Branding: Strategic, Authentic, Understood, Valuable and Bought
Most brands fall short of complete integrity. How about yours?
My company brand could benefit from a little listening, introspection and fine-tuning after 8 years of continued growth in the market.
Our brand made one significant shift from “great copywriting” to “content-focused marketing services” about 3 years after start-up. Now it’s time to realign our core strengths and value delivery with a consistently focused message strategy that includes provable, relevant differentiation. The work is very exciting!
Where does a brand strategy start?
Core strengths, core values and delivery track record should be at the heart of your branding strategy. Putting that realness about your people and products into the right words, images and sounds is what effective branding is all about.
Authentic brands are respected, believed and bought.
Start with the demonstrable. How true and accurate are your brand statements and marketing content when compared with what your clients experience in your deliverables?
You and your team, like any other group, know what you’re good at and not so good at. Stick to the “good at” or better yet, “the insanely good at” when differentiating your brand and building consistency into your ad and web content.
We suggest spending focused time, several hours or more, on writing an honest and clear positioning statement for the benefit of your customers and your entire target audience. There are some really great positioning exercises and writing formulas available. We help many of our clients with this vital exercise and the results speak for themselves in business growth.
4 Part Marketing Communication Strategy
I strongly recommend establishing an authentic brand identity prior to implementing any significant marketing campaign. Starting from there, the most basic way to assure that your marketing communications have a high degree of success is to use a proven 4-step process.
If you’ve done a thorough job on your branding strategy, then implementing this formula is much easier and works much better!
- Identify your target customers narrowly. These are people with money already in their budget, either now or in the future, for the kind of things you provide.
- Determine the best channels (media, salespeople, events) to reach them.
- Plainly state how you give them a better life and show evidence – visual evidence and testimonials.
- Show how to get it easily – buy now, try it free or learn how it works.
The best performing e-Commerce websites follow this formula consistently because 
it works! We all know why. It’s the age-old value proposition followed by the call-to-action laid out simply!
Somehow, we tend to complicate our messages by adding extra stuff we want to “be sure to include.” Being marketing savvy does not always include being thorough. Too much content injects potential distractions, pauses and stumbling blocks to purchases.
Keep it simple and provide clear, smooth, short pathways to buy your products. It’s what our customers want! Isn’t that what you want?
