Stop shouting and be heard: Brand Positioning
Attention is an invaluable commodity for a modern business because there are simply too many organizations vying for similar customers in the same marketplaces. Many choose to invest heavily in advertising dollars to solve their awareness problem, but this is coin-operated awareness that goes away when the money does. The cost of paid marketing is higher and less effective in the absence of organic-paid balance. And apart from impulse purchases on pre-existing favorites or, at minimum, positive brand awareness, overuse of advertising emphasizes “leads” vs actual demand. So, what is an organization to do?
Prioritize your brand impression.
Elevate the ways your past, present, and current customers engage with your company to improve customer loyalty, word-of-mouth, and overall trust. Seth Godin states, “People do not buy goods and services. They buy relations, stories, and magic.” None of which can be achieved using paid search and social as your primary engagement strategy.
The Magic of Brand Presence
Industry leaders like SEMrush, Purple, and Todoist know that developing a strong brand identity leads to intangible assets like:
A honed brand message helps prospective customers see you as a trusted solution provider, giving you an advantage over the competition. Anyone who has been to Costco or seen an article about the company knows what it stands for and can make a quick decision about whether they want to make purchases there without Costco investing a marketing dollar to reach them. Companies like SEMrush, Purple, and Todoist are trusted by their customers to provide high quality products and experiences because they have focused on delivering complimentary products and services that consistently deliver value.
The more your value your organization creates for customers, the more you can grow your bottom line and set the standards the rest of your industry will follow.
Laying the Foundation for an Effective Brand
People think “brand” consists of a snappy tagline, a memorable logo, or a dedicated PPC campaign, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Every brand needs to begin with a purpose that’s more than a simple mission statement. If you are shaping the strategic direction of the company, then you typically have a core reason for why you wanted to pursue that direction in the first place. That’s the foundation of your brand presence.
Once your purpose is defined, you can determine what kind of image you want to use to communicate that purpose. Organizations that have clear sense of what emotions or thoughts they want to evoke in their target market are best suited to communicating that in their branding because they have a clear intention behind every decision they make.
Having a clear image of how you want to be perceived flows into the next step of brand building: creating a set of guidelines governing all creative decisions to facilitate that image. A brand guide is essentially the personality you want your organization to have in its external-facing content so it resonates with your target demographic.
With your guidelines in place, you then have to come up with a clear position you want to take within your target market. This often can look like filling a need within an underserved segment of the market, or it could be a message that differentiates itself from the value propositions currently dominating the market. The goal is to determine how you can add more value to customers’ lives than the competition.
Once you have your position down, then you can start thinking about the marketing tactics you can use to promote your new brand. This plan should focus on consistency across every channel so it feels like the organization is operating with one voice. That way, customers and prospects begin to see you as a dependable partner rather than a vendor who may or may not be giving them the best option.
Building on the Foundational Voice
Having a clear purpose and a voice provides the basis for your brand presence, but it’s only effective if you try to use it to build organic growth for your organization’s marketing channels.
Here’s how you make sure your voice stands out among the noise of sameness:
Create Your Buyer Personas
It’s convenient to use the same message to everyone, but it’s not going to resonate unless you’re trying to push widgets. For organizations who aren’t in the business of pushing volume, it’s necessary to tailor the message to specific customer profiles.
This is where buyers personas are useful because they use detailed information to understand a prospective customer’s wants and needs. With this knowledge, creating content that resonates with individual customer types should be a breeze.
Build a Brand Identity
Every externally visible piece of your brand presence should be distinct if it’s going to stand out in the crowd. It’s critical that your externally facing collateral remains consistent across:
Each branding element should work to reinforce the others to be effective, so it’s usually best to invest the time and energy in monitoring regularly to ensure compliance.
Start a Conversation, Not a Pitchfest
Any brand that needs volume to survive can try to pitch its services or products to anyone who will listen, but they’re also in a precarious position in today’s economy. The people you talk to now may not be ready to buy for some time, and pitch-slapping your prospects often leads a bad taste in everyone’s mouth, so they aren’t likely to turn towards you for the future.
Having a brand voice and presence is an investment in organic, long-term growth, and needs to be focused on starting conversations that prospective customers want to be a part of. If you can get people to raise their hand without having to pitch them, then selling becomes far less costly.
Final Thoughts
Many companies have come to rely on digital marketing tactics as a driver of new business, but don’t take the time to develop a robust strategy ahead of time, and it’s led to a lot of mixed results. This coin-operated approach can be effective at making a sale, but it’s also easy for a competitor to take your place in the hearts and minds of your customers if they offer a cheaper price.
In the decades that Weidenhammer has been helping clients, we have found that organizations often succeed at scaling their business sustainably if they have already modernized their underlying infrastructure and operations, because that will make the customer journey so much more valuable to the client without incurring unnecessary expense for the business.
If your organization has already done the world to be in lean, fighting shape, then building a brand presence is the best of way of increasing the value of your organization over the long term because it builds trust with your customers that no amount of discounting can take from you.
It takes work and hardly happens overnight, but it’s sustainable in a way that relying on any one marketing tactic can be.