Marketing Blog

Do you have a brand marketing strategy? Do you know what your brand marketing strategy is?  If you don’t do you know why you should?

Do you think I am asking a lot of questions for the beginning of a blog article?

Let’s start with the basics. What is your brand?

Your brand is not necessarily what you have created or what you think but the perception of your company in the marketplace.
Understand Your Brand

What do people believe you do? I used to work for a large industrial company who for decades had been in warehouse automation. However, that is not what people in the marketplace thought they did. The perception in the market was that they specialized in static storage.

Even though they had specialized in these two different areas for years, they weren’t able to make the change in customers minds.

So how does that hurt?

If people don’t perceive you as a solution to their problem they don’t go to you to solve their problem. For instance, my fridge is made by Frigidaire. That makes sense. Their brand is refrigerators, right? Do a Family Feud-style survey, and I bet the Frigidaire brand “refrigerator or freezer” gets about 95%.

On the contrary, my oven is a Bosch. What are the chances that the word “oven” is associated with Bosch is anywhere above the 5% mark? Slim.

You need to understand what your customers and prospects think about your brand before you can change it.

If you are a new company, you don’t have the problem of changing your brand perception, but you have the challenge of building a brand from scratch. However, for the purpose of this conversation, we are going to say you have an established or at least semi-established brand.

Brand Elements:

Creative elements of your Brand: Your brand has a series of creative elements, like your corporate colors, your logo, your typeface, essentially everything that goes into your content marketing, website, business cards.

Message: The message of your brand is what you want people to think about when they interact with you. Mainly anytime a prospect touches anything about your brand whether online, at a trade show when they talk to customer service when you send invoices. All of that is a reflection on your brand.

You need to have an understanding of all of these elements to be able to change them. You go into a brand change knowing that it will take time and effort. If you have carefully nurtured your brand over the years, then it will be easier to strengthen. If you haven’t nurtured your brand, it will be harder, but not impossible.

Want a free brand assessment? 

Does your staff treat everyone on the trade show floor the same? I know that if a C-level prospect walks into your booth that gets more of a reaction then when an engineer does. But, is that it? Are all of the responses from your team a matter of instinct, or do you have an actual buyer persona made for your trade shows?

If you haven’t created buyer personas for your trade shows, here is why you should.

Let’s say that one of your more senior associate on the show floor is engaged with a prospect. You have a junior staff member who is available to talk. A director level prospect walks into your booth. Your junior associate meets the prospect and starts talking about benefit “A.”Great, right? Except this is a director of logistics and he really would be more interested in benefit “B.” Your senior associate might have known, but your junior associate doesn’t have the experience yet. Your prospect leaves your booth and engages with a competitor who knows exactly what they would be most interested in learning.

Now all of this could have been avoided if you had created buyer personas in advance and had devised messages for two or three buyer personas.

Plan: What type of personas are you expecting to meet at this show? Look at your CRM if you have been to the show in the past and do a little research. What were the job titles that were common prospects in the past?

Decide with your sales team what would be the best way to talk to each of the chosen personas. At larger shows, we have even gone so far as to have different members of our staff targeting certain prospects. For instance, we have our product engineers talk to more technical prospects and senior staff targets more senior prospects.

Remember that everyone needs to know the plan so make sure you publish it where everyone on your team can access it. Review it at your staff training sessions.

Customize your content: You should have the same message to all your prospects, but you can cater to each prospect personas. Try to find the best content for each persona and have it ready to go before the show. If you don’t have the content, you might want to recycle some of the old content and see how you can tweak it to make it more appealing to each persona.

I am sure that you have planned to send emails to your prospects after you triage them. However, going one step forward and having supporting emails of the benefits that will appeal to each persona will improve your conversion and open rate on your follow-up emails.

If you would like some help with building your buyer personas, download our guide to building buyer personas here.

Everyone knows that brand dissonance is a very real thing, especially if you have a larger company or are expanding. However brand inconsistency can also be a problem for smaller companies.

You have the rush that you have to get something out. Maybe it is a white paper or a catalog, you have to get out, and perhaps you can’t get access to your “good” logo. You have to recreate it, and you can’t remember what your “blue” is. Trust me; a blue billion is not just a saying.

So you rush, and you put out something that looks, well a little different. Or one of your salespeople has to have a new presentation, and so they cobble something together that looks not quite right. Maybe the type is different, the logo is misplaced, or the colors are wrong.

This is the beginning of brand dissonance. Why is brand dissonance so bad?

Well, look at a company like Coca-Cola. They have been around forever. Their logo is immediately memorable. You can picture it right now. The colors, the shapes, you have it. Now, what if you see the coca-cola logo on a bottle in the store, but it is in orange instead of red.

Not that big a deal, right? But it immediately raises questions. Is this really coca-cola? Or is this some knock-off? I understand that most businesses aren’t like Coca-Cola, but that makes brand dissonance even more of a threat. 

Every time you “touch” a prospect you are reinforcing your brand. It takes around 23 touches to be memorable. If you mess up just one of them, you start all over again.

Remember your brand is not just your logo, colors or type, but every time you interact or touch a prospect or customer. Your invoices are part of your brand, your website, your letterhead, how you answer the phone.

They all have to be tied together. That is why you need a brand bible.

How do you go about creating a brand bible?

The first step is to examine all of our collateral.

Logo: The first is to analyze your logo. Try to describe everything about your logo. Typeface, positioning, colors, everything about your logo.

• Where you place it on a brochure or print
• Where should it be on your invoice

Remember that you may send a few different pieces of print copy to a prospect or customer, so make sure they look alike.

When should you use a grayscale version of your logo?

What are your official colors? Make a print square of each color. Then describe the RGB, Pantone, and CMYK below each.

Print: Look at each of your print pieces. How can you make them as consistent as possible? This is for letterhead, business cards, even presentations. Anything that you can conceivably print out print and analyze. Try to come up with one consistent style.

This includes typeface for headlines vs. body copy. What size should each be and what colors are permissible? Write all of this in your bible with examples.

Online: Your website must be as consistent as print. You want to make sure that the online is consistent with the print as much as possible too. If your logo is always in the upper right side of your brochures, make sure it is on the upper right side of your website as well.

Now, most importantly, distribute your bible. Make sure everyone has one and access to it is easy to find. Give it to any partners including your marketing company, printers, trade show house. Everybody.

Want to talk about your brand and how you can make it grow for you? Contact 366 Marketing for a free evaluation.

Developing your trade show message is one of the most important things you can do before your show. First, a short definition. The theme of your show is the overarching idea, and you tie the message to the theme. The message is what you want people to take away from your exhibition.

Remember your message is not your tagline, but your tagline needs to support your trade show message.

Your Trade Show Message:

Step 1: What are your goals? What are the goals for this show? What do you want to accomplish? Yes, most shows are there for lead generation, closing deals or even direct sales. However, there are a lot of different areas of ROI that you can get from your shows.

Brand awareness, media attention, and thought leadership are all important to building your brand. Keeping your goals firmly in mind is going to help you create a better trade show message.

Welcome to the last part of our inbound marketing series. If you have missed any, feel free to go to the start of the series here.

The final part of the inbound marketing campaign is reporting the results. That can be scary, right? Maybe you didn’t get the results you wanted. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t have the greatest results from your first campaign. Sometimes it hits the very first time, and sometimes it takes a while to build the results that you want. After all, if inbound marketing were easy everybody would do it, right?

Why Report? You have to report your results for two reasons:

1. Your bosses probably want to know your results
2. You need to prove ROI

One of my concerns with reporting on how awesome my campaign was is blowing your own horn. Why? Then I discovered that was silly. The rest of the company needs to know marketing’s ROI. If you don’t tell them how will they know?

Also, you need to reports on the results so you can get more investment for the future.

When to Report: You can start reporting on your results as soon as you have completed all the steps of the campaign. However, it might be best to give your campaign a little while to breathe and mature before reporting results. For instance, you report the first results a couple of weeks after your campaign steps are complete.

Remember you also want to keep reporting your results from the initial campaign as well as the others that you launch. Continue to report on your results from a monthly, and then maybe quarterly, time frame. This will depend on how often other members of the company want to know and other factors as well. 

What to Report: There are a large number of results that you can report on, and every company is different, so here are just a few that you could use.

• Visitors to the site
• Likes on the various social media networks
• Keyword rankings
• Visitors to blogs
• Etc.

However, one of the key pieces of information to report is MQL or Marketing Qualified Leads. These are leads that came in through your inbound campaign and downloaded your premium content. They have an interest in what you do and are in your funnel.

This is what moves the needle for your CEO and CFO and sales directors. We all know that marketing is not just about leads, although leads are a good quantitative measure of ROI for inbound marketing.

Want to get the whole checklist on Inbound Marketing so you can start your inbound campaigns? You can download it here.

Welcome to the last part of our inbound marketing series. If you have missed any, feel free to go to the start of the series here.

The final part of the inbound marketing campaign is reporting the results. That can be scary, right? Maybe you didn’t get the results you wanted. Don’t be too discouraged if you don’t have the greatest results from your first campaign. Sometimes it hits the very first time, and sometimes it takes a while to build the results that you want. After all, if inbound marketing were easy everybody would do it, right?

Why Report? You have to report your results for two reasons:

1. Your bosses probably want to know your results
2. You need to prove ROI

One of my concerns with reporting on how awesome my campaign was is blowing your own horn. Why? Then I discovered that was silly. The rest of the company needs to know marketing’s ROI. If you don’t tell them how will they know?

Also, you need to reports on the results so you can get more investment for the future.

When to Report: You can start reporting on your results as soon as you have completed all the steps of the campaign. However, it might be best to give your campaign a little while to breathe and mature before reporting results. For instance, you report the first results a couple of weeks after your campaign steps are complete.

Remember you also want to keep reporting your results from the initial campaign as well as the others that you launch. Continue to report on your results from a monthly, and then maybe quarterly, time frame. This will depend on how often other members of the company want to know and other factors as well. 

What to Report: There are a large number of results that you can report on, and every company is different, so here are just a few that you could use.

• Visitors to the site
• Likes on the various social media networks
• Keyword rankings
• Visitors to blogs
• Etc.

However one of the key pieces of information to report is MQL or Marketing Qualified Leads. These are leads that came in through your inbound campaign and downloaded your premium content. They have an interest in what you do and are in your funnel.

This is what moves the needle for your CEO and CFO and sales directors. We all know that marketing is not just about leads, although leads are a good quantitative measure of ROI for inbound marketing.

Want to get the whole checklist on Inbound Marketing so you can start your inbound campaigns? You can download it here.