Companies that sell software currently dominate the field of building brand awareness. When you perform a search for "brand building," you will find a plethora of content that has been created by vendors such as Qualtrics, course providers such as Coursera, and the like.
They provide similar content which describes a three-step process: define your audience, execute your brand message, and evaluate your results. While this might sound appealing in a meeting, once you put this into practice, it usually fails miserably.
Brand strategy should not be viewed as a "creative" process in an abstract sense. It is a systematic process used to collect and analyze data to establish a brand's position in the market, then develop and execute marketing activities to take that position to the market.
To achieve marketplace domination, you must rely on actual customer data, not on what you "think" will happen, otherwise your brand will fail to compete with others that have tested their assumptions. The vagueness must be removed. The key to creating brand awareness, generating demand for, and ultimately generating growth for a brand is to look at what actually happens in the marketplace.
The Truth About Building Your Brand
Most marketing teams get stuck at the definition stage. They talk about brand purpose, brand storytelling, etc., but never incorporate those concepts into their day-to-day activities.
Therefore, there is often an overwhelming disconnect between how the organization views itself (what it stands for) and how the market perceives the organization (what it stands for).
Escaping the Definition Trap
One of the most common misconceptions regarding brand equity is that brand equity is based solely on how your customers perceive your logo. The data indicates that brand equity is much more of a mechanical process than that.
According to research conducted by Qualtrics, 81% of consumers are more likely to remember the color of a business than the business name itself. Using colors in branding can increase overall brand recognition by as much as 80% due to people’s tendency to recognize what they see most often.
The color choices you make are psychological in nature and therefore will affect how people perceive your company, and ultimately increase or decrease the potential for growth within the company.
When you define your branding strategy, you need to have measurable goals to tie consumer perception of your company back to sales data. If you cannot measure the results of your branding strategy, you are basically just making a 'suggestion' about how to proceed.
Prioritizing Data Over Internal Opinions
To stay relevant to a brand, data must matter more than personal preferences or opinions held by company founders. Research found that companies whose brand positioning is based on what the founders liked typically tend to fail in the long run.
The best strategy for affecting brand health is to continue collecting data on brand usage using a variety of inputs. A recent study performed by the research firm Qualtrics included research performed on the responses of over 3,000 brand managers and researchers from 14 different countries.
Based on their findings, there is no doubt that brands require continued monitoring in order to maintain a healthy brand position.
Tracking Real-Time Market Sentiment
The degree to which companies are affected by the buying choices of consumers based on social media sentiment is greater than 67%. Therefore, if your company relies on static, outdated surveys to gauge consumer sentiment, you are potentially missing out on huge sales opportunities.
Many of the best companies today use text analytics and natural language processing to gauge market sentiment in real time. They are able to track live sentiment through a number of channels rather than waiting for an end-of-year report to determine whether or not their marketing message is working.
As a company, you need to build brand awareness and create sales conversions through the use of well-planned targeted marketing campaigns. In today's marketplace, brands face a multitude of challenges such as limited marketing budgets, extended buying cycles, fragmented media channels, etc.
Therefore, when developing a strategy to create a brand, it is imperative that your marketing campaign addresses each of these areas.
Target Audience Definition in Your Brand Strategy
When developing a marketing strategy, you need to segment your audience into groups according to the characteristics of the different groups and then create advertising that will appeal to each of them. By targeting a large area of audience at once, it will be a waste of money and therefore will not lead to increased sales.
You need to understand exactly who is purchasing the products, what type of product, and why they are purchasing the products. Modern platforms employ more than 150 industry-specific topic models and access hundreds of structured and unstructured data sources to map the wants and wishes of customers.
Without proper segmentation of your audience at this level of detail, your messaging will become muddied or blurred. This requires a marketing lead to unify the primary message across sales, content and paid media; the message must have a consistent look and tone. Building trust through consistency creates demand for your product(s).
Resolving Conflicting Signals in the Marketplace
Conflicting data is one of the most problematic areas in market research. Surveys may indicate that a fair number of respondents want premium features; however, actual sales data would suggest the opposite; they only purchase the least expensive product(s).
When the signals from the audience conflict with one another, rely on actual purchasing behavior. Oftentimes, customers will say one thing yet do another.
A good strategic planner takes advantage of A/B testing in live channels to force the customer to make a decision. Measuring how the impact of a positioning change translates into the company's bottom line is far more effective than simply asking a focus group for their opinions.
Measuring Brand Presence Across Multiple Channels
Many teams cannot demonstrate the value of their brand marketing strategy. They tend to measure social media "likes" versus the bottom line. This is a huge strategic error.
When a company's brand architecture is built as it should be, the primary business metrics will shift in a measurable way.
The Real Financial Value of Brand Health
When a brand is healthy, the execution of all other types of marketing activities is less expensive and easier. When a company is executing well, the financial return on investment is indisputable.
A clear, data-driven approach to develop your brand's identity can reduce your customer acquisition costs by as much as 15%. Conversely, a clear, data-driven brand identity can also improve click-through rates by at least 25% and increase lifetime value by an average of 30%.
Some highly targeted email campaigns have reported returns of as much as 400% due solely to having a clear brand message that aligns with the customer's expectations. When organizations begin measuring their marketing performance instead of guessing, they can achieve total revenue increases of approximately 20%.
Tracking Key Metrics for Your Brand
Continuous tracking of share of voice, campaign recall, and brand awareness will enhance your ability to succeed.
When a company deploys a tested and proven strategy (ROI = 30%) to recommend its products to customers who have recommended your products, this will lead to organic growth of an ambassador/referral-based program.
Additionally, you don't have to have a large organization to achieve this; however, you must have clearly defined decision rules and be willing to experiment with your branding strategy based on how well it is received in the marketplace.
Final Thoughts on Market Demand
You cannot purchase a healthy and prospering position in your target market through the use of advertising spending alone. You must establish this position through collecting accurate data about your customers' preferences and behavior.
The marketplace rewards organizations/companies that are willing to explore their brand position, to continually assess "live" sentiment toward their brand and to adapt/change as quickly as possible to consumer feedback.
Stop using vague and imprecise creative conversations to develop your brand! Start implementing clearly articulated, data-driven processes to connect your research to your target customers and to connect your target customers' behavior back to your financial bottom line.
A marketing strategy failing to produce lower costs for acquiring customers or a higher customer lifetime value cannot survive in today’s marketplace.
FAQ: Your Brand Marketing Strategy
How do limited budgets affect how companies approach the research phase?
Limited budget companies cannot afford to use enormous global panels for market research; they must rely on lower-cost, focused data sources. Rather than conduct extensive market research surveys with limited resources, companies can utilize targeted social listening and cheap advertising to conduct small market test campaigns to see which brand message produces the best click rate.
When preparing a test, small-budget companies should focus on learning more about their most profitable segment than on trying to assess the state of the entire market.
What impact does disagreement among internal stakeholders have on brand positioning?
When there is conflict internally on the brand messaging, consistency is difficult to achieve and maintain. If the founder of a company wants one message for branding purposes and the sales team requires another, the success of the brand is severely compromised.
To resolve internal conflicts between selective stakeholders, you can reduce subjectivity through objective customer data. Rather than arguing over subjective thoughts, you can conduct a split test and let your audience decide which message has the greater appeal to them. Ultimately, a brand marketing strategy must be determined by customers, rather than by corporate executives.
What does a brand team do to balance an organization’s long-term brand equity with short-term performance needs?
Typically, brand equity is enhanced through time, while performance marketing often produces an instant return. To address this gap, companies can develop and utilize a hybrid approach to marketing.
For instance, when doing a performance ad campaign, conduct splits on long-term brand messaging to evaluate if certain wording or colors generate low-cost ad response but decrease long-term brand equity. If so, eliminate the specific language used on the long-term branding. All short-term ads must seamlessly integrate into the overall long-term identity of the brand.
What is the penalty of not identifying differentiation from competitors?
If you are merely copying the product offering of a category leader, you are reinforcing to potential customers the continued existence of that larger category leader. Creating a niche in the market is more important than ever.
Without identifying a level of competitive differentiation, you will always find yourself competing on price. Competing on price destroys margins and as such, ultimately reduces customer lifetime value. A brand that has implemented a distinct strategic plan, through a unique value proposition, is the only reliable means of protecting itself against losing its pricing power.