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Before you press “publish” on any new piece of content, it’s critical to make sure that it is brand-aligned. After all, marketing content that does not support the core messaging of your brand isn’t doing your organization any favors, and it could be actively harming you in the marketplace. So as you work on your next piece of marketing content, ask yourself these 20 questions:
Brand messaging
1. Does this content convey key messages important to our brand?
2. Does this content stay on topic?
3. If this piece of content were the first thing someone encountered by our brand, would they have a clear understanding of who we are and what we stand for by the end of the piece?
4. Which brand value or set of values does this piece align with?
5. Is this content relevant to our target audience? If so, have we done the research to support that claim?
6. Does this piece of content support or muddle our message?
7. If this content uses humor, does it fit our audience?
8. Does the tone of this content fit our brand style?
9. Does this piece of content address its audience’s pain and point them to our brand as a compelling solution?
Visual branding
10. Visually, does this content fit with our other offerings?
11. Does this content stand out from that of our competitors?
12. Does this piece of content follow all brand design guidelines?
13. Do the images and design choices in this piece of content convey the image our brand wants to uphold?
14. If this content piece had no mention of our brand, could someone guess what brand it was aligned with based on color choices, font choices and so forth?
15. Is this content’s design of a level we are proud to display as part of our brand?
Role in the buyer’s journey
16. Does this content fit with our other content offerings in terms of when and how a prospective customer will interact with it?
17. Does this piece of content entice a viewer or reader to continue further down the funnel?
18. Does the content link to other marketing materials, encourage a prospect to contact our organization or otherwise promote engagement?
19. What does this content do to drive demand or activate sales?
Do you have marketing questions you want to discuss with an experienced team? Contact us.
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Brand updates put a lot on the line. If done without the proper research, they can have long-lasting repercussions on your brand loyalty, customer recognition and more. But a strong, well-received brand update can drive positive press, reinvigorate your marketing and grab your audience’s attention.
Need some inspiration for an upcoming brand adjustment? Learn from these recent and successful B2B brand updates by Salesforce and Intuit.
Salesforce brings the brand together
In 2014, Salesforce brought what had previously been a mish-mash of acquired brands under one umbrella, creating a new website and new logo to mark the change. Previously, Salesforce had offered a sales solution and separate marketing solutions, with confusing messaging explaining the connection between them.
With the brand update, Salesforce embraced the ethos of marketing-sales alignment. The new branding emphasizes how all Salesforce tools work together across a customer’s journey. While a few of the best-known brand names, including Pardot, remained, the new presentation emphasized Salesforce’s overarching presence and created both external and internal cohesion.
In 2015, Salesforce continued their redesign by reworking the look and feel of their software. They revamped the old look of salesforce.com—previously described by Fast Company as “easily the ugliest app in the [CRM] space”—to streamline the look and feel of their main products. But this was more than a superficial redesign: they relied on thousands of customer interviews, site visits and usability studies to render the site more usable, clean and navigable.
Intuit creates a unified ecosystem
Like Salesforce, Intuit had several products under one umbrella. Their products, Quicken, QuickBooks and TurboTax were each highly successful and had plenty of name recognition of their own. But Intuit lacked a strong overarching brand identity, which hindered the launch of new products that did not benefit from the Quicken, QuickBooks or TurboTax names.
To solve this problem, Intuit embraced a new set of visual design guidelines to tie its products together. This included a refreshed logo. At the same time, the company launched a new product naming architecture that also served to emphasize the products’ connections to Intuit.
In both of these brand updates, the companies strengthened their overall brands by considering how they could better unify their existing offerings. Each approached the problem in the way that made the most sense for their products, with Salesforce eliminating brand names that had little recognition, and Intuit tying the company name to those of top-performing products. Both, having thoughtfully addressed their central problem of a lack of brand unity, were successful and well-received.
Does your organization have similar branding problems you’re looking to fix? Give us a call.
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One key to growing a B2B business is having a strong brand that fosters engagement with buyers and end users. But in the end, marketing’s goals are to generate demand and activate sales, and so the most successful brand engagement is that which can be translated into viable leads that result in pipeline (and eventually bottom line) growth.
So what leads to this type of brand engagement success? Let’s take a look.
Research remains key
Earlier this week, we wrote about the need for robust research in a brand refresh. The importance of research does not end there. Successful brand engagement requires that you connect the dots between your research and the execution of your marketing and branding efforts. It also requires that you build campaigns that satisfy the needs and pique the interest of your audience.
For example, your surveys may find that people in your audience aren’t looking for the most cutting-edge technology. Instead, they would prefer to work with a brand that can cut through the tech lingo to help them make decisions and find the simplest tools to get their jobs done.
In such a case, a company looking to create engaging content would work to position their brand as one that helps people navigate the complex world of technology, making decisions simple and clear. Collateral might include white papers that act as guides to new technologies. These white papers, if well-crafted, would have enormous potential to drive engagement because they address a real need.
Compelling content generates leads
In inbound marketing, engaging content can generate leads directly, as when gated content is used to encourage prospects to opt-in to future marketing messages. Then, further nurturing is necessary to build a relationship with these leads and guide them through the buyer’s journey. But your content has to be highly valuable for your visitors to consider handing over their contact information in exchange for the download.
With that in mind, continue to produce content that your customers are actually interested in, and addresses their pain points. Building a brand is just a starting point; once you’ve done that you have to continually educate your audience, particularly in B2B industries. Prepare a content marketing strategy that emphasizes the importance of multiple touchpoints, and provides ways for your brand to engage with your audience across platforms.
Remember, the engaging educational content of inbound marketing is best paired with the personal engagement provided by a great sales team. Practice marketing-sales alignment to allow both departments to optimize their processes and build relationships with your target market.
To read more of our thoughts on marketing, explore the Movéo white paper library.
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At Movéo, we believe that very successful brand refresh must start with data insights at its foundation. Without research and data, branding is a guessing game, and one that won’t better an organization’s reputation nor win it customers. Read on for a glimpse at how Movéo uses detailed research to inform branding decisions, and what happens to brands that don’t.
Research first
Whether launching a new brand or refreshing an existing one, research must be step one. No branding work should be done in a vacuum. The types of research that are possible will vary based on your budget and goals, but whatever tools and tactics you choose, you must always aim to uncover key insights that will inform your branding decisions.
When planning a brand refresh, begin with your value proposition, and the key messages that support that value proposition. What are the elements of your brand that set you apart? Whether it’s a facet of your business currently emphasized in your branding or not, think about what you consider a core tenant of your work. These statements will be evaluated in market research to determine what’s impactful and what falls flat.
Then, evaluate your resources. Determine whether you can work with an outside research firm, and if so, how extensively. Design surveys, interviews and similar tests to better understand how your brand is seen in the marketplace and what customers associate with it. Robust research may include blinded tests of value propositions and visual brand elements, broad-based customer studies that ask questions about the brand and its competitors, and classic A/B testing. As we’ve mentioned before, your company may also find value in measuring your Net Promoter Score®—a metric that evaluates how likely your audience members are to recommend your brand to a friend or colleague.
Internal-external harmony
One important step in your research will be evaluating internal perceptions of your brand compared to external perceptions. Are they in harmony or is there a disconnect?
To determine this, Movéo gathers insights from employees about the internal perception of their company, and compares them with extensive external data. Such branding work reveals a lot about the real-world effects of branding decisions, and can help brands make adjustments in an attempt to better convey their internal intentions to their audiences. It also provides valuable information on how a brand’s audiences actually perceive it, which may even give the brand new ideas about how to reach and interact with those audiences.
“Permission to move”
One thing we look for before launching a brand refresh with a Movéo client is “permission to move” in the marketplace. That is, is there an opportunity to move beyond what the brand stands for right now? We say the brand has permission to expand in a certain direction if our data shows that such an expansion would be welcomed by the market.
One key indicator of this permission is brand credibility. For example, if your brand is considering offering a new product line in the information technology field, we would look at how people perceive your technological expertise. In some cases, a brand may have plenty of goodwill and a positive reputation, but the wrong sort of brand expansion can hurt its credibility and perception because it moves a brand into an area where it has no existing recognition.
Remember to take your time and invest the necessary resources in any brand refresh. A strong brand is built on a firm foundation.
To dive deeper into our thoughts regarding effective branding that drives business growth, read our white paper 10 Simple Truths About Strong Brands.
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For B2B marketers, understanding how “people” respond to your brand can be difficult, since B2B is all about businesses buying decisions. However, buying is still an emotional, personal activity that requires you to elicit positive reactions from end-users and the people signing on to do business with your company.
That means B2B brands need to make an effort to connect directly with the people who are decision-makers or the end users of their products. Consider these KPIs that will help you better analyze how various stakeholders respond to your brand as individuals:
Cost per referral
We’ve spoken before about how much customer loyalty means to your success, and it’s worth repeating: your customers’ loyalty plays a crucial role in building your business and furthering growth. The more your customers respond to your brand as individuals, the easier it should be to encourage them to refer your brand to someone else in their network. So track how difficult and costly it is to get referrals, and specifically referrals qualified to do business with your company. Do you need to poke and prod your customers in the hopes that they will promote your brand, or are they already acting as brand advocates? Net Promoter Score® is another valuable measure of how likely customers are to refer your brand to a friend or colleague.
Volunteered information
The more your audience trusts you and values your content offerings, the more information they will be willing to exchange for access to gated content or other benefits. Take a look at the forms throughout your website. Are prospects filling out the minimum required form fields or are they volunteering information such as their phone number even when it is not required? Do a decent ratio of your site visitors fill out the forms on your landing pages, or do the vast majority of them redirect away once they realize the content is gated?
If people are reluctant to fill out your forms or fill them out fully, consider how you can present your brand in a more inviting way.
General brand recognition
To really understand how individuals interact with your brand, and whether your brand awareness efforts are sufficient, it’s helpful to invest in some research. Get a sense of how many people recognize your logo out of context, specifically in the industries you serve. How many can describe your offerings?
If you find that few people have solid knowledge of your brand, think about ways to broaden your brand awareness, not just among decision-makers but also among others in the organizations to which you sell.
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At Movéo, we believe strongly that B2B brands matter more than B2C. As we wrote in our white paper by that title:
“Brands matter because the B2B marketing communications world is characterized by numbing sameness, commoditized feature wars and laundry-lists of product benefits. … Branding today is a strategic tool that helps the supplier cut through the morass of the market, get noticed and connect with the customer on many levels and in ways that matter. A strong brand becomes the customer’s ‘shorthand’ for making good choices in a complex, risky and confusing marketplace.”
Well, a customer can’t use that shorthand to choose your organization if they’ve never encountered your brand before. And that’s where brand awareness comes into play.
Brand awareness is different for B2B brands
Relative to the average B2B buying cycle, most B2C purchasing decisions are made quickly. For B2C brands, brand awareness is about being top-of-mind for consumers who might make a purchase at almost any time. Building a strong reputation is important to B2C brands that want to have ongoing success and drive customer loyalty, but these brands also have the opportunity to build reputation and loyalty through interactions during each short-term purchase.
For B2B organizations, the purpose of brand awareness is different. Think of it this way: a breakfast cereal consumer gets the chance to switch brands of cereal every time they go to the grocery store; a business technology purchaser may make one decision that affects their organization for years to come. As such, the stakes for a B2B brand’s reputation are different. Purchases are less common, but carry far more weight. In order to acquire new customers, B2B organizations must invest in brand-building campaigns that make an impression even with those who are not yet ready to buy. These awareness campaigns may even be aimed at those who are not yet in a decision-making position, but who are on track to be so.
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Marketing won’t take your organization very far if it isn’t built on a strong, consistent brand. In B2B marketing, branding is often left by the wayside—and yet, it’s essential for reaching new clients, growing existing partnerships and bringing in new revenue. Consider these three reasons why:
Decision-makers are willing to pay more for strong brands
Across the board, strong brands give a customer something to relate and respond to, allowing an organization to foster long-term relationships. There are long-term financial benefits to building brand loyalty over time, for healthcare brands, B2B brands and B2C brands. Retaining current customers is always more cost-effective than finding new ones, and a strong brand can help existing customers feel more closely connected to your product or service than a more generic approach would offer. Those who feel connected to your brand are more likely to make future purchases, and invest in larger purchases from your organization.
Consider what your brand stands for and integrate those principles into a loyalty program. For example, you may have built your brand on your reputation for standout customer service. Cultivate referrals by offering new customer service perks to those who refer a relevant business. Or, if your brand is built on your creative thinking and outside-the-box ways of delivering results, send exclusive white papers and toolkits that explain your methods to top customers who have expressed an interest in your thought leadership.
B2B brands matter more than B2C
Branding sets your organization apart from the myriad other options available to your prospects. As discussed in our white paper, B2B brands matter more than B2C, it’s time to reevaluate the common thought that consumers make decisions based on emotion but business buyers make more rational decisions. It’s simply not accurate. Intangible assets such as “goodwill” and popular recognition play a critical role in the B2B buying process.
Your brand is your differentiator. Two organizations may produce functionally the same item, or offer essentially the same service, but their branding gives them different characters, and is ultimately the reason that customers pick one over the other. Read our white paper to learn more.
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As marketing technology presents marketers with more and more opportunities to grow their brands across digital platforms, the ways a brand can be expressed through digital have and will continue to change.
Branded web series
Consider the power of branded video to drive engagement, and the growing amount of time spent with digital video as a portion of all web traffic. Given these factors, a branded web series could be a promising new avenue for your organization to explore. While some of the best known web series have been created by B2C brands, B2B brands can and should embrace this trend.
Consider this: instead of overtly promoting your brand, incorporate your message into a web story organically, or bookend each episode of your series with “presented by” screens. Your audience will appreciate and spend more time with content that is deeply relevant to them, rather than something that feels like a commercial. Meanwhile, your organization gets credit for the thought leadership. Instead of trying to strongarm your audience into engagement, host the series on your website or YouTube channel to drive traffic, and then entice viewers further through the funnel with other valuable content.
Interactive content
Did you read our November blogs on interactive storytelling? If not, we highly recommend that you revisit them, since interactive storytelling remains a valuable, yet still largely untapped tactic for marketers.
If you already have an interactive storytelling strategy in the works, consider the other types of interactive content that your organization can create as well. Perhaps interactive data visualizations and infographics could help tell your brand story. Try presenting original research in a set of branded infographics that your audience can manipulate to see different data segmentations or to drill down into the information that most interests them. What other examples of interactive content can you think of that would impress your audience?
Gamification
Using game-like elements to drive sales is nothing new—just think of traditional customer rewards programs. Today, it’s possible for marketers to offer far more sophisticated gamified content to drive engagement and entice leads through the funnel. You may also find success using gamification to remarket to existing or past customers.
When planning your gamified content, Marketo suggests developing rewards for social sharing, offering incentives for the creation of a personal account and creating a sense of urgency through the use of a deadline or countdown.
Want to learn more about how content can help your organization gain customers? Read our white paper, The 5 new laws of content.
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Your marketing may be creative, beautiful and interesting, but is it actually driving customers to the sales team and revenue to your business? It’s time for a reality check: no matter how innovative you think your marketing is, if it’s not driving growth, it’s failing.
For the next few months, we’ll be taking a hard look at marketing’s role in driving measurable, bottom-line-focused business results. We’ll be encouraging you to ask tough questions about your own marketing campaigns, and to evaluate their effectiveness using data. To kick off, let’s consider the three areas of business growth on which we will be focusing for the next few months on the blog. These also happen to be the things at the center of our work as an agency: branding, demand generation and sales activation.
Branding
A truly differentiated brand is what separates good companies from great ones. Ask yourself: can you quickly and easily define your brand’s essence? Is your brand clearly defined in both internal and external communications? Do your current customers not only relate to your brand, but actively promote it? If you can’t sum up what your brand stands for, and you can’t confirm that it’s expressed in your marketing, your audience won’t be able to define your brand either.
To drive business growth, your brand needs to saturate every aspect of your messaging, from the logo to product names. Where can your marketing department improve dedication to the brand? In February, we’ll be providing answers to this question and more.
Demand Generation
While demand generation can be achieved through a variety of approaches, its goal is always to engage prospects and motivate them to become interested in your products or services. If your marketing is unearthing new prospects and leading to sales calls, it is creating some kind of demand. But is it aligned with your organization’s overall goals and messaging?
To understand if your marketing is generating the right type of demand, take a look at how those sales conversations are working. Are the leads you are warming up looking for what you are actually selling? Is your messaging consistent? Check back on our blog in March for a broader discussion on generating meaningful demand.
Sales Activation
Ultimately, whatever the mix of tactics used, the goal of marketing is to drive sales. In this digital age, marketing automation is key to successful sales conversion. In fact, organizations that use marketing automation to nurture leads see a 451% increase in qualified leads and 53% higher conversion rates on average. But marketing automation alone isn’t enough. Leading companies understand the importance of using their automation campaigns to generate and deliver intelligence for their sales teams, and spend a great deal of time and attention optimizing marketing-sales alignment. Marketing must, above all else, position sales for success. When we take a deeper look at sales activation on the blog in April, we’ll include marketing automation’s role in lead nurturing, and the best practices you need to know to better align your marketing and sales efforts.
Could your marketing team do more to drive business growth? We’re always happy to answer your questions and discuss strategy. Contact us.
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Now that we’re a month into 2016, your organization should have a handle on key metrics from the past year and be prepared to apply key insights to a new 2016 strategy. But processing those can be overwhelming. With today’s nearly limitless available methods of data capture, it’s all too easy to collect more data than you can actually use, misinterpret the data you need and miss valuable insights. However, by picking some essential KPIs and focusing your efforts on interpreting the insights they carry, you can launch more effective campaigns in the upcoming year.
Focus on these three often-overlooked metrics in your previous campaigns to get ahead in your future plans:
Where contacts are lost
Do you ever take the time to look at the spots in the funnel where the majority of your leads are lost? Are your leads turning to a competitor due to a weak or inconsistent communication about your differentiators during the consideration stage of their decision-making process? Or are you losing them during the awareness phase because you’re failing to capture their contact information and nurture them accordingly? Take a look back at the flow of leads over the past year and note the sticking points in your communications. In 2016, plan ways to smooth out the buyer’s journey in these problem areas, perhaps through more targeted content or better-timed communications.
Content engagement
Beyond page views and white paper downloads, do you know how your audience interacted with your marketing content in 2015? Did they follow links and calls-to-action on your blogs? Did they share that content? How long did they spend with it, and did they read the whole piece or just open it?
Go deeper than simply tracking open rates and bounce rates to find how contacts are truly engaging with your work. Use tools like Google Analytics’ Behavior Flow and heat maps to better understand how your audience interacted with your content in 2015. Then, incorporate these findings into your 2016 content marketing strategy, giving your audience more of what intrigues them and using the most effective tactics to usher leads further through the funnel.
Net Promoter Score®
While following the actions of your leads and prospective clients is great, you must also remember to measure your current customers’ activity and loyalty to your brand. A good way to do this is by tracking your Net Promoter Score®. An organization’s Net Promoter Score® is a numeric score that represents how likely customers are to recommend an organization to their friends or colleagues. The Net Promoter Score® was created to improve on older, unreliable customer satisfaction surveys, with a measure that goes beyond satisfaction to get at whether a customer is truly a brand advocate.
Do you have a record of your organization’s Net Promoter Score® in 2015? If not, it’s time to reach out to your customers and measure your current score. Then, use this metric to take stock of where you stand in terms of brand advocacy, and plan strategically to improve your score through initiatives that engage all departments in improving customer relationships and satisfaction.
For more on why Net Promoter Score® is such a useful indicator of marketing success, read our white paper, Net Promoter Score: A powerful measurement.
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