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The Beginner’s Guide to Performing a Brand Audit

April 29, 2020 No Comments

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

In News

Email Marketing Strategies To Strengthen Your Internal Communications

April 28, 2020 No Comments

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

In News

How to Convert Someone to Your Cause in 5 Simple Steps

April 16, 2020 No Comments

By David Meltzer

Phillip Stutts discusses the branding and marketing lessons he’s learned from working in politics for the past two decades.

Phillip Stutts, founder of Go Big Media and Win Big Media and author of Fire Them Now, shares his thoughts on why the five-step process for branding a politician is the exact same as branding a person, product or service in any other industry. He also shares why customer data is so essential when putting together an impactful advertising campaign.

Stutts and The Playbook host David Meltzer chat about the importance of testing your advertisements before launching a campaign, why businesses should operate with a giving and abundant approach and why they believe in giving prospective clients a free assessment in order to get alignment.

By David Meltzer

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

In News

Branding is dead, CX design is king

January 3, 2020 No Comments

By Micah Bowers.

The days of crafting brands without incorporating a CX design mindset are drawing to a close.

One of the hardest things about design is keeping track of the terminology. There are many words to learn, and definitions frequently overlap. But don’t think for a moment that any two terms mean the exact same thing. Distinctions abound. Abbreviations matter.

So it is with user experience and customer experience design, or UX vs. CX. The two disciplines are so closely related, their differences so murky, that they are sometimes used interchangeably.

Originally, the UX umbrella was meant to cover every facet of an individual’s interplay with a company, but our distinctly digital age complicated things. UX is now associated with the quality of interactions between a user and a digital product, and CX design has come to encompass all the other encounters that a person has with a business.

All other encounters—the scope is enormous.

Today, UX designers typically focus on a series of goal-driven tasks and the overall quality of interactions; for instance, “How can we improve mobile navigation so people can find things more easily?”

To create cohesive experiences, UX designers must also be aware of the ways in which their work impacts existing features. “Does changing our navigation improve discoverability and speed up our purchasing process (or increase our conversion rates)?”

Zoom in with UX. Zoom out with CX. It’s a natural pairing.

But what about other design disciplines? How do they fit into the CX design equation? More specifically, what impact does brand design have on the customer experience? At the very least, it seems like brand designers ought to be aware of all the ways in which their clients interact with customers.

Avoid a myopic brand

Brand designers have an uncanny ability to pinpoint the attributes that make companies special.

What do they do best?
How are they different than the competition?
Why should anyone care?

With these insights in hand, brand designers unify the most essential truths into a promise between company and customer.

This promise, the brand promise, has few words but permeates every aspect of a company’s activities. It names a common goal and inspires everyone involved to move with a shared sense of mission.

But, a brand promise can be restrictive—especially when a brand designer doesn’t appreciate the full scope of a company’s touchpoints (aka any interaction that has the potential to change a customer’s feelings toward a business). For example, a design team lands a contract with a grocery chain and goes all-in on a strategy that makes digital interactions top priority. They define a compelling brand promise and outline a companywide mindset that emphasizes high-quality digital tools and content. Unfortunately, the team doesn’t give the same level of care to the grocer’s brick-and-mortar experience, and they fail to develop a plan to infuse in-store interactions with the updated brand sentiments. A crucial aspect of CX design and customer engagement has been ignored. With time, customers grow frustrated because the glossy rebrand they encounter online doesn’t translate to the real world. In-person interactions with the grocery chain didn’t become markedly worse, but they feel slow and dated in contrast to the lofty expectations set by the rebrand.

CX apathy causes irrelevant brand collateral

Visual identity design builds on brand design. A brand promise is the foundation, brand values are the frame, and the elements within a visual identity are the fixtures and finishing touches. They embody the most important aspects of the brand in visual form and serve as aesthetic benchmarks for a host of promotional collateral.

Chobani’s visual identity was designed so that the brand, despite being a household name, would be perceived as a small, humble craft company (like its early days). [Image: courtesy Toptal]

To create an effective visual identity, it’s crucial that a brand designer have big-picture knowledge of a company’s customer journey—all the ways customers interact with the company and perform tasks over time. Why is this so important? Designing promotional collateral for brand channels isn’t like creating a responsive interface for different screen sizes. It’s not enough to recycle and resize the same design elements over and over. Every channel has unique constraints and content demands. Time, scale, distance, environmental distractions, and user expectations are just a few factors that come into play. It’s not necessarily the brand designer’s job to create promotional collateral, but it is their job to design a visual identity that is adaptable to multiple scenarios. Let’s expand on our example from earlier—the brand team that goes all-in on digital.While building out the grocery chain’s visual identity, the brand team decides to outline a set of photography guidelines that will give the grocer a more intimate and human feel. The intentions of the team are good: They want to cultivate a more relatable web and social presence by showing happy people enjoying the grocer’s goods.But the human-centric photos don’t account for the chain’s past success promoting products out of home—where ads must be interpreted in the blink of an eye. When a new set of billboards, bus wraps, and kiosks are designed following the brand team’s guidelines, they are visually attractive, but the photos of smiling people don’t fully communicate the deals the grocer is offering. The ads fail to grab the attention of motorists and pedestrians, and the campaign fizzles.

Brand designer keys to omni-channel awareness

Brand channels are unique and evolving

Every channel that a company uses to communicate with customers has its own idiosyncrasies. What works on one channel isn’t guaranteed to work on another.

Some channels are structured for highly personalized interactions—others less so. One channel may be geared toward in-depth videos while another is known for short audio clips.

Channels aren’t static either. Features, popularity, and demographics are always in flux. Just when everyone thinks they have a handle on “where users are spending their time,” a new channel emerges and disrupts everything.

The paradigm can’t be controlled. Flexibility is paramount.

There’s no way to dominate every channel. Fit is crucial.

Consistency is the lifeblood of engagement

Engagement measures a customer’s feeling of relationship with a product or company. Feelings and relationships may be fickle, but they thrive on consistency.

The takeaway for brand designers? Consistency encompasses more than visual design decisions like logo placement and color use. Every touchpoint makes an impression. Every interaction impacts perception. No part of the customer’s journey is inconsequential or dismissible.

The customer experience is interconnected

Customer experience design is a web of interconnected interactions. Touchpoints don’t exist independently of one another. They’re all part of the same story, all linked to a brand’s core promise.

A purchasing experience on mobile doesn’t end. It extends into unboxing, setup, and regular use. It continues through ad campaigns and customer support. It endures on social media. Finally, it breathes new life with the choice to make, or not make, another purchase.

Click here for a larger version. [Image: courtesy Toptal]

CX strengthens brand relevance

Branding is dead? Hardly. It’s stronger than ever, but that doesn’t change the fact that a crummy interaction completely undermines even the most inspiring brand promise. Can brand designers control what happens at every touchpoint? No, but they can design brands that are disconnected from reality—brands that make big promises but don’t deliver when it counts. When such a disconnect exists, customers tend to look elsewhere.

Branding isn’t dead, but the days of crafting brands without incorporating a CX design mindset are drawing to a close.

Feature Image Credit: Toptal

By Micah Bowers.

Micah Bowers is a senior designer at Toptal. Follow him on LinkedIn and Dribbble. This article was originally published on the Toptal Design Blog.

Sourced from FastCompany

In News

Instagram Stories Branding: Marketing That Benefits Your Business

November 28, 2019 No Comments

By Michael Stelzner

Are you using Instagram Stories to its fullest potential? Want to make your stories more consistent and engaging?

To explore how to use Instagram Stories for your brand, I interview Sue B. Zimmerman on the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

Sue is an Instagram marketing expert and author of The Instagram Strategy Guide. Her online course is called Ready, Set, Gram.

You’ll find tips and techniques for using Instagram Stories to help your business stand out, and discover how to use the new Create features that just dropped.

Click HERE for the remainder of the article.

By Michael Stelzner

Sourced from Social Media Examiner

In News

5 Questions to Ask Before Your Brand Takes On the Industry Challenger

November 19, 2019 No Comments

By Chris Lowery

Startups take risks, something all organizations should do

Today, large CPG brands are feeling even greater pressure in an expanding world of new go-to market strategies. Subscription services, ecommerce “anti-brands” and sustainability-driven challengers are changing the paradigm of how people shop and consume.

Brands like Hims have linked a suite of products to address top-of-mind men’s issues such as hair loss, erectile dysfunction and anxiety. The online subscription model offers a discreet (no face-to-face medical consults) and holistic solution for guys that otherwise might not seek help through normal channels.

Truman’s combines both a subscription and sustainability model to deliver mix it yourself nontoxic cleaning supplies to your door. The reusable spray bottles and small refill cylinders make shipping and storage easy.

These are two of many current startup examples. They challenge key assumptions of how products are formulated, how they work and how they’re delivered to consumers. To win against these anti-brands, marketers need to learn to take risks like a startup.

For many startups, the irony is that they are risking everything including savings, homes and the investment of close associates and family. This is not simply a professional risk from which to rebound from, but also a risk to current life and future.

So how do they find the resolve to take risks? By understanding the risk, defining the potential return, outlining the strategies to mitigate and communicating all of this clearly to internal and external stakeholders.

To win against these anti-brands, marketers need to learn to take risks like a startup.

Here are five fundamental questions that need to be answered to help you get ahead of the conversation, assess risk and build a solid case to leverage with internal/external stakeholders while putting your own mind at ease.

How certain are you that the consumer wants the product?

If you think you’ve identified a clear missing need in the marketplace, have you done the simple task of talking to potential consumers about a product that solves this need? As simple as that sounds, many teams haven’t, and a series of short conversations can not only help you confirm that need but may help you sharpen your product offering.

Can you link your innovation efforts to a parallel success in a different category?

Perhaps your product is a new enough proposition that it is difficult for consumers to understand. Can you identify something in a different category where the leap has been made and reapply some of the thinking? For instance, protein first hit shelves in the snack bar category for consumers that were using bars as a no-prep source of protein for fitness routines. Recently, marketers saw the behavior of these products being incorporated into less rigorous lifestyles and began to bring protein into juices, cereals and even coffee creamers. It was a logical reapplication to adjacent breakfast choices.

What needs to be true for product success (quality, efficacy, flavor, credentialing, price point, etc.)?

Every category has a shopper decision tree, which is the sequence of choices a shopper works through to find the product for them before they choose and buy. Identify this for your product. Once the key “Who am I?” “What am I?” questions are answered, what is the differentiating aspect of your product that communicates why it’s right for that consumer.

For some food categories this is nutritional credentialing, for others it’s simply a flavor choice. Be clear on what that is for your product before you start to create the packaging or develop supporting communication. This will also be a key part of your customer sales story.

What is the minimum level of confirmation you need to launch?

If your launch is national, does it start with test markets in partnership with a key retailer? If not, what is the minimum data set you need for launch confirmation? This can be as narrow as multi-city qualitative with 40–60 consumers if your confidence in the product is high, or as expansive as a full quantitative with thousands of respondents. A research professional can help you understand the right level of clarity and the costs involved.

How quickly can you course-correct based on market response?

This is something most large CPG companies don’t like to think about but that almost all entrepreneurial enterprises expect to do. Quick adjustments based on real market response and customer feedback is crucial. Not only are you honing your proposition in the real environment where it lives, but you are building a stronger relationship with your customer by working together for success. Plan for a measure and adjust milestone after launch, price point, support and even design if necessary. Perhaps you won’t need it, but if you don’t, the conversation is a happy one to have both internally and externally.

In the end, willingness to risk is very personal and tolerance for risk within organizations is a difficult thing to change. Assessing your proposition carefully by using the questions above is a good start to building a strong plan for launch, support and (if needed) adjustment.

Feature Image Credit: Tolerance for risk within organizations is a difficult thing to change. Getty Images

By Chris Lowery

Chris Lowery is president and CEO of Chase Design Group.

Sourced from ADWEEK

In News

Connecting the Dots Between Product and Branding

November 15, 2019 No Comments

By Douglas Montague

How rethinking brand expression influenced Microsoft products and vice versa

Imagine a sheet of paper with a couple dozen tiny dots spread out on it. Their placement doesn’t seem random. You can sort of make out a shape, but there’s no obvious way they go together.

Now imagine a sheet with identical tiny dots, only each one is numbered. The dots may still look like a jumble, but the numbers indicate how they link together. You draw a line from one to two, two to three, and so on. Oh look, you’ve drawn a seal balancing a beach ball on its nose! Gold star.

Working for a big company sometimes feels like staring at thousands of dots and having little idea how to connect them. I’ve been with Microsoft since 1995, but I don’t think I understood how these dots could work together until 2015.

That’s when we changed our marketing strategy. Before, the product design team would build and design the experiences, and the marketing team layered a brand identity on top to sell it. With the 2015 change, branding was no longer a “layer” of marketing disconnected from the product experience. Instead, branding became directly tied to and influenced by the product. And maybe, just maybe, the brand could influence the product in return.

In the heavily siloed world of giant corporations, that was practically crazy talk.

One dot at a time

Simplicity became our mission. We first needed to build brand principles and the brand story (in other words, why we exist in the world). Then, we’d figure out how the principles and story inform the product experience. We theorized that connecting experience and expression among product, brand identity, and marketing, and extrapolating those principles into meaningful guidance across the company, would create a better experience for customers.

Numbers started to appear next to those scattered dots staring me in the face. The trick was getting other people to see them, too.

To show people the value of brand creative teams in marketing, we needed to have a lot more conversations with product design. First, we needed to understand what they were building and where they were headed. Second, we needed to create a visual identity closely tied to the product’s visual language, which a worldwide marketing organization could later implement.

Easy enough, right?

Thankfully, our senior leadership encourages us to work together for the greater good of the company, pushing away our own egos as much as possible to bring success to all. We call this One Microsoft. Particularly in our area, acting as One Microsoft is a necessity: we have a tiny creative team and can’t succeed without the assistance of other great creatives, so we need to understand each other’s business and create together. When it works, it’s magical.

Case study: transforming Microsoft Office

Rebranding Office was one such magical example. For the first time, we looked to product teams for cues to lift the brand identity and create simple, scalable guidance. We worked directly with product design, an approach that we’d take later with Azure and HoloLens 2.

Our approach had five steps:

Create the brand story working across brand strategy, engineering, and marketing, including a deep dive into product design principles and future principles.
Conduct an end-to-end visual audit of the entire customer journey.
Identify visual patterns and cues from the product, and from the parent Microsoft brand, to create a visual identity for the brand expression.
Build creative principles and theories around color, illustration, typography, and photography, then stress test across all communication touchpoints in the marketing funnel.
Create a simple design system that designers could scale worldwide without much creative oversight.

Three large black boards with print outs of the current Office branding. — Boards from one of the many visual audits done in 2016 for Microsoft Office.

Our audit concluded that Office needed a more sophisticated yet simplified visual identity connecting our product experience and marketing communications. The marketing teams were doing their best; they followed the Microsoft brand guide for reference, but the broadness of the guide and visual system made it difficult to implement. We pared down the brand system in the name of simplicity.

Office brand guideline examples including personality, colors, and font.

Pages from the Microsoft Office Brand Guidelines.

Our collaboration effectively linked the pre-purchase marketing communications to the post-purchase ones. For example, we used our marketing expertise at engaging users to improve the first-usage experience (for example, the “how to” videos that introduced users to Office online). In that space, the product team focused more on UX, not the kind of branded moments within the product where you can tell a story.

The fifth step in that process was perhaps the toughest, simply because of scale. Several hundred marketers worked on Office, each with their own budget, each choosing their own creative. Because of that, and their concern that we’d just scold them for doing things wrong, none of their work went through a creative review process. We not only had to change how people worked, but we also had to assure them we had their best interests in mind.

In time, people from other teams understood that we weren’t focused solely on creative, that we wanted to help them meet their business objectives and performance metrics. Again, it comes back to that One Microsoft principle of trusting each other and helping each other succeed. Product teams started seeking out our involvement, and marketing trusted us to make more things on their behalf.

Keeping a good thing going

We emulated this turning point elsewhere. We worked directly with principal designers Paul Cooper and Lance Garcia to build creative principles (for everyone keeping track, that’s step 4) that ended up changing the patterns and UX of azure.com. Functionality informed brand choices, which reflected back on the site itself.

The front page of the Azure.com website. — Azure.com

The same goes for HoloLens 2, which was perhaps our most daunting task. The product team had worked on it for two years by the time we stepped in to begin branding, so we had catching up to do. (Yes, not ideal.)

HoloLens 2 works in mixed reality, a new medium for most users. Because of that, people need more than product photography or UI to understand how it works. So, I partnered closely John Nguyen and David Wolf from the product design team to come up with a solution. We were inspired by prismatic light in holograms and by the way the product sensors understand the world and generate a 3D map. We believed that this prism and map would tie the marketing and the product experience together in a beautiful way. The product experience largely informed the elegant brand we created for HoloLens 2 and subsequent marketing materials.

Four expressions of the HoloLens branding. — HoloLens 2 Prismatic Color Blend used in illustration, full-bleed backgrounds, and HoleLens 2 wordmark logo.

These marketing materials turned out well — so well that they influenced the product. Romiro Torres, the creative director for HoloLens 2 UX, was working out the visual expression and experience of how the device maps a room. He integrated the same visualization into the product experience, so users see the same visualization we created for marketing when HoloLens 2 maps the room they’re standing in.

HoloLens 2 Room Mapping from the launch announcement in Barcelona

Chances are that doesn’t sound like a big deal to you, but it felt huge — that “maybe, just maybe” moment I mentioned earlier. If you listen closely, you can hear silo walls cracking.

Those are the kinds of moments we strive to create every day. They become a lot more likely when teams spend the time to truly understand each other. Branding makes that easier. It provides that layer of customer clarity, connecting the dots so that marketing and product can take a step back, look at the lines, and say, “Wow, a seal balancing a beach ball!”

By Douglas Montague

Microsoft Brand Creative Director. I don’t believe creative that has commercial success tags it with an odious suggestion that is stinks. Views are my own.

Sourced from Medium

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5 Key components to building a successful brand and business online

October 9, 2019 No Comments

By Chanakya K.

In today’s business-savvy world, it has become vital for ventures and brands to set themselves apart from their competition. Businesses nowadays face a daunting task of presenting themselves in the virtual world in such a way that they attract more customers. Creating brand awareness and doing so in a way that it not only attracts customers but also builds a pool of prospective clients is the crux of running a business online.

There are many key components to building a stable and attractive brand image to run your business. In this blog, we will go through the 5 major components that will help your venture skyrocket its brand image and utilize the potential of online marketing to its fullest.

1. Branding

Branding your business is more than taglines and logos and flashy posters or ads. Finding the purpose of your business and conveying it to the customers is called branding. Creating brand awareness is perhaps one of the most important components of running a successful business.

The more innovative and reachable your branding strategy is, the more people will get acquainted with it. For creating a branding strategy, businesses often rely on a good digital marketing to elevate their brand image. Hence, vetting and engaging with a good digital marketing company that can take care of developing comprehensive strategies for online marketing and coming up with innovative ideas to expand your brand’s reach is imperative for this component.

2. Segregating features and benefits

Contrary to popular belief, highlighting the benefits of your business will attract customers to engage with your business. Features your business has are just attributes, but the benefits your business provides your customers are the real shining star in attracting them. Highlighting benefits will retain your already existing customers. It will also bring in a slew of new customers who would want to reap the benefits of your business. This component plays a key part in digital marketing, and often includes client testimonials and customer reviews.

3. Customer experience

What is a business’ purpose other than catering to their customers’ needs? The focal point of any business is keeping its customers satisfied. A customers’ journey starts with your business as soon as they book an appointment or enter your premises. From that point, until they leave your premises and use your products/services, you must keep in mind to heed to everything the customer is feeling or saying.

Using a Customer Management System is imperative in tracking customers’ activities and takes their feedback, so you can keep them satisfied throughout their engagement. Moreover, this increases customer loyalty and improves your brand image, which makes customer retention easier. This data can be leveraged for digital marketing and attracting new customers.

4. Consistency

Aiming to provide services that are consistently good makes sure that your brand shines brighter than your competitors. If a customer is returning to your establishment, they are not doing so because of your product, but your service. Big brands make it their goal to present their customers with a journey that they will remember every time they use your product.

Leveraging this consistency by highlighting it in your online marketing is the best strategy your business can adapt. An established and good digital marketing company knows how to present customer experience as an asset of your brand to the new audience, which persuades them to engage with your brand and experience your exemplary customer journey themselves.

5 . Promotions and scale

Once your business has built up a loyal customer base, you have to set it up for an upward trajectory if approached in the right way. Using targeted strategies like promotions can help elevate your brand and also attract a multitude of new customers who were engaging with your competitors. You need to make them see that engaging with your brand would be more beneficial for them.

This would also help your business build potential partnerships with various other businesses which will further help in increasing your customer base.

Once this is done, all you have to do is serve these new customers as you did with your loyal customers, and you will attain a colossal mass of promoters of your brand who would vouch for your brand through reviews and testimonials.

Conclusion

Working with an efficient digital marketing company can help you majorly scale up your brand image and business in a lesser time than handling everything yourselves, which leaves many rooms for errors that can affect your brand negatively.

A professional and expert digital marketing company can help you navigate through the digital world and increase your brand awareness by a huge margin. Taking your brand and converting it into a luminary in the marketplace is the sole purpose of your venture’s marketing strategy, and hiring a good digital marketing company like SEMrush where you get all your Marketing toolkit under one platform can take you a long way in the digital world and elevating your brand image to the highest standards.

By Chanakya K.

Sourced from TechGenyz

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Digital You Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age

October 8, 2019 No Comments

By William Arruda

What’s your story?

The most successful brands aren’t created, they are unearthed. Successful branding is based on authenticity. So how do you reveal your own brand? First, by searching yourself for answers to questions like these: What do you do better than anyone? What are you most proud of? What makes you lose track of time?

In Digital You: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age, branding authority William Arruda describes the 21st century world of personal branding and guides you to define, express, and expand your personal brand for the virtual world. Branding is not about being famous, Arruda explains; it’s about being selectively famous. It’s about more than social media excess. When you understand the true value of personal branding, you can use it as a serious career development strategy.

Digital You offers a deep dive to understanding and defining your unique promise of value—making a great first impression, mastering multimedia, and, ultimately, expanding your network and promoting thought leadership. You’ll learn how to develop, design, and sustain a personal brand throughout the fluid movements of any career. Understand how to be clear about your digital brand and your unique promise of value so you can increase your success and happiness at work and in life. It’s time to stop worrying about career extinction and start crafting a brand of distinction.

By William Arruda

Dubbed “the personal branding guru” by Entrepreneur magazine, William…Full Profile

Sourced from atd Association for Talent Development

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How to Know When Your Business Needs a Rebrand and How to Do It Properly

September 18, 2019 No Comments

By Nick Brown

If you’re one of many business owners and entrepreneurs out there who thinks that ’brand’ equals the company’s name and logo, we strongly encourage you to think again. In today’s business world, it’s not uncommon that people make mistakes such as this one. And while it’s true that brand is tightly connected to these instances (the company’s name and logo), the story doesn’t end there.

If you aim at successfully running your business, you need to realize just how important your brand is. We’re not very fond of strict definitions of terms, but if we had to sum up what ’brand’ actually encompasses, we’d have to roughly say that it involves (and revolves around) all the experiences that people have with your firm. You’ll notice that the keyword here is the term ’experience’. This means that you need to worry about how your company is being perceived by others. Your customers and prospects should ideally have a pretty good all-around experience with your firm, which usually means that your brand is doing alright.

But often, this is not the case. For various different reasons, it happens that companies stop being the customer’s favorite. Sometimes it’s the competition and in other cases, it’s bad marketing decisions that led to this situation. Whatever it may be the case, if you realize that your company is struggling on its way to the top, or things have suddenly started to go downhill for you, maybe you should consider rebranding. That’s why, in this article, we’re going to talk about these things more thoroughly. We’ll guide you through the process of recognizing if your company needs a rebrand, and if it does, how to do it the right way.

Distinguish Yourself From the Rest of the Peers and Competitors

One of the most crucial things you must do is to differentiate yourself from the competition. You can’t expect to retain old customers and gain new ones if people can’t really tell what your brand is exactly about and why is it so special.

In order to do this, a prudent thing to do would be to rebrand. This is especially important if you realize you have some generic logo or a name that doesn’t resonate in people’s heads. Customers like to see when businesses care about these things because it also shows that they care about them. So, if you’re using stock images in your marketing materials, it’s best advised to stop this practice. People recognize these generic images and this tells them that you’re not as involved as you should be in making sure they get the best experience when dealing with your product.

If You Suspect Your Brand Is Outdated – Rebrand ASAP

There’s a pretty simple rule in marketing: if you even suspect that your brand is outdated, you should rebrand immediately. Sometimes this is also advisable in situations when you’re not really suspecting anything, but if and when in doubt, make sure to breathe a new life into your existing brand.

Some of the clear signs that you possibly should consider rebranding is an outmoded font or flash-based website, for example. These things belong to the past. You might think that this is not as important, but since so many things happen online, it’s paramount that your company has a fresh, modern-looking website that’s going to visually match today’s marketing trends and criteria. You need to realize that your company’s website, logo, name, and the whole visual identity can be either a deal-maker or a deal-breaker.

Any Sign of Poor Reputation Requires Rebranding

On the other hand, if you start seeing that your business is slowly going down the drain and it’s getting a poor reputation, it’s essential to do something pronto. You can’t expect to live from old glory days, and you need to learn how to adjust accordingly. Don’t sell your business if you don’t have to since there are other ways you can try to save it.

Rebranding is clearly one of those things that, if done properly, can make your business rise again to its previous blissful days. Overcoming negative reputation is never easy, but if there’s a proper way to try, it’s making sure the customers start seeing you in a completely new light.

It’s Essential to Rebrand When Your Company Evolves

But it’s not crucial to rebrand just in case your company starts to struggle. On the contrary – even if it starts to grow rapidly, it’s of utmost importance to think about different strategies and ways to rebrand. Many people make the mistake of leaving everything as it is in a situation when the business starts making progress and becomes a success. But this is one of the errors you definitely need to avoid.

And in those situations when you’re trying to expand your business to other markets, it’s also of prime importance to make sure there aren’t any other companies or businesses with similar brand names, logos, and that their visual identity doesn’t match yours in any way. You clearly want to avoid people associating your brand with someone else’s, or mistaking you for someone else. If this happens, you could be looking at potential problems that revolve around patent disputes, or other legal issues. We’d strongly advise you to make sure that this doesn’t happen and to spare yourself from going to court over these matters.

A Huge Part of Successful Rebranding Is Having Clear Goals

This is something that applies to all companies, no matter if they’re in the process of rebranding or not: you need to have clear goals in mind. If you want to be successful, you have to know what is it exactly that you’re trying to accomplish. The way you approach your company’s mission and values is going to set the tone for the entire venture.

That’s why it’s so important to ask yourself and try to honestly answer the questions that revolve around the reasons why your company exists, what values does it promote, and what is it that you can offer that’s rather unique. Having clear answers to these questions will most definitely help you to rebrand successfully.

Consistency is Key – Make Sure to Rebrand Accordingly

Speaking of successful rebranding, you need to make sure to go through this process accordingly. This means that you have to pay attention to the way your brand has been perceived in the past. If you’re not rebranding because of the poor reputation, there’s no need to take the entirely different route. On the contrary, it’s better to stay on track and develop a strategy that’s going to work effectively with your existing brand.

Even if you have the luxury to start from scratch here, it’s better to be consistent. You don’t want people to have troubles recognizing your product or services – you only want to give them something that’s going to show that you care (for them, as well as your position in the marketplace). You want to attract customers with higher retention rates, but you also don’t want to lose any old customers in the process.

Pay Attention to Your Competitors

We’ve already indicated how important it is to set yourself apart from the competitors. One of the ways to properly rebrand has to involve doing your due diligence and researching what the competition does. Ideally, you want to create the brand that’s so powerful that everyone else looks at and mimics what you’re doing.

But the truth is, even if you’re a trailblazer and a trendsetter in this regard and other companies try to recreate your strategies and methods, you still have to watch closely what everyone else is doing. It’s ok to play that bushwhacker role in front of the consumers, but when the doors are closed, you simply have to know what your competition does. If you don’t do this, you might find yourself in the position of having to rebrand due to some other reasons, like the poor reputation that we’ve already talked about, for instance.

Be Open to Different Ideas From Your Team

Being a company leader or manager isn’t the easiest task. Often time you have to make all the big decisions concerning your company. But in some cases, this creates a certain problem: people who are in high positions within the company tend to neglect other people’s opinions. If you want to (continue to) have success, it’s strongly advised to have people who your trust on your team.

Other voices need to be heard and you can all profit from this. Not only can you hear some good new ideas about the proper way to rebrand, but you’ll also show everyone that their opinion matters. This is extremely important if you’re looking to create good office vibes and an environment that values good ideas.

Don’t Underestimate the Complexity of the Task

If you’re looking to rebrand the right way, don’t underestimate the complexity of the task. It may sound like it’s not that big of a deal – you just take care of your visual identity – but remember what we’ve said at the very beginning: your brand is much more than this. It’s not enough to have a new logo, name, or a company website that follows latest web-design trends. You have to pay attention to the whole user experience.

Many company owners don’t realize just how lengthy and serious this process is. You need to plan everything carefully and manage the entire endeavor from start to finish. If you neglect certain parts of this process, the whole thing can be deemed a failure. That’s why a well thought-out project plan is crucial here. As we said, don’t try to micromanage every step, but trust your team to make sound decisions.

Ensure to Timely Launch Your Rebrand

Another important thing you have to make sure is to launch your rebrand on time. This is also connected to closely watching the market. You need to see what your competitors do and, like it or not, follow their pace from time to time.

For example, if you realize that your competitors are preparing to do something big, you need to assess the situation properly. If you launch your rebrand before they make their big announcement, you can potentially find yourself in a bad situation, especially if their surprise outshines yours. Customers could completely forget the fact that you’ve rebranded, or think that it’s not a particularly big deal (compared to your competition).

On the other hand, if you wait too long to launch your rebrand, you’re putting the entire operation in jeopardy. It wouldn’t be the first time that a company has put valuable resources into rebranding without ever actually launching it. You need to do whatever it is in your power to avoid this scenario. On top of this, you also need to avoid any confusion – the potential customers and consumers should know exactly why you rebranded. There should be a clear logic behind the idea and they need to see the improvements right away.

The Bottom Line

Every company needs a rebrand from time to time – this is something that’s inevitable because of the simple fact that things change rapidly. You don’t want to have an outdated brand: this reflects poorly on the entire company. And once you gain that reputation, it can be pretty hard to make it go away. And one of the ways to make this negative reputation go away is exactly through rebranding.

In this article, we’ve talked about how to know when your business needs a rebrand, and how to do it properly. The most important thing to remember is that you need to take care of your customers at all times – that way you’re actually giving enough space to your company to potentially become a huge success. Constantly growing, evolving, further progressing, and expanding your business to other markets should be one of your top priorities, but just make sure you’re protected from patent infringement. You don’t want any legal issues to stop you from reaching your full business potential.

By Nick Brown

Nick is a blogger and a marketing expert currently engaged on projects for Media Gurus, an Australian business, and marketing resource. He is an aspiring street artist and does Audio/Video editing as a hobby.”