketer’s strategic goals, but how do you win these dedicated customer fans for life? Brand loyalty doesn’t just happen by chance or even occur because your service or product is superior. Brands build loyalty methodically, and these seven steps are the best place to start.

1. Create Your Brand Strategy

Every successful brand has a strategy, which is different from a marketing plan. Your brand strategy defines what you stand for, and while it includes your creative elements, it also details the promise that you make and the personality you convey in the mind of your prospects and customers. Your brand strategy brings your competitive positioning to life and is a critical step toward building brand loyalty.

2. Conduct a Brand Audit

If you know what your brand should stand for, how well do your existing messaging, campaigns, and creative elements represent it? What does your market think your brand stands for? By conducting a brand audit, you can determine all of your brand touch points, collect market feedback, discover your brand’s gap analysis, and create your brand update schedule.

3. Define Your Brand Personality

Your brand is more than your logo, name, or slogan — it’s the entire experience your prospects and customers have with your company, product, or service. Think of your brand as a person with a distinct personality. To define your brand personality, describe him or her, and then convey these brand personality traits in everything you do and create.

4. Develop Your Brand Story

Your brand story can have a powerful influence on the brand experience. This is not ad copy or boring facts; it’s a powerful element of your brand strategy. Memorable brand stories tell the unexpected, challenge you, and strike an emotional chord. They convey your personality, share what you stand for, set expectations, and communicate your values.

5. Review Your Brand Name

Your brand name plays a critical role in your brand strategy; it’s what triggers the thoughts and emotions of your buyer. Selecting a great brand name can be a challenging exercise, and even if you already have a name, it’s one that’s worth revisiting. Make sure you’ve considered all of the options and ultimately choose the best name you can – there’s a lot at stake.

6. Determine Your Customer Retention Strategy

Your customer retention strategy is about keeping the customers you’ve invested in to acquire, and it’s likely to deliver the highest marketing ROI of all your marketing programs. If you’re in an industry where your customers make multiple purchases over the years, it will be much easier to grow your revenue and profitability if your team is focused on retaining those customers.

7. Craft Your Brand Architecture

The key to your entire brand strategy is your brand architecture. Your brand architecture sets the foundation for all of the other components of your brand and combines them into a single unified structure. Brands play on our emotions, so your brand architecture should uncover the specific emotions around which you want to build your brand.

Marketing MO’s expertise in data-driven brand science gives us unique insights into how successful brands generate emotional connections with their customers to create true and lasting brand loyalty. Our comprehensive brand strategy toolkit provides the framework and guidance to design a comprehensive brand loyalty strategy for any type of brand, in any market, anywhere in the world.

It’s a powerful framework for building a brand from scratch, rebranding a company or product, or becoming a brand strategist.

***

Jim Sagar is the co-founder of Qlutch Marketing, Inc. – creator of the Brand Strategy Toolkit and CEO of Rehinged where his team leverages artificial intelligence for marketing and sales teams.

The post How to Build Brand Loyalty appeared first on Marketing MO.

And in today’s digital world, that can be more complicated than ever. Customers’ expectations of brands are changing, and we’re undergoing a massive shift in how we deliver that brand experience.

Some brands won’t survive.

But it’s still early in the shift. Even if you’re an “old school” brand or traditional B2B brand, you can still evolve your brand experience to meet your customers’ changing expectations by connecting with the emotions of your buyers.

By being authentic.

By being human.

By creating an expectation for the experience that you will deliver. And then by following through and delivering upon it.

And your brand story can help to set that expectation.

Creating a Compelling Brand Story

Most of us know the stories that lie behind the big tech brands that we use today – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at Apple; Sergey Brin and Larry Page at Google; Jeff Bezos at Amazon and Elon Musk at Tesla.

Here are some other examples of compelling stories that you might be familiar with:

Dollar Shave Club became a billion-dollar company that was propelled by a funny and authentic brand story.

Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company has raised hundreds of millions of venture capital funding for its non-toxic household goods products company and leads with a compelling brand story.

Warby Parker has changed how many people purchase eyeglasses and shares their story.

Blue Apron is attempting to change the U.S. food system.

People today have more choices than ever, even in B2B, and they are choosing to do business with companies they want to do business with.

With brands that support the things that are important to them.

With brands that make them feel good.

With brands that are aligned with their values.

You don’t have to be a consumer brand to connect with your audience in this manner. Even a 92-year-old industrial machine manufacturer is sharing a compelling brand story.

Formed out of the 1925 merger between the C.L. Best Tractor Company and Holt Manufacturing Company, Caterpillar is now one of the most recognizable industrial brands in the world.

But it wasn’t always recognizable. Caterpillar shifted its marketing approach in 2015 to share their story. They invested heavily in content marketing to communicate it to the market.

Writing Your Brand Story

As you’re thinking about your brand story, start by thinking about your story theme. At the highest level, there are only a handful of story themes:

• A quest for something intrinsically special
• Rags to riches
• Good against evil
• Revenge
• Love
• Survival in a new environment
• Individual against society

Most movie scripts and novels follow one of the above themes. If you’re a startup or a relatively new company, your story could be about your founders and what they set out to change. If you’re a more established brand, your story can reflect the values that the company holds, or something that it’s focused on changing.

Think about your brand’s personality and positioning and write short summaries of story ideas. Then take a fresh look at them and consider:

• Credibility: Why are YOU qualified to sell this product?
• Differentiation: Why are you DIFFERENT from everyone else who sells this type of product? (Be positive and truthful).
• Purpose: Why are you in business? What difference or IMPACT are you trying to make? (Be emotional if possible. People want to know that you care).
• Intrigue and Personality: What makes your story worth listening to? What will appeal to the customer on a personal level?

Memorable brand stories tell the unexpected, challenge you, dare you and strike an emotional chord. They can convey your personality, share what you stand for, set expectations and communicate your values.

Your brand story can influence the brand experience. It’s not ad copy or boring facts.

It’s a powerful element of your brand strategy.

***

This is an example of content contained in Module 1 – Brand Inspiration of our comprehensive brand strategy toolkit, which can help you build the foundation to become a brand strategist. This module is about defining the elements of your brand that shape your brand experience. You can also view additional articles about choosing a great brand name, designing your brand architecture, shaping your brand personality traits, writing your brand messaging,  developing your corporate identity or conducting a brand audit.

The post How to Create a Compelling Brand Story appeared first on Marketing MO.

The company was formed in January of 2018 after being spun out of Simmons Bank in Memphis, Tennessee. The company principals, Orma Smith and Jay Mays, have over 40 years of combined experience with insurance products and benefits packages and had been running the employee benefits division within the bank for over five years.

Their new brand was originally intended to be called Streamline, but after a conflict check rendered the name unusable, they were tasked with finding a new brand name.

Instead of restarting the brand naming process, they started to build a brand using the Marketing MO Brand Strategy Toolkit to gain a better understanding of what their name should represent.

It was an eye-opening experience.

Brand Inspiration

CanopyNation clients had worked with Orma, Jay and their team at Simmons Bank and experienced their passion for customer service and helping them get the most out of their benefits package.

Orma and Jay’s strong personal beliefs were apparent to everyone they worked with:

• Honesty and integrity
• Taking care of the people who do your work
• Giving, not taking
• Genuinely caring about your employees
• Being open, responsive and transparent
• Treating our customers as family and friends
• A dedication to education (for us, it’s about educating people about how to manage healthcare risk)
• A devotion to servicing the customer

They wouldn’t even sell certain lines of insurance because they couldn’t recommend them to friends and family. The brand inspiration module enabled Orma and Jay to clarify how their values would be communicated in the new brand.

And it became clear that they’d put their brand promise front and center:

We promise that you’ll receive our relentless pursuit of customer service

Brand Differentiation

In the United States, there has been a dissatisfaction in the marketplace over the past 20 years over the cost of healthcare. Government legislation is still creating a tremendous confusion about healthcare. There’s some dishonesty in the insurance industry, with people selling out to get the commission and not servicing customers properly. There’s increasing pressure on the big banks to increase bottom line and topline growth – regardless of the outcome to the customer. And many other brokers are not investing in the future.

In the brand differentiation module, they were able to determine that most of the main groups of competitors were not serving the market in the way the market desired. Some of the national players like Willis and Marsh are respected and valued with tremendous resources at their disposal. But there was an alarming trend of putting shareholder growth ahead of customer needs at some companies.

Additionally, most of their peer agencies and solo practitioners were not investing in new technologies and providing completely transparent support during the ACA open enrollment period.

Their competitive advantages became clear from the work in this module.

Brand Positioning

At this point, they decided that their brand positioning would be as an employee benefits advisory service instead of an insurance brokerage. The trusted advisor for business healthcare coverage was difficult to find — and it was their entire focus.

They’d strive to have the new brand to be known for providing innovative healthcare products and comprehensive administrative services.

Brand Architecture

While the buyer persona for the economic buyer is the CEO or owner of the company, the main influencer (and thus the most important buyer persona) is the person responsible for human resources.

They broke these down into four specific personas based on experience, career stage and company type. And for each, what the new brand should mean (the brand means) were the same:

• The team handling all of my employee benefits work
• Ensuring I get the perfect plan for my company and employees
• They take care of the benefits for all of my employees

They defined their brand personality traits as:

• Warm
• Trustworthy
• Modern
• Competent
• Committed

In the brand architecture module, the team also wrote their brand positioning statements and brand messaging, defined the elements of their brand story and defined the experience the brand should deliver at each touchpoint.

Brand Naming

With the majority of the brand strategy completed, it was time to revisit the brand naming exercise – with a goal of selecting a great brand name that would anchor everything they wanted the brand to stand for.

The process took two weeks and the stakeholders were very pleased with their ultimate selection of CanopyNation.

Selecting the URL required some evaluation, as a shed company owned CanopyNation.com which redirected to ShedNation.com.

They evaluated CanopyNation.co, goCanopyNation.com and getCanopyNation.com, but ultimately decided on joinCanopyNation.com.

Brand Strategy Implementation

The CanopyNation team is still working through their brand strategy implementation plan, but their website went live in March 2018.

Additionally, CanopyNation received preliminary approval for their trademark a mere 90 days after the application. While most applications won’t move this quickly, their in-depth research of names in the brand naming module helped ensure that the name could be trademarked.

Aero Interactive out of Indianapolis handled the creative implementation of the brand strategy, starting with the website design and build.

“For our design work, it really helped our team to have such a clear, concise brand strategy document at the beginning of the project. We knew exactly what the creative should represent. It would be great to have every client start with such a comprehensive written brand strategy.”

• Lindsey Jones, founder of Aero Interactive

“We are so pleased with the results from completing this entire process! It was challenging but very rewarding. We’re proud of our new brand and never expected to be able to create a brand that represented the beliefs and values of our core team as well as CanopyNation does.”

• Orma Smith, CEO of CanopyNation

If you like the design, feel free to reach out to Lindsey and her team.

And if you share the same beliefs as the CanopyNation team and are looking to get the most out of your company’s benefits, connect with the CanopyNation team.

And you can start building your brand with the brand strategy toolkit here.

The post Build a Brand Using the Brand Strategy Toolkit appeared first on Marketing MO.