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The Beginner’s Guide to Performing a Brand Audit

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By Nicholas Morpus

The world today moves at a breakneck pace, so what worked for your brand one day might not work the next. A brand audit will give you the insights that you need to stay on top of your market demands.

hen Toyota created Scion, their brand position was to sell these cheaper and smaller vehicles to younger buyers. However, after a couple years into the brand’s lifespan, Toyota realized that their Scion vehicles were more sought after by older buyers despite the intentions of their marketing plan.

This was the perfect example for the need of a brand audit. Building a brand is difficult and will require many revisions as you learn more about your target audience. Obviously, you don’t want to needlessly spend money when it isn’t producing the results you were hoping for.

That’s just marketing 101. That’s why a brand audit will give you the opportunity to realign your branding and marketing tactics to where they’re most needed.

Overview: What is a brand audit?

Simply put, a brand audit is an in-depth look into your business’s current market position and effectiveness when juxtaposed against the competition. It is an evaluation of your efforts in the eyes of your audience for the purposes of pointing out shortcomings, inconsistencies, and gaps in your market strategy.

Should your small business perform a brand audit?

Yes. It doesn’t get any simpler than that. Even if your business is experiencing tons of success, there is always room for improvement. In fact, when you’re succeeding is a fantastic time to perform a brand analysis in order to ensure that you’re not getting comfortable while potential competitors are addressing new market demands.

If that hasn’t convinced you, here are three key benefits of performing a brand audit:

1. Discover flaws in your brand

A thorough brand audit is likely to turn up all sorts of inconsistencies and issues in market targeting that are affecting your sales, website conversions, page views, or any other metric of success you’re currently tracking.

At worst, your branding might be way off the mark, and at best, you’re only dealing with minor perception issues. Either way, a brand audit will bring these problems to your attention.

2. Pave the way for improvement

Once you understand a problem, it is much easier to contemplate a solution. Brand audits give you the opportunity to fix the issues that are dragging down the perception of your brand and provide you with honest feedback on what your target audience is looking for.

3. Provide insights for future development

Brand audits not only highlight pain points in your brand perception but also open the door for new ideas and developments in your business efforts. Perhaps the brand assessment will inspire a new product, service, or idea based on the feedback you received from your target audience.

How to perform a brand audit

Now that you understand the invaluable benefits of this process, here’s a simple five-step brand audit checklist to help walk you through the process.

Step 1: Conduct an audience survey

Starting out, this is where you’ll probably have to invest some money into auditing your brand. While some of the steps in this list require you to make some best-guess efforts to narrow your branding focus, an audience survey is the perfect way to get a direct insight into the mind of your market.

In order to net the best results, it’s best to hire an outside company to conduct market research for you.

Tips for conducting an audience survey

There is nothing more valuable in business than understanding your audience. Without these insights, you are running into the market blind and will inevitably waste tons of money and time. Here are a few tips for conducting an audience survey that’ll benefit your brand targeting efforts.

  • Know your target market: Surveys are only useful if they’re conducted on your target audience. If you’re looking to sell a product to customers in the United States between the ages of 22 and 45, then it does you no good to include Australian teenagers in the data pool.
  • Aim for a large sample group: Surveys are only useful when the group is large enough to eliminate the wide swinging results of potential outliers. Make sure your survey sample size is large enough to provide meaningful results.

Step 2: Audit your analytics

Google Analytics is an extremely powerful tool that you can use to understand your business website traffic once you know how to harness its full potential.

First off, your traffic analysis will give you an idea of which countries are most likely to visit your website, which sources are driving traffic to your website (Google searches, social media, etc.), and the quality of that traffic (are they converting?).

Tips for auditing your analytics

There are so many tips for using Google Analytics that I could write an entire guide on the subject. However, these are the two most important tips for getting the most out of your website marketing metrics while conducting a brand audit.

  • Take your bounce rate seriously: Sometimes it’s not your product or service but actually your website itself that’s causing the problem. Your bounce rate (the metric determined by those who visit your site and leave immediately) is affected by all kinds of factors. Make sure your page load times are quick, your landing pages are relevant, and your website content is compelling in order to combat high bounce rates.
  • The right market: Your website analytics will tell you where your traffic is coming from, including the geographic location of your traffic. If you’re seeing traffic spikes from countries you aren’t looking to market to, then there is obviously an issue you have to address. Traffic spikes are useless if it isn’t quality traffic from a source you hope to convert.

Step 3: Audit your social media

Not only is social media a godsend for small business marketing, it’s also treasure trove for consumer research. Performing a social media audit will give you an insight into not only your likes, shares, and referrals, but also audience insights such as age ranges and gender ratios.

This information will help you further narrow down where you should increase your efforts and where they are wasted.

If you’re interested in more information, you can read our detailed guide for auditing your social media accounts that’ll walk you through each step.

Tips for auditing your social media accounts

If this is your first time ever auditing your social media accounts, here are a few tips to help you smooth out the process.

  • Use an audit spreadsheet: Conducting a social media or brand audit isn’t a one-time deal, so it’s important to maintain a record of your progress. Here’s an audit spreadsheet template that’ll help you keep track of all of your social media marketing KPIs for comparisons during each regular audit session. This data will help you build out your future social media content calendar tailored to your audience insights.
  • Where to find the data: While it is possible to gather all of this information individually from each platform’s proprietary marketing analytics tools, for the sake of convenience, a social media management tool is perfect for tracking your metrics. In fact, some tools like Sprout Social or Hootsuite are capable of gathering data that Facebook or Twitter don’t usually track.

Step 4: Evaluate your competition

If your business is dealing with any direct competitors and you see them succeeding where you’re falling behind, it’s time to evaluate what they’re doing differently. The great thing about competition is that it not only incentives you to improve, but also opens the door to new ideas that you would’ve never thought of otherwise.

Tips for evaluating your competition

While you can hire a professional market intelligence expert to evaluate your competition, it’s entirely possible to learn quite a lot through some research of your own. Here are a couple tips to get you started.

  • Find the comparative advantage: Evaluate how your competition markets to their audience, how they treat their customers, what services they provide, and how their website functions. Try to find what they’re better at and make improvements based on those advantages.
  • Check their SEO: There are lots of analysis tools out there, like Brightedge, SEMRush, and Ahrefs, that analyze your competition for organic keywords. Use one of these tools to assess the SEO of your competitor’s website to see what keywords they are targeting and how to maximize your website content based on their actions.

Step 5: Make adjustments to your brand

Now that you understand all of the issues plaguing your brand, be it audience targeting, website function, customer service, or any combination of shortcomings, it’s time to take those lessons and make improvements.

But once you’ve made these improvements, your work isn’t over. It’s important for you to monitor these changes and take note of any fluctuations in business, web traffic, and customer response.

Tips for making adjustments

This step isn’t as simple as making the changes to your brand and forgetting them. Here are a couple tips for making the most of your efforts.

  • Consider running your potential changes through focus groups: You started off this process with consumer input, and it’s best to end it the same way. A focus group is the perfect way to get feedback on your changes and make the final tweaks before implementing your brand shift.
  • A/B test every change: Once you’ve made the adjustments, it’s important to A/B test all of your core metrics to see if there are any improvements to your business, website traffic, etc.

The Blueprint will help you get your branding and marketing on track

Success in business doesn’t begin and end with a comprehensive brand audit. There’s lots more you’ll have to do to ensure your marketing efforts are reaching the right audience, and we at The Blueprint want to help you supercharge your business.

By Nicholas Morpus

Sourced from the blueprint

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Confessions of an Automotive Chauvinist: A Look Back at Brand Loyalty

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By Frank Markus

My journey from GM to Ford to Chrysler and back again.

As a young car guy, I was raised an automotive chauvinist in a staunchly brand-loyal household. In those days whole families seemed to cleave to one manufacturer or another. Mopar folks never shopped “Found On Road Dead.” GM loyalists had so many brands to choose from they never needed to stray. AMC people felt everything else was either too big, powerful, fancy, or expensive. Of course, nobody bought “ferrin” cars.

Such brand loyalty is difficult to imagine today, when buyers’ automotive affections come up for grabs every time their lease expires or their odometer rolls past that magic sell-by number. Perhaps this intensified competition helped foster the high level of overall quality we enjoy today, but it has certainly kept marketing departments busy.

My family were GM folks. Mom’s uncle sold them in Wisconsin, and both sets of grandparents drove Buicks. We drove Chevys because that was the rung on GM’s price ladder we could reach. I came home from the hospital in a ’60 Bel Air two-door sedan that was soon traded for a new ’65 Impala fastback sport coupe, followed by a similar ’66 and a low-mileage formal ’68 Caprice custom coupe demo that dad bought at a cocktail party. Then in 1969 we bought a plain-Jane Townsman wagon, whose only “frills” were A/C, an AM radio, and a 350/Turbo-Hydramatic powertrain.

1957 Plymouth Suburban

That was the car that really imprinted on me. It was in that driver’s seat that I first assumed command of both the steering wheel and the pedals after 15 years of yearning, helping steer, and driving the wheels off my pedal cars. For a variety of reasons, Dad decided to hang on to that Townsman for 170,000 miles, so when I went off to college, I inherited an even dowdier, un-air-conditioned ’69 Chevy Brookwood wagon from Dad’s cousin.

Even though my Chevy chauvinism was well established by this point, the first two cars I purchased with my Oldsmobile dealership (minimum) wages were ’66 Mustangs. I bought them despite their Fordness because they were iconic pony cars.

But I came to resent their Fordness every time I went to fix something, so my next purchase returned me to the Chevy fold: a fully loaded 10-year-old ’73 Caprice Estate wagon. When its horrendously thirsty 454 threatened to bankrupt me, I swapped it for a Canyon Brown metallic VW Dasher diesel wagon (yes, its manual transmission made it the ultimate car-scribbler ride). I admired its parsimony, loathed its lethargy, and parted ways permanently with the VW brand when its engine failed at only 150,000 miles.

An instant and permanent chauvinism shift occurred for my whole family when I took a job with Lee Iacocca’s post-bailout New Chrysler Corporation in July 1985. During my six-year engineering career there, sweet new car discount deals and access to the lot where cream-puff low-mileage exec lease cars were sold on the cheap helped Dad drop GM like an expensive mistress.

1966 Mustang Coupe repair

In addition to purchasing my one and only brand-new car—a custom-ordered 1986 Dodge Lancer ES Turbo—my newfound Mopar loyalty led to purchases of two “Forward Look wagons”—a ’59 Dodge Custom Sierra and a ’57 Plymouth Custom Suburban—and the 1967 Sunbeam Alpine I still own. (That was a quasi-Chrysler, produced by the death rattling Rootes Group subsidiary.) These days I also own a super cute 1985 Chrysler Town & Country K-car wagon that takes me back to my 22-year-old pocket-protected post-grad heyday.

Our dads are our heroes. We grow up assuming their choices were all well-reasoned and rational. But looking back, I have to wonder whether Dad would have made the same choices had he rigorously cross-shopped the competition. A few years back I got the chance to answer that question by comparing the very cream of the Chevy and Ford wagon crop in a head-to-head retro comparo for the late, great Motor Trend Classic magazine.

In the Bow Tie corner was, hands-down, the coolest ’69 Chevy wagon extant: the GM Heritage Center’s Kingswood Estate, factory-equipped with the crazy-rare L72 solid-lifter 427 engine. Only a handful of the 546 L72s installed in full-size Chevys went in wagons, and most of those were specced as stripper drag racing specials. This one was fully decked out with nearly every available option, and for added nostalgic value, it boasted the same Dover White over blue color scheme of the family Townsman. Representing Ford was a top-of-the-line Country Squire, similarly equipped with nearly every option and a 429 big-block in Presidential Blue with a gold woven-vinyl interior.

I spent a glorious day driving the two cars back to back and an additional day and a half piloting the Ford. My hard-nosed journalistic conclusion: That year—and perhaps for years before and after—the Ford was objectively the better car. It soundly trounced my beloved Chevy in terms of ride comfort, interior noise levels, body rigidity, seat comfort, wagon features, ventilation, radio—everything but quarter-mile times.

Of course, childhood chauvinism dies hard when I’m trolling Bring-A-Trailer for ’69 big-block wagons …

Chrysler and Sunbeam

By Frank Markus

Sourced from Motortrend

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Email Marketing Strategies To Strengthen Your Internal Communications

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By Christina Crawley.

More than ever, teams need to be able to rely on digital tools and strategies to work together. As remote and geographically dispersed teams increase, the benefits of in-person collaboration need to find their place within the digital realm. Various combinations of tools support this approach; however, smart use of internal email marketing is key to keeping employees focused and informed so that they can do their jobs effectively.

Email marketing generally focuses on external audiences. It aims to encourage individuals to click, engage or buy. Its approaches are, however, still very much relevant for internal teams, both large and small.

As you look to either strengthen or launch your internal email outreach to your digital teams, here are a number of trusted approaches that you’ll want to be sure to include.

1. Create (and stick to) a schedule.

Employees can more easily retain info that they both recognize and expect in their inboxes. A companywide or teamwide update email that comes in unexpectedly may leave individuals confused as to how they are supposed to respond or move forward. Consistent, expected email updates provide structure and a sense of routine that they can quickly apply to their work.

Some updates may be more relevant, appreciated or acted upon than others, but their consistent frequency will make them far more likely to be applied to teams’ everyday work. Consistency creates habit, which then becomes part of your employees’ working routines.

2. Apply formatting and branding.

While it may seem like internal audiences don’t need branding and formatting, a visually clear structure goes a long way in getting employees’ attention and engagement. Your staff’s inboxes are just as packed with incoming mail as your external audiences’ are. Visual cues and flags allow your internal teams to effectively understand and scan what you are sending their way.

Deliberate formatting, from familiar subject lines to consistent body topic blocks, allows staff to quickly scan what they’ve received and pick out what applies to them. For teams that are waiting for a certain piece of information, or are focused on other emergencies, this formatting allows them to quickly grab what they need and move on.

Branding allows your staff to immediately recognize and differentiate email communications, such as a new staff announcement versus a product launch. It makes it easier to know what attention is expected of them, and how it affects what they are doing.

Email templates that incorporate branding and formatting for different types of messages can help your messages stand out from regular, nonformatted internal emails.

3. Personalize your content.

Whether you are communicating to thousands of employees worldwide or a small team locally, being aware of your audience segments and what you need from them helps to avoid your emails being ignored. Create content that is relevant to those who receive it. Otherwise, it risks being seen as unimportant and ignored.

Personalization ranges from individual departments to specific roles. For example, the length and detail of your content may be short when providing a brief companywide update on an issue, compared to a small team update on the same issue that dives deeper and includes tasks and action items. Calls to action (CTAs) that you lay out may also differ from one group to another — for example, including buttons and/or links to take action outside of email versus requesting a direct reply or follow-up discussion.

4. Create engagement and interaction.

Generally speaking, we know that if people engage directly with something (in this case, email content), they are more likely to remember it over time. Creating an intriguing or playful interaction opportunity within an internal email is an easy way to achieve this. Examples include launching a feedback poll, asking a trivia question connected to the issue you’re communicating, encouraging engagement with the company’s social media or sharing a relevant video to break up the act of simply reading.

Interaction with your internal emails not only helps employees to better retain the information you’re sending, but it also brings them closer to one another and creates opportunities for further collaboration and support. This is especially valuable when they don’t have the opportunity to connect in person.

5. Don’t spam your internal teams.

When developing an email strategy that engages teams and encourages employees to pay attention and take action, there is a real concern that too many internal emails can have a negative effect on productivity. The general rule of thumb is to focus on content that pertains directly to employees’ roles. If your emails are relevant to their working day, then they will be received as valuable and worth the time to read or scan.

Emails unrelated to employees’ work run the risk of being nothing more than distractions, which may negatively affect employees’ output. This is not to say that you shouldn’t be sending emails about upcoming social events and personal news, but be aware that those should be done at a minimum and/or in a way that avoids distracting or pulling them away from their work.

Looking Ahead

Email is an asynchronous form of communication, so your teams are able to engage with your email outreach when it makes the most sense for their workloads and schedules. As you launch and update your internal email strategy, pay close attention to the engagement data, and make tweaks and changes as necessary. What works today may not next year. The key is to provide consistent content that is essential in supporting your team’s success and productivity.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Christina Crawley

Director of Marketing at Forum One, leading global marketing and outreach to the world’s most influential nonprofits and foundations.

Sourced from Forbes Billionaire

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The head of marketing for a UK urban-gardening startup explains how strong brand recognition helps him grow his team

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By Dominick Reuter

  • A startup’s brand can be one of the most valuable assets for growing its team.
  • “People want to work for a cool, exciting company that they’ve heard of,” said Franky Athill, the head of marketing for Patch Plants, a popular urban gardening startup in London.
  • Athill was Patch’s fourth team member, and it has since added more than 40 others.
  • He shared his advice with Business Insider about two key things to remember when it’s time to add talent to your startup.
  • This article is part of a series on growing a small business, called “From 1 to 100.”

The search for talent presents a significant challenge for many startups, and the ability to recruit the best people is one of the most critical factors for success.

Startups with strong brand engagement can have an advantage in this respect by reaching a wider field of potential hires.

Franky Athill does exactly that as the head of marketing for Patch Plants, a popular London urban-gardening startup that he has helped grow from four to 45 team members since 2017.

The idea for Patch came about when founder Freddie Blackett was looking for a better way to keep his houseplants alive on the balcony of his girlfriend’s apartment, and he discovered that many other would-be green thumbs in the city shared the same frustration.

After Blackett spent a few years refining the idea in a startup incubator, Athill joined Patch as the fourth employee.

Up to that point, Athill’s career included stints with several other marketing outfits, most notably with famed fashion photographer Mario Testino, whose digital operation he set up and built to 2.8 million subscribers.

Athill spoke with Business Insider about how he uses his marketing channels as a recruiting tool to grow the Patch team.

Use your brand engagement to reach potential hires

Over the past three years, Athill has overseen the growth of the brand’s social reach to more than 200,000 Londoners. Over the same period, he said, daily sales have gone from just 10 to 1,000.

That pool of social followers is also where he has sourced the 40-plus new members of his team.

While a gardening startup may not have the glitz and glamour of a Testino photo shoot, Athill says Patch’s brand engagement is strong. After all, growing your team isn’t simply about finding more people, it’s about finding the right ones.

“That has helped us a huge amount because it means that we’ve been able to hire really good people through our own networks and through our own marketing channels.”

Generating engagement and excitement for your brand is vital for a startup, Athill says, and not only because it drives sales.

“Without it, it’s very hard to compete in the job space for the very best people,” he said. “They want to work for a cool, exciting company that they’ve heard of.”

It all comes down to a numbers game for Athill, who said that reaching a wider audience improves the odds that he will find a good fit to join the team.

Get help from a pro to filter your prospects

Once you’ve amassed a sizable applicant pool, Athill recommended that early-stage startups outsource the screening process to a recruiter as they grow beyond 10 people or so.

“A good recruiter can pay back their weight in gold,” he said. “Use your digital marketing skills and brand to fill a huge funnel [of applicants], and get [the recruiter] to assess that funnel.”

Having an independent perspective can help you save your energy and attention for the most promising candidates.

“Don’t let yourself get in a position where you’re going into interviews hoping that the person is great, because then you’ve left it too late, and now you’re under a lot of pressure to fill that seat,” Athill said.

And there can be a real cost to making a bad match, especially if one of the core leadership has to find a replacement for a new hire that didn’t work out.

“If one person is focused on hiring for a week, that’s a very big distraction. So I would avoid doing that,” Athill said.

By Dominick Reuter

Sourced from Business Insider

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Content-Link Alignment Drives Long-Term Engagement

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One of the largest national home warranty providers encountered a conundrum: how could they keep their audience interested and engaged between annual membership renewals? We aligned content and link strategy, to drive banner performance with staggering improvements in year-over-year traffic and engagement that drove brand awareness for new and existing users.

Insight 

A home warranty is purchased or renewed once per year, with the only other touchpoint being service claims. But customer loyalty and market expansion requires brand awareness — and search visibility requires continual traffic and engagement. Our task? Engage existing customers and appeal to prospective audiences year round.

Solution 

Our strategy empowered a trusted, authoritative brand position in the minds of its audience, the industry, and to Google’s algorithms. We developed a content strategy with blogs that answer homeowners’ burning questions, inspire them with DIY tips, solve their home maintenance problems, and inform them on home-related topics — all rooted in longtail keyword research. We supercharged this content with backlinks from high-quality sources, utilizing relevant anchor text.

Results

Thanks to its keyword relevancy and backlink-boosted authority, this content ranked for a numerous variety of longtail and traditional search queries that drove traffic to the blog. And users found tons of value, too, staying on the pages longer. In comparing performance from March 2019-March 2020 to the previous year, we drove organic search performance to increase brand engagement and reach.

25% Improvement in blog traffic, driving more users to the brand

27s Additional time on page, with averages rising to 4 minutes, 58 seconds

26% More entrances to the domain via the blog

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Sourced from digital current

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Need to reinvent a beloved brand? 9 important steps to take

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By Ad Age Collective Expert Panel.

No matter how well-established a brand is, there may come a time when it needs to reinvent itself. Whether the company is working to keep up with modern sentiments or reach a new target demographic, the process of reinvention should be carefully considered and implemented. Otherwise, you may end up alienating the very customers who built your brand in the first place.

To help businesses that are considering a rebrand, we turned to the experts of Ad Age Collective for their insights. Below, they share nine steps a company should consider when reinventing a well-known brand.

1. Leverage your historical emotional insights.

When brands need to reimagine their future, it is important to understand why customers had an emotional connection to the brand in the past. Leveraging that emotional insight to refresh the branding and marketing around a product in a new light is often where you can start. – Kristen Anna Roeckle, Concentric Health Experience

2. Conduct research and reinvent based on data.

Reinventing a well-established brand doesn’t mean starting from scratch. Be sure to conduct research with your customers to find out what they currently think of your brand. What parts of your brand are still relevant? What parts need to go? What do customers believe you can credibly stand for? Use a fact-based approach to create a refreshed brand that audiences will connect with. – Aaron Hall, Siegel+Gale

3. Involve your existing fans and employees.

Reinvention can be exciting, but for some it means changing the brand they have come to know and love. Avid fans and employees should be considered in any reinvention plan. How do you ensure continuity and inclusion for this passionate base? Involve them early and bring them along for the ride. This will ensure they are not left behind and remain ambassadors for the new brand. – Maggie O’Neill, Peppercomm

4. Expand the audience, but don’t alienate the core.

We are frequently tasked with repositioning a well-established brand to reach a younger demographic. An important step in this process is to consider options for a reinvention that avoid alienating the existing core consumer. For a brand that has established equity, new strategies should expand brand relevance to a younger audience, not leave long-time brand fans behind. – Issa Sawabini, Fuse

5. Test your strategies first.

When reinventing your brand, it’s vital to test the changes you’re going to make. Make sure that you do your research and test your new brand image with a small group of your core audience. Continuous testing and getting feedback will ensure that you don’t alienate your core audience. It will also help you make changes in the right direction. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner

6. Go back to your ‘why.’

Brands often need to reinvent themselves because they either lost their way or their momentum fizzled. They probably lost their way because they lost their “why.” Or, they lost their momentum because they lost their drive. If companies can retrace their steps to remember why they started the business in the first place, they can inspire new direction or refill the tank with passion. – Reid Carr, Red Door Interactive

7. Make sure you have a clear path to engage new customers at scale.

Ask 20 adults to rewrite history or direct a do-over and what’s the response? No one chooses a gradual approach. Huge success scenarios with visions of landmark breakthroughs are voiced. This also applies to brands reinventing. Pursue outsized results by driving trials with solely new prospects. Proceed only if a path to engage new customers at scale is evident. If not, why reinvent? – Sean Cunningham, VAB

8. Stay true to the core brand.

Staying true to the core elements of a brand that have stood the test of time with the consumer should not be undervalued. A brand can do a face-lift by updating color scheme, images, messages and even refocus themes, but this should not deter dramatically from its brand equity and the value it spent building over time. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne Advertising

9. Have fun and give the keys to your new brand ambassadors.

Classic brands like Converse and MINI really set the pace in terms of giving the keys to the brand to their customers. They didn’t necessarily need to reinvent themselves. But by allowing their customers to collaborate and use digital tools to “design their own Chucks” or “dream cars,”  they got crucial brand insights while appealing to modern shoppers. What they did is now common. – Lana McGilvray, Purpose Worldwide

By Ad Age Collective Expert Panel.

Sourced from Ad Age

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A smart branding strategy during lockdown

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By Solly Moeng.

While many of the countries around the world who are currently in coronavirus lockdown, try to figure out the right balance between fighting the spread of this deadly virus and the right time, and approach, to restart their economic engines, professionals in brand communications are faced with a conundrum of their own.

We should feel their frustration because theirs, too, is a choice they must make between pushing product and service, on one hand, and communicating the work their brands are doing, ‘playing their part’ – with no obvious profit motive (wink wink!) – to help curb the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Must they remain in hibernation – not seen nor heard (in case they might say the wrong things that might come back to haunt them) – until the coronavirus has passed and the dust settled? Must they go for a tandem of pushing product and service in some messages, and their brand’s community outreach initiatives in others? Must they overlay their communication with messages demonstrating their brand’s social conscience? Must they simply ditch all pure brand communications during this time and focus on ‘playing their part’ and demonstrating the extent of their brand’s corporate citizenship, and heart, with the hope that that is the approach that will ensure memories of their brand’s social conscience remain top of mind when the dust has settled?

And, for those who are in a hurry to start pure brand communication campaigns, when will the right time be for this? Just before the lifting of the lockdown, or just after? This is assuming, of course, that brand communicators are also taking this time to assess and understand the possible ramifications of this lockdown, and the ‘new economy’ currently being shaped right before our eyes, on their old ways of communicating their brands’ messages.

By the look of things, it will no longer be entirely ‘business as usual’. The lockdown is helping many consumers around the world open their eyes to goods and services they really do not need that they had been conditioned over time – often thanks to great, even invasive and manipulative, marketing messages – to believe they needed.

Are brand communicators thinking about all of this and working hard, behind-the-scenes, on new approaches to authentic, less manipulative, multimedia brand communications with a heightened social conscience and a reloaded online focus?

What smart brands are doing during lockdown

All around the world, smart corporate (and person) brands have found impactful ways to remain in the minds of their customers, followers, and markets by leveraging their good names without pushing traditional offerings.

Now, Giorgio Armani makes aprons for doctors; Gucci designs face marks; Ferrari develops much-needed medical respirators; several airlines have turned their planes into cargo transporters for Protective Personal Equipment (PPE) and other emergency supplies; DHL is using its planes to provide the same kind of assistance.

A number of celebrities (e.g. Dolly Parton, Trevor Noah, Lupita Nyong’o and many others) have joined a program to read bedtime story books to children through an online platform that is being replicated by A-listers around the world, including South Africa. Tattoo artists have given away their gloves and protective gear to healthcare providers; many known and less known artists have taken to providing free online entertainment to help keep the spirits high and to underline the importance of community and social connections in the face of forced physical distancing. Free, globally accessible online libraries have sprung up to also mitigate growing levels of boredom and difficult access to books in some communities.

The list of efforts by private individuals who have come up with innovative ways to help elderly neighbours, or those with other health problems, is growing every passing day. Even trained dogs and drones are being used to deliver groceries and medical supplies to people trapped in their homes by age and other forms of infirmities.

Be discerning

With all of this happening – and the whole world is focused on the need to reach out across traditional divides of political, ethnic, religious and geographic frontiers in its battle against a common, invisible, and deadly enemy – it must be hard for brand communicators with one eye on products that are not moving, stuck on shelves and in storage facilities under lockdown, to determine the right moves to make without being seen to be too opportunistic, politically incorrect, or socially insensitive.

The brands mentioned above, those who have turned to manufacturing and supplying Covid-19 related goods and services, as well as providing other forms of community outreach, have got it right on two grounds.

A fine ‘covinundrum’

First, they will remain top of mind, visible, in the minds of their stakeholders during a time when it seems insensitive to be pushing traditional products and service, as well as appearing to be out to draw financial benefit from consumers who seem only concerned with surviving the deadly virus and an uncertain economic future; many of them worried about their battered livelihoods. Secondly, they stand a good chance of being remembered for having been there when the world needed them the most. Their brand equity will certainly come out having been positively boosted, cushioning them with generous levels of consumer goodwill and market standing. They must simply be smart, strategically measured, in how they use these benefits when the lockdowns get lifted and a semblance of normalcy returns, ushering with them the new economy; else they too might find themselves on the backfoot, with good reason.

No doubt, the lockdowns around the world present traditional brand communicators with a fine “covinundrum” to deal with. But only those who would have had their ears on the ground and their eyes on new media consumption patterns during this period – and managed to align their approaches to fast changing consumer preferences and sentiments – will seamlessly integrate the new economy.

It will be a different world when the dust finally settles; and opportunities will be plenty for those who can spot them and use them for shared, long-term gains instead of narrow, short-term profit.

By Solly Moeng

* Solly Moeng is brand reputation management adviser and CEO of strategic corporate communications consultancy DonValley Reputation Managers. Views expressed are his own.

Sourced from fin24

 

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3 Ways To Build A Stronger Personal Brand On Social Media

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By William Arruda

Social media can be pretty intimidating for some people—especially those who tend to shun the spotlight and avoid self-promotion. That being said, there’s no denying that social platforms can and do allow individuals to build personal brands that afford them greater professional opportunities.

Having a robust social media presence is an asset to your long-term career growth. In a survey by recruitment platform Tallo, 87% of Gen Z respondents saw the career significance of online personal branding. These competitive young workers and employees-to-be are making it imperative for candidates of any age to up their personal branding game online.

No matter what career stage you’re in, you can use social media to your advantage to improve your personal brand. Here are three strategies that will help.

1. Look beyond LinkedIn

Most people assume that when it comes to career growth, the only social media platform worth spending time on is LinkedIn. This is a myth. While anyone who knows me has heard me tout LinkedIn as a crucial starting point (with over half a billion users worldwide!) there is real power in supplementing it—as long as your image and messaging remain consistent across all platforms and your goals are tailored to what each one does best. For instance, LinkedIn is indeed essential for delivering your digital first impression and expanding your professional network, but Twitter is ideal for sharing content you’ve published and starting a discussion. Should you have a professional presence on every major social platform? It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Brian Freeman, CEO and founder of microinfluencer platform Heartbeat, believes it’s a mistake to overlook newer, trendy platforms like TikTok if you want to bulk up your audience. “TikTok makes it easier than any other platform to go viral and gain a new following, then pass that following on to other social media platforms where you have a presence,” he says. “Whether it’s Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, or YouTube, you can go viral on TikTok and gain thousands of new followers on a second platform at the same time.” Most social media users are active on multiple platforms. When someone decides to follow you on one, follow them back—and then follow them on a different app to win their views across social.

2. Publicize your expertise

“Thought leadership” is a term often used in the content marketing world to describe content produced by company executives aiming to position themselves as experts in an industry or topic area. It can take myriad forms, but its goal is always to reinforce the credibility of the brands (personal and corporate) that produce and byline it—and it’s typically quite effective. Good news: It can work for you, too.

While publicists pitch the media, asking journalists to write about their clients, thought leadership lets you become the author of that coverage, not just by publishing your content in traditional outlets but also by publishing it through social media. If you’re an expert at something, let the world know by sharing your knowledge and ideas. Speaking at conferences, serving on boards and interacting with journalists and other influencers in your field of expertise will of course allow you to learn from and teach others, and it will also get you acquainted with people who might be able to help you achieve personal and professional goals. But taking a proactive approach to sharing your expertise on social media shows the world that you’re open to professional interaction and eager to answer questions. Engage in group discussions, provide thoughtful commentary on relevant posts and make an effort to introduce others to helpful resources, and you’ll be surprised by the opportunities that come your way.

3. Advocate for your organization

You’re serious about your career, so you want to be taken seriously—whether that’s at your current company or at the one you aspire to join. Your social accounts, when consistently and professionally branded, provide a platform for your company or college to get some free PR, which can help with both sales and recruiting on their end. Plus, by painting your colleagues and cohorts in a positive light, you’ll cement your image as a team player who cares about your organization’s future. That’s something every employer wants to see.

Doug Wilber, CEO of Gremlin Social, a social media solution for banks, understands the power of social selling (branded content posted on employee accounts). “When employees share their positive work experience on their personal accounts, they become powerful recruiting tools that can draw in potential candidates and increase employee retention,” he says. In turn, employees also benefit from brand advocacy. When you have a credible personal brand online, your words carry more weight with potential customers and other external contacts, meaning you’ll likely have more success in your day-to-day role.

Social media scrolling doesn’t have to be mindless or unproductive. In fact, social platforms give you a way to create and seize opportunities that would have been off-limits just a decade ago. Start with the three strategies above, and you’ll be amazed to see how far your personal brand can reach.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By William Arruda

William Arruda is the cofounder of CareerBlast and author of Digital YOU: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age.

Sourced from Forbes Billionaires

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Brands are finding more ways to reuse creative assets without being repetitive

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Sourced from DIGIDAY.

Faced with the complexity of today’s digital landscape, marketers are caught in a vicious cycle of low campaign volume, costly production rounds, endless revisions and missed advertising opportunities.

Why did things become so difficult? It’s a combination of antiquated (and often manual) ways of producing content combined with budget restrictions. Brands need more content than ever but they are struggling to meet demands around volume, scale, speed and high-quality output.

This phenomenon can be thought of as a type of content gap, in this case an internal production delta between the amount of content brands need to market and message to consumers and the resources they possess to produce and scale it — and it’s growing greater by the day. According to a Forrester report commissioned by Celtra, 70 percent of brands are already devoting more time to content creation for their campaigns than they would prefer; and for many the content production gap can’t be solved by merely throwing more money or hours at the problem.

So, what does this gap mean for marketers? How can they bridge it? Below are four common symptoms of the content production gap and how marketing teams can fix it.

1. Content output is too low (and the team needs more capacity)

While digital has given brands unparalleled opportunities to deliver personalized messages across platforms, many marketing teams lack the bandwidth to cover all of the ground those opportunities now represent. As a result, brands are failing to deliver against their media and messaging strategy.

Digital advertising goals are nearly impossible to achieve without tactics that can speed up production. For example, according to the Celtra Data Insights team, reusing assets by templatizing creative, rather than creating all of the variations manually, saves 75–80 percent on production time. By introducing automation and separating content from design, teams can design a strong asset and then scale it across numerous variations.

2. It’s difficult to produce excellent creative in the time available

The average person is served more than 1,700 digital ads per month. A marketing team’s signal drowns in all that noise unless it can generate creative that helps their brands stand out. However, when there’s a scant amount of time for getting campaigns out the door, creative quality almost inevitably takes a hit.

There’s another challenging piece here too: creative consistency. Design, quality and cohesive branding are necessary to maintain this factor across all markets, all the time. Off-brand — or worse, off-putting — content will have an impact on a brand’s bottom line. Conversely, according to a Harvard Business Review report, consistent branding across all platforms increases revenue by up to 23 percent. Similarly, and also from the Harvard Business Review: “A euro invested in a highly creative ad campaign had, on average, nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a non-creative campaign.”

When scaling campaigns and content, maintaining true consistency and high-quality creative can be taxing. What can help bridge this part of the content production gap is to look for automated solutions that give teams margins to generate new creative that cuts through noise, all the while controlling for human error, and ensuring that elements like text, style and translations are laddering up. If automation isn’t an option in-house, then the team should look to partnerships that can add technology to the mix.

3. Advertising opportunities are slipping away

Ideally, top-performing marketing teams should take an agile approach where they can test, learn and iterate on creative continuously. In practice though, most are busy just trying to deliver the basics for their media teams and agencies. In those cases, the shortage of content leads to missed opportunities. Marketers end up lacking the capacity to launch campaigns fast enough or try out new concepts.

Again, technology can help, allowing the team to manage the technical side of production easier and faster while granting full visibility onto each campaign asset. When the team isn’t preoccupied with repetitive tasks — when they can cut steps and time spent on feedback rounds, for example, identifying real-time toolsets for editing, commenting and previewing content —  they can better focus on inventive and engaging content.

4. Your creative is too generic

According to Marketo, 63 percent of respondents are highly annoyed by the way brands continue to rely on the old-fashioned strategy of repeatedly blasting mass messages. Even when a marketing team is satisfied with content volume and creative quality, it still needs to ensure that its ads and messaging include the level of relevancy that consumers expect.

Most companies are well-aware that this is an area in which they can always seek improvement. According to the Forrester study that Celtra commissioned, 61 percent of organizations reported that improving creative relevancy is their organization’s digital advertising creative goal over the next year. However, the more personalization marketing teams add, the more variations those advertisers will need to create to keep up with that strategy.

Marketers are shifting their focus from improving longer-standing content production methods towards developing new ones entirely. New technology doesn’t just facilitate digital advertising; it establishes a new process overall, one that offers unparalleled production speed. Again, adding technology and strong tech partnerships into these efforts means opening wider margins for creativity and context-rich tactics. Software and platforms have become primary tools that help marketers bridge their content production gaps, empowering them to deliver at the speed of media.

Sourced from DIGIDAY

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