The adage that a brand is not just a logo or symbol still holds true today, even more so during these turbulent times. To stay competitive, your brand must have meaning to build trust, drive preference, and achieve long term loyalty. The ongoing pressure to deliver financial results coupled with the fragmentation of audience reach, make it all that more difficult to own a place in the market. Your brand identity and integrated marketing plan has to be well thought out, with a cadence that keeps you differentiated, breaks through the clutter, and drives business growth.

Your employees, customers, clients and other stakeholders are paying close attention to how you demonstrate brand value. The business landscape is shifting. It’s harder to find and keep loyal customers. Sustainable practices are paramount. Diversity, equity and inclusion need to be part of your DNA. How does a brand keep up? The power of brand reflects every attribute of your company and when nurtured, it is your most valued financial asset.

Below are a few steps to strengthen your brand and marketing strategy:

Step One: DEFINE WHO YOU ARE

• Build your brand vision from the inside-out.
  • Start with employees — they are your brand ambassadors. Ensure they know what your brand means and how it maps to your company’s vision. Employees will prioritize their work to achieve that higher purpose and feel confident that their efforts support business success.
• Find your brand story and unique values.
  • With so much competitive clutter in the marketplace, it’s vital to ensure external marketing messages are ownable to you. Build upon your history, product offering, audience influences and unique characteristics. Most importantly, stick to them; deviating only waters down your story and gives others a chance to mimic what is ownable to you.
• Know your audience.
  • If you don’t know your audience personas, it’s like shooting an arrow blindfolded, hoping to hit the bullseye. Who are your customers (demographic, psychographic, ethnicity)? Where are they (geographically)? Why did they choose your services over other options? What do they need and want from your offering? This data is a must for nurturing your brand, creating content, developing marketing messages, determining your media strategy and measuring against goals.

Step Two: GAIN BUY-IN

• Create meaningful brand campaigns.
  • Create integrated brand campaigns that are true to your brand vision, authentic, believable, and align to your core values and business KPIs. As they say, “if you build it, they will come.” But only if your audience believes what they see, what they get, and recognizes the intrinsic value received.
• Leverage ambassadors and partnerships to deepen your brand offering.
  • Marketing tactics are more complicated than ever, yet rich in unique ways to reach customers. It’s no longer about simply deploying advertising, it’s about leveraging your audience, channels, ambassadors, influencers, media allies, partnerships and more. Create a plan that is a 360° approach to ensure you incorporate all that marketing tactics have to offer.
• Meet your audiences where they are.
  • With digital marketing in full swing (and a necessity in your marketing mix), reaching the right audience is now a fine-tuned strategy that delivers stronger, more targeted results. As noted above, understanding each audience is critically important, as is the way in which you reach them — where, how, and when they are most likely to consume your brand and marketing messages.

Step Three: BECOME YOUR BEST SELF

• Nurture relationships with your communities.
  • As our country’s philosophy and views change, so must brands. Global and local companies need to remember their roots and create a plan to actively integrate into their communities. Create a campaign that shares your message of support and commitment. Shift your giving efforts into the creation of a company foundation to manage the community pillars most important to the business. The takeaway — get out there and be seen. And don’t be afraid to let audiences know about it.
• Control the narrative.
  • By keeping your brand messages aligned with your business strategy, you minimize others telling your story differently. Build consistency across your message hierarchy and ignore the less important affronts on your brand. If an issue does go astray, address quickly and bridge the message back to your core strategy. Public relations pros are astute with how to handle this type of challenge.
• Measure your success and pivot where needed.
  • If you can’t measure your efforts, reassess your plan. Rich data is at our fingertips, especially with digital marketing tactics. The more information you have access to, the better decisions you can make with your brand and marketing execution.

Stay constantly engaged with building and evolving your brand with a focused plan that strengthens your market position and drives business impact. Your brand is a financial asset, treat it like one.

AMF Media Group can help you create a powerful brand and build a marketing strategy that exceeds results. Email us at [email protected].