A Great Brand Is Marketing Gold

As another year starts, you are ready to tackle challenges and opportunities with renewed vigour. You have firm resolutions and great expectations to match. 2011 is going to be the year of actively marketing yourself, your business, your products or services. Your brand is going to weave its magic and win customers.

“Brand magic” doesn’t magically happen. There is a lot of hard work to create a brand that attracts and holds the attention of your ideal customer. This challenge has been compounded by the quantum of information and ‘noise’ in the market resulting from Web 2.0 technologies

You hear it and read it everywhere: 2011 is the year for social marketing. For some it is exciting – they hear all the “fast rags-to-riches” stories – and for the sceptics, it still is a complete waste of time and effort.

There is some truth in both views. If you ignore the new technologies, you are likely to miss out on opportunities seized by competitors reaching more customers, more often. If you get caught up in the excitement of new systems and tools and let technology drive you, you may forget the real purpose of the exercise ie reaching and converting customers; – and miss your sales and profit targets. You may get genuine leads yet still not get new sales or worse, lose business from existing customers.

For most business leaders, time and resources are precious and investing in new technologies can seem daunting. The key is to work smarter and focus energies on what matters to the customer.

Don’t get distracted by the hype: technology in itself isn’t going to solve your branding issue.

Focus on your brand objectives and building its effectiveness in every single customer communication channel you use, on-line or off-line.

How To Build Your Brand Efficiently & Effectively

The new technologies have shifted the power balance between customer and marketer has changed. The customer has access to information from a wide range of sources and the power to switch off instantly from your message. Your competitors – current and yet-to-emerge – are all eyeing off your customers and working out how they can reach and satisfy your customers better than you do.

Effective marketing is about knowing your market well, understanding how you can connect with it and how you can establish a genuine relationship with your ideal customer and consistently delivering the value your brand promises.

Whether off-line or on-line, the basic principles of smart marketing remain unchanged. The time-tested recipe for driving your business profitably through effective branding has 3 “magic” ingredients: real market insights, strategy focus and execution impact.

1. Real Market Insights

Reflect on 2010. What are the key lessons about your market, and your brand? Do you see the risks, the opportunities? How can you build on your successes and change what has not been effective enough?

Marketing is not just about advertising, having a website, a flurry of sales activities and events. Marketing is first and foremost about observing, listening, hearing and understanding, and meeting your ideal customer on his/her terms where he/she is. It is about keeping relevant and delivering on your brand promises. Brand success starts with meeting the promises you made to your customer.

The Art of Listening to your market is at the heart of marketing more effectively. It enables you to:

• see your products/services, your people and processes and your competitors from the eye of your market
• find what matters to your market and how to use that insight to plan well and increase your impact
• build awareness, relevance, memorability, desire and passion for your brand

All successful brands have applied and continue to apply these principles. Market segmentation is more critical than ever to cut through the clutter, connect and engage with your customer. You need to know who your ideal customer is: your brand cannot be all things to all people or it will be bland, fail to generate passion and end up relying purely on price cutting to achieve sales.

Unless your business model is about being the cheapest, this type of brand strategy never leads to sustainable growth or profits. Forget about trying to appeal to the entire population. Zoom in on your ideal customer only and build your brand strategy around him/her.

Know intimately what that group of real people who represent your ideal customer thinks, does, and wants. And get this knowledge better and faster than your competitors do. Why do they love your brand, hate it or buy it but don’t care? What are the issues that matter most to them, now and in the future?

When you know that, you will know how to find and be found by your audience more easily, how to engage with them and how to achieve more impact.

One of the benefits of technology is that it has never been easier to find out a lot about customer profiles, behavior, emotions, and motivations. You/your people have already more information than what you think. And you can get instant feedback about the benefits of your products/ services, the brand experience by your customers; what your brand and your competitors mean to them. It is now affordable by even the smallest of businesses to conduct simple market research and validate assumptions

However, information about your customer is valuable only if you are able to convert them into powerful insights about your customer. If you feel it is too hard to make sense of how to make sense of and effectively use the information gathered, get help to structure the facts, and thought processes. Understanding your customer is critical.

2. Strategy Focus

Unless you are planning to waste a lot of time and money to go nowhere, you must put in place a tightly focused strategic plan for your marketing strategy.

Start with a review of where you are at right now:

• What have you spent your marketing resources on so far?
• What activities mattered to your ideal customers? If an activity did not generate sales, should you do it again? Differently?
• Have you got the balance right between hunting for new customers and developing your current ones into bigger customers and brand advocates?

A customer is more than a single sales contact. Total customer value is a function of purchases over time and of the recommendations they make. A neutral or negative attitude to your brand represents lost opportunities. In fact, this is a major risk in this digitally connected world as reputations can be made and destroyed in an instant.

A plan that grows customer value needs to include these essential steps:

• Position your brand well for its ideal customer
• Ensure your product/service meets customer wants and needs
• Identify all your brand’s contacts with the market; engineer a positive memorable brand experience every time
• Set clear objectives and challenging but realistic goals, taking resources into account
• Communicate within your business and sales channels the essence of your brand and the rationale behind your activities
• Structure a mix of activities to build brand awareness, relevance, memorability, desire and passion. Question how each activity will complement the others to expand your reach and increase sales.
• Ensure you define the right on-line content and channel(s); and combine it with the right frequency
• Balance use of proven and innovative approaches to build on successes and stretch marketing effectiveness
• Link activities coherently to streamline your efforts into a succession of complementary effective “hits”
• Measure impact: Be capable of quickly identifying what is going wrong and why, and adjust the details whilst keeping your eye on the target.

Beware of a few traps:

• Too often, plans are a reaction to the past but don’t look ahead. That is a dangerous practice in this rapidly changing world. Insights in what worked and what didn’t work is great. Foresight into what could be possible is even better!
• Expect more and new market activity: changes in customer needs, motivations, and expectations; competitors trying harder to get new customers (yours) and secure the ones they have; new competitors coming along with ‘better’ models.
• Don’t try to “do everything”. Your plan will turn into a desperate wish list rather than a focused and executable plan.
• Allow enough time to prepare each activity properly and to align your resources accordingly. Aim for outstanding execution of every activity.
• When you assess results, don’t get caught in analysis paralysis.

If this is all too hard and confusing, get specialist help.

3. Execution Impact

1. Demonstrate your brand’s superior benefits

   If you do cannot identify or worse still, do not have a genuine competitive edge, you are wasting your time. Your brand power is far more than simply a list of product or service features: it comes from the whole brand experience.

   Make your brand superior from your market’s perspective. Fine-tune your product or service, your sales channels its order fulfillment processes, and your communications with your customers at every point of contact.

2. Talk the language of your audience
   Using their language helps your customers include your brand in their “comfort zone”, see it as worth following – on digital media like blogs, newsletters and social media channels, or in traditional channels such a print and mail-outs. They can believe that you care and that a dialogue is worthwhile. They are prepared to send feedback because they feel they will be heard, seek further information because they will understand and trust your brand.
Communicate Brand message consistently across all channels
3. Communicate for instant Impact
   Whether you have 1 minute for your elevator speech or 3 seconds for your web page to make an impression, your message needs laser sharp precision to grab and keep the attention of your audience and start a mutually beneficial relationship.

   Keep your message very simple and direct. All effective marketing communication works around 5 anchors:

   • Acknowledge your audience and their need(s)
   • Articulate your relevance i.e. how you help
   • Reassure with your credentials
   • Excite with customer-based proof of results
   • Engage through an immediate action call

   It can be done in 5 words, 5 sentences or many more. It can be articulated around multiple messages and media. The key is to ensure that it remains focused and tight.

4. Be consistent in what you do
   If you keep changing the brand story or forget to add chapters, how will your market understand, remember, trust, respect, desire your brand?

   Make sure everything you do generates the same positive brand image, often enough. If you raise expectations and you don’t live up to them, you are undoing what you have just achieved. That is brand damage you can’t afford. Your competitors will grab the opportunity and your market will leave you very quickly.

5. Be really Active and Visible to your target market
   When resources are scarce, spreading them thinly dilutes the power of your marketing program. Concentrate your efforts and hit with precision repeatedly. Some things that you should be doing include:
   • Keep your website active and interactive or it will lose relevance and become invisible.
   • Follow up immediately on networking contacts, or you’ll be forgotten or rejected.
   • Write regular newsletters or blogs. If the last one was 6 months ago, how do you expect to your brand to be seen as a valuable point of reference.

If you can’t do any of these things well, EITHER don’t do it all (doing nothing is less damaging than half-baked efforts) OR allocate budget for outsourcing these activities to a specialist.

Branding Is Vital For The Bottom Line In 2011

In this increasingly ‘noisy’ and competitive market, focused and clear thinking to create instant and lasting impact with the right customer is critical.

Your strategy starts with what you want to achieve and focuses on your ideal customer. Make conscious decisions about your brand and execute your strategies effectively in all your activities. Focus your resources on what matters most to ensure you stay ahead of your competitors.

If you don’t have the time or resources, get specialist help. Brand building is not an ‘optional extra’ for business success in 2011.