"Be authentic" is not a strategy for a business; rather it gives you an idea of what you're hoping to get from the business. This statement reflects many marketing guides which originate from an unrealistic perspective – infinite budgets, every customer cares about your story, your sales team executes perfectly every message you put out by your marketing team. That world does not exist.
Your brand communication strategy must be a working operation. It is an operational system. It must be organized around tight rules; it must have well-defined operating numbers; and it must maintain a tight relationship between what you say on your website and what your sales call staff says on a telephone.
Without a clear method of measuring the monetary impact of your message, your communication strategy will never fulfill its purpose of delivering value to your customer. It is time to stop following the advice of unqualified people or businesses and start employing an effective system designed to support your business and scale.
The Issue with General Brand Advice
Agencies, blogs and other businesses refer you to the examples of big brands like Apple, Nike or Dove. They suggest you take the lead from these companies on how to create your story with emotional appeal.
This advice can have serious repercussions.
If you are selling at the B2B level: software, heavy equipment or professional services, you do not have the luxury of providing clients with your grand emotional appeal. Your clients have tight budgets and are very concerned about making a mistake that may cause them to lose their jobs.
Therefore, your clients do not want to hear the "grand" story, they want to see clear proof that you provide solutions to their specific issues and problems without presenting them with significant headaches.
Why the Normal Way Fails
In a classic approach, you would define an audience, create a core message, choose the channels through which to reach that audience, and stay consistent with it. This is all well and good on paper; however, the model falls apart very quickly.
There are the limitations of a human team, including the fact that channels degrade over time, advertising costs continue to rise, creative teams suffer from burnout, and when a company is too spread out, it does not have enough resources to produce high-quality content in all of those channels.
This means that rather than producing quality content in two channels, a company may have to produce average content in ten channels.
Additionally, the standard model does not account for barriers to success within an organization. It assumes that the legal team, product team, and sales team will all agree with the same messaging automatically, which is not the case.
The B2B Buying Group
When dealing in B2B, you are not just speaking with one individual; instead, you are speaking with a committee of individuals responsible for making purchasing decisions.
You must convince the end user that your solution is easy to use. You must convince the finance director that the solution is reasonably priced. You must convince the IT security director that the solution will not have any data security breaches.
Since each of these individuals has different criteria for evaluating your solution, it will not be possible to communicate a single message. Your communication must be aligned to the unique criteria for each role while still providing the same core truth.
In order to have effective communication with the buyer, you will need to strategically align your sales enablement efforts. When marketing makes a promise that is not aligned with what the sales team is promising, the buyer loses confidence and walks away.
Creating a Brand Communication Strategy That Promotes Profit
To address these issues, communication must not be viewed as an artistic project; it must be treated as a part of your organization's operational processes.
You need a succinct and clear workflow from research through gathering information through analysis, to the completion of performance metrics, without anyone dropping the ball at any point.
You will need to assign each task within each workflow step to someone and be clear about what the purpose of each of your assets is before starting.
Research and Message Building
You cannot rely on your gut to determine what will resonate with the market. You must rely on market data. According to research conducted by Epsilon, 80% of consumers prefer an individualized experience. Therefore, to deliver this, a well-defined message architecture must be constructed for your organization.
As an example of message architecture, extract and document the words or phrases that your ideal customers utilize when communicating about your product; don't write clever marketing copy. Listen to and transcribe sales calls to customers recorded on phone systems.
Read support tickets to determine what frustrates your customers and how those frustrations are relieved. Utilize the extracted customer quotes or phrases to build your company's core positioning statement.
Once the core positioning statement has been defined, use this statement as a foundation to build out your position statement for each member of the buying committee.
Channel Matrix Based on Limits
Stop attempting to be everywhere with all types of marketing; instead, you need to identify the marketing channels that best connect with your specific consumers, based on the size of your current marketing team and your current marketing budget.
To illustrate this point further, consider the actual results of Domino's "AnyWare" marketing launch; rather than creating general mass-marketing ads, they built specific marketing pathways for customers to find and buy their products. This resulted in over three-quarters of their sales being processed through digital channels.
Alternatively, KitchenAid successfully used time-specific moment marketing on YouTube, such as changing the length of video content based on user behavior. They adapted to their channel realities.
Focus on 2-3 specific channels and become proficient at them; ignore other channels until you can allocate resources to expand into additional channels.
Content Rules and Scaling
Most teams fail in this area because they have great messaging but cannot produce enough content to create a meaningful impact. Worse still, many teams have multiple employees creating their own versions of the same content.
You must have a strong governance model in place. Clearly establish roles for who will create the brief, who will design the asset, who will approve the copy and legal language, and finally who will publish it.
Use specific tools to enforce compliance with your governance model. Teams typically use tools like Canva and Webflow to quickly create design elements for content pieces and Asana or Mural to facilitate the review and approval of content drafts.
They often use tools like Brandfolder or HubSpot to maintain the final versions of brand assets and ensure that everyone is using a current version of their logo and text. Having strict guidelines leads to faster production of content for your brand communication strategy.
Measure Your Brand Communication Strategy Using Objective Data
If you are unable to measure it, you will not be able to justify it in a boardroom environment. For years, marketers have used subjective data to support their contributions.
This has now ended, as leadership teams are not interested in using subjective data such as clicks, likes, and impressions to gauge success; they are measuring their ability to influence revenue and gain market share.
Stop Using Vanity Numbers
Traffic numbers simply indicate the volume of users but do not indicate how many of those users became customers; therefore, the high number of engagements may not mean anything.
For example, if a user engaged with a post but did not become a customer of the brand, the high engagement means nothing. In addition to this, you must stop measuring the number of people who viewed your posts and the number of clicks your post received.
The numbers you've created are easily manipulated, and they are disconnected from business growth. One email that goes out to fifty qualified, targeted buyers is far more valuable than a viral post that gets a million views to people who will never buy any of your products or services.
Numbers to Prove Strategy Effectiveness to Leaders
To support your strategy effectiveness with hard numbers you can show the board room, you need to measure what actually happens in the marketplace and what keeps customers loyal to you.
You will need to use metrics from such platforms as Sprout Social, Brandwatch, Meltwater, or Qualtrics to be accurate in your analysis.
Share of voice (SOV): Your company's share of total conversation and ad spend in your market compared to direct competitors.
Net promoter score (NPS): This is a strict measure of customer loyalty, and generally a score greater than 50 means extremely positive results.
Branded search volume: The number of people searching for your company's name on search engines.
Customer retention rate: The percentage of customers who will continue to purchase from you over a period of time; this is an indicator that what you've promised has lived up to the expectations.
Advantages of AI in Message Testing
We are no longer limited by how long it takes humans to create one headline. With the advent of artificial intelligence, how quickly we can test ideas in the open marketplace has been revolutionised.
Agencies and fast-moving teams leverage AI to create thought leadership content only. They are using it as an engine for rapid testing.
AI-Assisted Option Generation
Stop wasting your time arguing about which hook works best. LLMs can generate 50 versions of your core message in 10 seconds or less—even faster with workloads from a computer versus a human!
When providing content for a model, you need to be clear about your positioning guidelines. From there, you should ask the model to produce a list of variant options that can be tested in the marketplace or generate ten versions within your target to save money.
Create a second list of ten versions, and ask the model to produce ten additional variants focused on speed alone. Next, produce a third list of ten versions, asking the model to create ten versions of the content that would reduce the overall risk of your service to potential customers.
Choose the five best options from each list and then put them immediately into the market to see which one performs the best and resonates with the customer base for your brand communication strategy.
Develop Feedback Loops and Testing Systems
Your static message will lose relevance as soon as it is forgotten by your customer. To ensure your messages remain relevant to your customers over a long period of time (typically 90 days), it is important to create a structured calendar for testing and refining all new content messages.
Develop a calendar to test new content messages every week, along with a schedule to measure your share of voice and branded searches on a monthly basis.
Your most important tool in doing this is constant communication with your sales team. When your sales team receives feedback from customers who are asking them a brand new set of questions about your product or service, you should implement an immediate revision of your marketing message to reflect this change.
Final Thoughts: Getting Things Done is Key
The gap between the successful and unsuccessful companies is not due to a lack of creativity but rather the lack of a systematic approach to building a communications strategy.
Creating a successful brand communication strategy requires creating a systematic and predictable process for developing, preparing, and delivering the message to a specific target audience. The creation and approval of brand content must follow strict guidelines.
Avoid using vanity metrics to measure success and instead measure success using revenue, customer retention, and market share. Do not rely solely on generalizations or "fluff."
Create a systematic workflow, build a process to check each version of your message, and use the data you have collected to determine which of your messages has moved your company forward the fastest.
Common Problems with Effective Communication in Marketing
How can marketing and sales teams work together?
Marketing should never work in isolation. To successfully align the two functions, marketing must base its core message development off of the objections that salespeople receive from prospects each day.
For every major marketing initiative, there should be a written one-page summary (cheat sheet) that accompanies it and is distributed to all salespeople. The summary will detail what the marketing initiative promises to deliver and how the salesperson should respond when a prospect calls with questions regarding the marketing initiative.
What is the best way to control messaging across 50 separate landing pages?
Centralize your assets and enforce version control. Do not allow any of your local teams to create any copy on their own. Create a centralized library of approved headlines, value propositions, and product descriptions using an online digital asset management system.
All web teams must pull from this centralized library to create their landing pages. If a landing page does not include at least one of the approved language blocks, it cannot be published.
How can teams adjust channel selection when facing budget cuts and creative tiredness?
Immediately consolidate. Eliminate the bottom 80% of your channels and consolidate all remaining budget and effort towards the two platforms that generate your highest branded search volume and account level engagement.
Stop producing new content daily and instead repurpose your most successful existing content into different formats. Focus solely on distribution and do not worry about creating new content.
Who is responsible for connecting brand awareness with direct account engagement?
Marketing leadership is the only department that has the authority to connect these two separate data points. Brand teams cannot simply hand over a spreadsheet of raw traffic data.
They must use analytic tools to connect broad-based awareness campaigns to specific accounts in their CRM. The moment that a targeted account begins viewing any of the brand's content online, the marketing team should notify the salesperson assigned to that particular account.
The process of handing off this information to the sales team must be completely automated and mandatory.