Remarkable Brands
Hosted by ACMI X and Emporium Hub, join Blunt Agency in their Core Brand Workshop designed to help arts organisations, creative studios, consultants and entrepreneurs understand the importance of developing a brand strategy, and how building a brand can assist with their business growth.
ACMI X (00:00):
We'll hand over to you, Brent.
Brent (00:02):
Thanks Amber for that intro. Excited to be presenting the brand strategy workshop today and also answering any questions that might come up throughout the presentation towards the end. I'll take you through a little bit of information firstly on us and what we do. So, we're a strategic brand agency and we really focus on building brands out across three phases, which is the strategic, the implementation (which could be seen as the creative side of things) and also the nurture phase of branding. Really what our objective is, is to enable businesses to understand and connect with more of the people that their brand serves. We work across a broad range of categories. We're really quite diverse in that sense, but we're all about brands and making sure that we are focused and outcome driven with what we do.
Brent (01:09):
Probably one of the key things that we like people to understand is what are we talking about when we're speaking about brands. Jeff Bezos had a great quote, which is "your brand is what other people say when you're not in the room". And that really encapsulates what it is. So we're not talking about visual things per se. We're talking about perceptions and ultimately, from a branding perspective, and what we're doing throughout the branding process, is we're managing those perceptions, through a process of articulating, developing and maintaining brand assets and behaviours in order to influence market perceptions. One things to note from a brand perspective when you're working through the process of branding, is once you move past thinking of it being a visual-led experience to an interaction-led experience, you start to see the opportunities beyond just what you're doing in the visual space.
Brent (02:24):
So whether it's how you are interacting with customers, how you are interacting at events, every aspect that will ultimately connect with a customer is going to influence that perception from a brand perspective. So, looking at that and addressing that as, a singular kind of view is really quite important. You can get bogged down in the details of the branding process but ultimately we're trying to achieve and answer three core questions when we're working through this process. It's who are we targeting? So looking at the market, the competitors and your business and choose what you are actually going after. The second one is what do you stand for? So how do you want to be perceived in the eyes of your customers?
Brent (03:25):
What do you want to want them to think when they engage with, or come across your brand? And the third level is how are we going to achieve that? So, tactically, what is the process in which you are going to go about building that perception within the marketplace, what tools you'll use, what devices you'll use, how you'll respond and react to certain circumstances or things that are going on. So the three core things that we're trying to respond to, really are core to the whole branding process and not to overcomplicate it, but this is the core things that we're really looking to address before you do anything.
Brent (04:22):
A bit of housekeeping before you actually go and start the brand strategy process is to actually understand where you're placed currently, before you start looking at your future brand.
Brent (04:36):
What we like to do is gather customer insights, audience insights, not necessarily who you are actually targeting, because that will come, but current customers. If you're a brand that's already established, then you'll actually have a customer base that might be already interacting with you. If you're not, and this is all fresh and you're hitting the ground running, then it's about trying to work out a lot more of the information about yourself and the business that will go forward as part of the brand strategy and ways in which you can go about this. If you've an established business start by interviewing customers and your most loyal ambassadors.It can help and it's not always needed, but Google what a perceptual map is to actually start to visualise this a little bit, it helps in order to have some kind of visual cue as to where you're placed, especially in relation to your customers. Understanding your brand heritage, if you've been around for awhile, how did you get to where you are?
Brent (06:01):
What's your backstory, gathering all your analytical data, like your Facebook and Google data. Those bits of information and understanding how people are interacting with your content, what kind of content they actually get behind and support, and trying to sort of have that as a reference throughout this process. And you can also use tools like SEMRush and UberSuggest, which both have free components to their model as well. So that you can start looking at things like back linking to your existing website and what kind of content people might be sharing. So you're trying to establish a pretty clear picture of where you are currently placed, what you are currently leveraging and who your current customers are and how they view your business. So the more back story that you can establish around that will make it a lot easier. Once you start developing your brand strategy,
Brent (07:16):
Why brand first? So we're a brand agency, so we'll certainly going to be the people who are saying that brand is most important, but this is why. What we're trying to do when we're building out a brand strategy is ultimately transition people up the brand maturity scale to become what we call remarkable. So when you're entry level, essentially the target market are aware of your offering. Foundation is when they also understand the value that you provide as a business. A Contender is when they see you as a credible partner and often a lot of companies get to that level where there's a level of credibility around what they're offering. The challenge is when you start to move beyond contender to leader and remarkable.So a leader is when you are seen as the best fit within your category as to what you do.
Brent (08:19):
And then remarkable is when there's a true alignment between your brand and the customer, and the customer goes on to become an ambassador for your brand. Apple is always very much a go to example of a brand that has hit that level, where people become great advocates of what they're doing. And ultimately that's the goal. And that's the process that in developing up a brand strategy that you're trying to achieve, but obviously it's a journey and it's not an instant or overnight thing. Tt takes time to build up. So the progression of that over time is really what you're trying to achieve. Keep moving forward.
Brent (09:12):
The brand framework that I will take you through has a number of sections in this. The first three or four are really where I like people to sort of focus their attention. If they can do that foundation work, they're really well placed to make sure that they are perceived and positioned well within their market. We also find that, and we've reviewed as a business ourselves, whether there's certain components that you could drop in order to speed up the brand strategy process. The first three or four of these stages we really feel as though you shouldn't. If you're going todo anything, these are a must. So I'll take you through what they are.The first one is brand substance.
Brent (10:23):
You're looking at creating the building blocks of your brand and it's really your internal brand that you're looking at during this stage and making sure that you have a good understanding of self before you start to work out how you're gonna take that to market. A big part of that is as a brand you want to live your meaning and do so apologetically. That takes substance in order to do that, and if you don't have that kind of foundation to why you're actually setting up a business or building a brand, then you kind of float around a lot. So it's about making sure that you're quite well defined in that thinking. The brand purpose is understanding your 'why', and I have examples of how this plays out in the following slide, but the brand purpose is knowing your 'why'. Don't make this shallow, it's why you do what you do.
Brent (11:36):
What we recommend with the brand strategy process is making sure that you document this. So create whether it's a Word doc or a Google doc and just start piecing this together, because it will become the go-to reference for your business. Whenever you're rolling out content or creating content, you'll revert back to this as a reminder of actually what the vision is and where you are heading and ultimately the content and the way in which you go about this. So document it. Tt's not so something that you write on a piece of paper and forget about, you need to refer back to this continually. Project your brand vision, so your future vision for the business, the idea behind the brand helps to guide its future.Don't be superficial with this, be aspirational as well.
Brent (12:32):
I like to actually challenge people to set something that feels like it's out slightly outside of what might be obtainable, so that they actually do push higher than maybe what they normally would. Really push. So Netflix's brand vision was to become the best global entertainment distribution service and they're probably not far off that. That is their vision for their future. Craft your mission statement. Your mission statement is your day to day of who you serve and how you're going to achieve your brand vision. It's very much based on the day to day way in which you're going to go about that. Then develop up your brand values, the beliefs that your brand stands for and where you won't compromise.
Brent (13:32):
This will guide your actions and behaviours and your decision making. One of the things that's great about establishing a brand strategy is that it helps you make decisions and some of those decisions will be quite hard. There'll be things where you have to make a call as a business where there might be an opportunity. It's great commercially from a monetary perspective, but it might not be a good fit from a brand perspective, which ultimately if you're trying to build brand, you're trying to look for things that are a great alignment. But this will help you create a decision making process of what's actually appropriate.
Brent (14:40):
An example of something that we had put together for ourselves, our purpose, is we exist to help marketing managers of national brands grow brand maturity by building strategic brand ecosystem. Our mission is to help brands discover and leverage their uniqueness. Our vision is to be Australia's largest and best preforming regional brand and creative agency and our values, like the things that we won't compromise on, our strategic process, we communicate with relevancy, we're direct to the point(hence the blunt side of things) and also the craftsmanship execution, which we're pretty adamant about any time that we roll brands out, that they have to be executed really well.
Brent (15:40):
The second stage is the positioning strategy is understanding your audience and who you are actually going to be going after. So developing your audience personas. So there's two concepts thatI'll discuss, there's personas and archetypes. Personas is personality.Archetypes is desires and we'll get a little bit more into the archetype side of things shortly, with your audience personalities, really what you're looking at doing is taking your customer base or who you are actually targeting, defining them into segments around personality groups and making sure you are defining them with human characteristics and traits so that you, as a brand can understand them at personable level. Also define who are most likely to convert in the sales, who might convert into becoming brand ambassadors or sharing content, and to give you an example of audience personas and what we usually do, we give them a name. So an example might be 'CEO Sally.' Her traits and personality might be that she's a high net-worth individual, conscious and autonomous in her decision making, buys based on status. You can really go into quite a lot of depth around that persona and it's it's worth doing, because it helps you create content and messaging that actually speaks to those people with relevance.
Brent (18:35):
I'll just answer Jackie's question.So she's asked the question, what's the difference between a brand strategy anda marketing strategy. It's a good question because the branding strategy is really around how you positioned in the market and how you want to be perceived and how you'll go about managing that perception. The marketing strategy is more geared around how you will actually go to market and what's the tactics around connecting with and marketing to that audience. So they interplay, they're related and they crossover in many ways, but the brand strategy is really geared around what is that perception you are trying to create and how you'll actually go about that. So there's a lot of crossover, but the marketing strategy is more tactical based in my opinion.
Brent (19:44):
Getting back to the positioning strategy and with your audience personas, make sure that you are also segmenting the audiences that you don't want as well, like who won't you work with, who aren't your ideal customer? There might be 'Tight Terry' who lacks understanding, is price focused, compares people frequently and is always lowballing on price. You might get there and go tight Terry is just not someone that we want to interact with at any level as a brand. So making sure that you define who your audiences are, as in the ones that you're going after, but also the ones that aren't relevant, because that'll create focus, especially around your content.
Brent (20:36):
So conduct a competitor audit, and there's lots of ways to actually go about this, but really what you're looking at is trying to understand those that you are competing against in the market.How are they positioned? Again, I mentioned earlier a perceptual map is sometimes worth developing up for your competition as well. And relating that back to yourself and seeing where you sit in comparison to your competition, getting a good understanding of their strengths, their weaknesses. You can use tools like UberSuggest, Google Trends, Google Keyword tool, Google Search as well, going onto their social media profiles and looking through the content, what they're talking about, how they're talking about it and just really developing a great understanding of how they go about things and how they're positioned within the market, because this will create what is the next point, the differentiation strategy. So it'll enable you to clearly see the gaps in the market for your brand and allow you to position that brand within that gap. And ultimately with the aim of connecting with people and having a clearly defined or differentiated brand from your competition.
Brent (22:16):
Something that we also like brands to develop out is a positioning statement. This is usually made up of a baseline statement in which we fill out the blanks, to give you an example it might be 'we help movie producers who have an increased demand to create profitable movies, to achieve content with mass market appeal. Unlike traditional film studios, our solution is supported by AI technology that evaluates stories against global content trends for market viability'. So once you actually develop that positioning statement addressing who the customer or your audience is, what you achieve, how you are differentiated from your competition and what your solution to their problem is.
Brent (23:20):
Keep in mind also with the brand strategy process. Although the first stage was very much about the internal brand, the stages from here are really starting to focus on your customer and making sure that everything you are doing is geared and focused around your customer rather than yourself. And it can be very easy to get lost in developing a brand and focusing on self, but we're really looking at how we're meeting the expectations and positioning ourselves with the customer. So it's really important to keep that in mind.
Brent (24:04):
So the next one is brand persona. Now we're really starting to get into the nitty gritty of understanding our customer and making sure that we're building out a brand that's going to define how you want people to view your brand and then establish characteristics that align with that perception. It's simplified down to two parts, so there's your audience and there's you and what ultimately your audience needs you to be.
Brent (24:45):
The first point is to uncover what drives your audience and this is where the archetypes comes into play. I've got some examples of what an archetype is. Carl Yung developed this out in the 19hundreds, I'll give you an example of that. So you want to create a narrative of your ideal customer, allow you to understand and humanise them.
Brent (25:11):
You want to back that up with data and surveys and research and try and get as clearer picture of your audience as possible. And it's best to not make assumptions here, the challenge is that if you assume too many things you can guarantee that wont be the fall over point when it comes to rolling out all your content. You really need to know your customer or your audience well, and it's not that difficult these days to get hold of the data, or at least research your customers. You can view their social media profiles, you can look through their interests, you can look through what they're sharing and liking and, and the way in which they're engaging with brands. And that will start to build up a good understanding of your customer base or your audience base.
Brent (26:11):
If you've got budgets you can certainly delve into more data based research, which there's companies that do that, or even running surveys that ask people specific questions. What you want to do once you understand your audience, your audience archetypes and archetypes are their desires, not their personality and that's really important to understand as well. So personalities is quite different to what their desire is. It will certainly influence their personality, but their desire is something that you are looking to marry your brand up to. So once you identify your brand role you want to establish what your brand archetypes needs to be in order to help your customer on their journey. So every customer is on their own journey of what they're trying to achieve, and you are looking at how your brand steps into that to assist them to get to where they're going, and ultimately build a relationship and continue through that journey.
Brent (27:28):
Develop human personality. So you want to create around your brand, almost start to visualise it as a person. So what are those characteristics? How do you look, how do act, how do you speak, what do you like and what do you dislike. This needs to appeal to your audience archetype as well. So it needs to be something that's meeting their expectations. We like to go through the process, even with brands that are quite technical in nature, to actually visualise what that might look like creating a look-book of that, because it does help to cement a bit of an understanding of what kind of person you would be as a brand. You also want to capture your voice in your language of how you speak, language you use and also you don't use, that will appeal to your audience archetype.
Brent (28:35):
So this is a great example of how you need to view yourself and your customer. The whole purpose of your brand is to get your customer along their journey. So in this example, it's Mr. Miyagi with Danielson and Danielson's on his journey, but Mr. Margi steps in throughout this story to assist him to get there. So you are not looking at creating a brand that is insular, it's gotta relate to your audience and your audience journey.
Brent (29:22):
So this is where we get quite technical with brand archetypes. I'll go through this. There is a lot of information out there about this. If you want to Google brand archetypes, which will help you sort of understand it in more detail, but Carl Yung developed this out. There is 12 archetypes, all with different core desires and characteristics. You might have seen as I've got on this diagram here the sort of archetype infographic, which sort of floats around, if you ever search for these kind of things, but what you kind of wanna look is what's your audience archetype, and it's usually made up two components. So there's the heavyweight, which we weight around 70%, and then there's a lesser weight of about 30%, so that your audience will usually have more than one of these kind of core desires and you're trying to sort of find what's the weighted side of things, and also what is also maybe be relevant or influencing and you know, this was one that we were sort of working on with a client and they were in the sort of N D I S space. Their audience archetype with 70%, every man, which has a real sense of desire to belong and the caregiver, which is a very service or subservient role of about 30%. And then the brand role in that was for this particular client was caregiver, which was a hundred percent. That's not always the case, sometime it will be a mix of two as well, but you're really looking at what the the audience. So if they've the ruler, so a rulers core desire is control, the best archetype to meet that might be the Sage, which is someone who is essentially develops understanding and knowledge and is guiding.
Brent (31:56):
So the ruler needs people who are knowledgeable and guiding in order to, if you look at their journey and where they're going, that is something that they may actually need as part of their journey to assist them, to get to where they're going.
Brent (32:14):
You also need to look at, and don't make the mistake that thinking your archetypal mix needs to be the same as what your customer one is. In a lot of cases, that won't be the case because it could actually cause conflict, like you wouldn't want two people that are trying to be the ruler in the relationship, that might actually cause conflict.So looking at the your audience archetype, your brand archetype, and developing a bit of an understanding of what is the best fit there in order to help them along their journey.
Brent (33:02):
Brand Personification - So this is an example of what we did for a client where we just helped them to visualise what their brand might look like. And you might create female and male versions of this or a mix. It's not gender based really. It's trying to create a sense of who you would be as a person. It will just help sort of give clarity when you're going out to the market around how you talk, how you present yourself and the sort of finer details of your brand. So that is quite helpful to do that exercise as well.
Brent (33:51):
Core message framework - So the first three and this are what we probably see as have to do, like, as in we would say don't drop any of those because you'll have gaps further down the pathway.
Brent (34:11):
With your core message you're outlining your audience, your objective, and your point of difference. And I'll give some examples around this as well because it does help to prepare content and information that you will draw on in the future. So if you are putting together proposals or pitches or social media content, a lot of these messages and the content that you develop here will be drawn on for those pieces of content. So you want to craft what we call primary core messages, and the primary core messages are focused on the external, the customer. It's outward facing and the messages that come together to shape ultimately the idea that you want your audience to have of your brand and focusing on the solution to their problem. What problem are you solving for them?
Brent (35:23):
The secondary core message, which is more about yourself, is the opportunity to go into a bit of detail, to tell your story. But again, it needs to be relevant to the customer and their journey. There's no point in developing messaging that has no relevance to the customer, to their journey. It will just fall on deaf ears. So it's all about the customer, even when you are talking about yourself you want to address key information your audience needs to know in order to make a decision around your offering. So you know, clarifying what that is and this is the opportunity also to look at your brand tone of voice and personality. So when you're crafting these messages, it's not necessarily just being duplicative of what it is, but also looking for opportunities to start to bring personality to your brand.
Brent (36:26):
If you think about this core message framework from a sound bite that you'll start to float through your strategy, your documents, your website, your social, obviously you want it to have a consistent personality and a consistent tone of voice because it's going to sort of influence the perception of your brand.
Brent (36:50):
Once you've got the core messages, were commend to develop up paragraphs of copy around this, so expanding, those out. And again, this makes it a lot quicker and a lot easier to prepare information in the future, you'll have your resource, which is this document that you're building out, where you'll be able to revert back to it, grab paragraphs of copy, you'll expand on them for different purposes but it gives you a baseline of what you talk about, how you talk about it. What's the most important things to be talking about and it also makes sure that you are driving consistency with what you are actually saying and doing in the market.
Brent (37:38):
Core messages. So primarily, the primary message we've got, why should your audience stop and take notice of your brand? What do you do differently? What's the value of that difference?How will it impact their lives? Why would they care about this? What pain points were resolved.
Brent (38:00):
Secondary core messages - where we'd like to go (as in your business), what you believe in, what your hold dear, what's important, why we value you, as in the customer, again, keeping in mind that although you're talking about you it's got to be relevant to the customer and their journey. Examples of that would be what do you do differently 'we're Australia's highest growth in NFT artist, marketplace with invite only qualified investors,' the secondary message might be, what do you hold dear? 'Supporting Australia's NFT artists by increasing revenue, revenue and demand of their artwork to qualified NFT investors'.
Brent (38:51):
So you can see with that one is about what you do differently and it's external facing. One is more talking about yourself, but it's very relevant to what the need and the journey of the customer. Your objectives with this is to have your audience understand that we understand their problem, and also that we are the best fit for their problem.So it's the two, the understanding makes you relevant, and then obviously the best fit is just when we're moving up the maturity scale, it's, it's moving up, that kind of ladder. Everything that we're doing here, all the messaging, make sure you revert back to your audience archetypes their desires and making sure that your core message framework, both your primary and your secondary is geared around speaking to that audience archetype and their desires and being quite focused around that is really, really important.
Brent (40:16):
The first four sections are really around getting your foundational stuff prepared, knowing who you are, knowing your audience, knowing how you're going to position your brand within market.What we're moving into now is starting to look at at how you're going to externalise your brand and obviously speak to those audiences and what you're going to say. The strategic visual identity side of the brand is really quite important as well, because it's the visual face of how you're going to start the position yourself and which will have a huge impact on how you're perceived as well. So you want to make sure that it encompasses the entire visual system. So it's not just about a logo. It's, it's about looking at all the content that you're going to create, and that will differ considerably for different brands.
Brent (41:29):
A lot of you might be visual artists in the animation or video sense. So you want to be looking at how do you showcase your work across those channels, if you're an influencer or a blogger or there's numerous different categories, you want to be looking at what typeof content are we producing and making sure that there's consistency across that. Once you actually do establish a consistent aesthetic and look and feel, what we recommend doing is creating a set of templates again, that will speedup your ability to go to market with a lot of your branded content and it also will drive consistency. If you're a larger brand making sure that you document that into a style guide is certainly preference because if you've got third parties that will step in and start to create content on your behalf, having a guideline around how they should play essentially, including your messaging and all that framework as well is really important. If you're small company where you are creating your own content, templates might be more than adequate, but if you are a large organisation, you need to sort of level that up to include a style guide.
Brent (43:07):
Now, we've got a question that's come through from Sarah. The core messaging is focused a lot on difference, what happens if you are working within a new form or field, how would the strategy shift?
Brent (43:25):
Well, I think if you're in the new form or field that is your difference. If you are in a field where you've got a lot of competition, that's where you're looking to differentiate yourself based on positioning. But you might find that when you're in a field that doesn't, that is unique and there isn't competition there could be a lot of differentiation based on what you're actually doing, but having said that, I think it's still very important to define yourself as unique beyond your service and your product and looking at owning something with a level of authority and clarity around your brand.
Brent (44:16):
And because you might be in a new form or a new field at the moment, but it doesn't mean that as that category progresses, that there won't be competition that will enter into that market and it could become saturated over time. So the more that you can really define how you are positioned within that market, beyond your product and service, will serve you well into the future. And really that comes down to understanding your customer, your customer journey, or your audience's journey, how you are going to step into that journey in order to build that relationship over time. So yeah, if you're looking at things which are emerging categories, or new categories, I'd still encourage you to make sure that you you're still defining your brand with a lot of clarity beyond your product and beyond your service.
Brent (45:24):
The brand presence, this is getting into the roll outside of things, so generating branded copy, messaging, I mentioned story frameworks here but a lot of time it's not needed in smaller organisations, but you could also develop story frameworks that really look at placing your audience into your brand story. You want to speak to your audience with authenticity and relevance. So making sure that any copy, any messaging, any stories that you're developing, focus on your audience archetypes, what their needs are, and making sure that you are speaking to that, designing collateral and brand that engages with your audience.
If you're developing this within your brand strategy, it will also assist you to create a bit of a go-to plan for how you're going to activate your brand across different channels and media mixes. This is starting to blend into the marketing strategy world, but understanding how your brand is going to play in different channels is sometimes worth including in your brand strategy. What's really quite important is to just to show up, be on brand, be consistent. This is one of the things that we see a lot.
Frequency, repetition, builds really strong brands, especially brands that have done that groundwork, that know who they're speaking to, know what their audience archetype is and what their desires and needs are. And making sure that every time they're speaking, they're meeting that, but if they're frequent, if they're front of mind, it really goes a long way in position you as the best fit for their need, and this will cover off one very thing from websites to online presence, such as social content, lead generation content. If you're doing anything along the lines of that, it could be you're creating show reels for yourself or animation reels, certainly don't miss your quoting documents, your pitch docs, if you're doing tender docs, it's really important that you are including your brand components within them as well and that it's all consistent and keeping in mind that people often don't make a decision around a brand based on a single piece of content in engaging with that, they might see your social content, they might then go along to your website. They might then request some further information. They might get hit with retargeting content or other social content. So this layers up over time, and you really want to make sure that you've got this constant, consistent repetition so that it helps cement that position in minds of the customer.
Brent (48:51):
The journey - this is sort of getting back to what I was just saying about, it's not just one piece of content. So viewing your relationship with customers as something that builds over time, it's not singular. You're not going to build a remarkable brand or a position that your brand is remarkable with a customer instantaneously. It's a relationship that builds over time. And certainly if people are gonna become ambassadors for your brand they need to have a true sense of who you are and why they would want to evangelise you as a brand as well.
Brent (49:41):
Small bites consistently and frequently. And I can't emphasise that enough that the consistency and frequency is really critical to this, and it doesn't need to be big content, small bites is fine.
Brent (49:58):
So this is getting to the final part of what we refer to as our brand framework. So just to clarify what that is again, the brand framework is made up of three pillars, there's strategy, there's implementation, and there's nurture. So once you've actually got your strategy in place and you've got your content and assets created, you're looking at how are you going to nurture the relationship with the customer who's on a journey over time. Branding is not a set and forget exercise, you need to nurture it what we refer to as an ecosystem, a healthy ecosystem, in order for it to mature and flourish. What we recommend as part of this, and depending on your budgets, but I'll talk in an idealistic sense to a certain extent, but there's lots of ways to sort of go about this including low cost and no cost model as well, but you want to implement a marketing stack that allows you to listen, watch and respond to your customer as they're on their journey.
Brent (51:17):
Again, going back to that kind of small bites consistently and frequently, it's about making sure that as your customers on their path, that you're connecting with them, touching base and doing so across a number of channels. So whether it's email, website and social, creating automations is quite powerful, especially if you are a brand that is not that resource heavy. You might find that creating some kind of automation allows you to feed this content through to the customer on an ongoing basis to maintain that kind of front of mind position. Examples of automations might be as simple as if someone downloads a piece of content. There might bean automation that feeds through a sequence of emails to keep in touch. They might get added to your email database and kept up to speed on a regular basis of what is happening either at an industry level or within your business.
Brent (52:33):
It could be social posting platforms like hootsuite, where you create a whole heap of content and you automate the posting component of it. So you're not having the jump in every day, simplifying the management of your content as well as more complex automations as well. Platforms like HubSpot and SharpSpring and Salesforce allow you to do this and CRM platforms, where if so one visits your website, if they're a known customer, you might have an automation that within a certain amount of time it sends out an email to this person that might inviting them a webinar or potentially a one-to-one workshop. It sort of allows you to interact with a customer without having to identify that opportunity yourself, but it's all based on automation and triggers that feed through quite complex scenarios and it can be quite powerful.
Brent (53:43):
Simple kinds of ways to nurture is making sure that you are retargeting and reengaging with people that if they're interacting with certain content that you have created, whether it's on certain pages of your website or certain, social content, reengaging and retargeting those people across other networks and just making sure that your brand is front of mind. Something we recommend doing in a commercial sense is connecting your sales pipeline to your marketing channels and your marketing. This is best done through a CRM system.
We use a few platforms like HubSpot and SharpSpring predominantly, but also Salesforce. But if you can look at the sales journey of customer and how they're interact with the marketing journey and your content that you are pushing out there, you can start to create what we call an attribution model around what content you are you creating. That's actually having an outcome from a sales perspective. So that will allow you to understand where you should invest your time, what content is actually having an impact on your business, beyond say likes and shares, likes and shares are obviously really important as well, because it increases your reach. But if you've got an understanding of how a sale has been generated and whether you're attributing that to the first point of marketing content, or maybe the last piece of content that they received, that enables you to better understand how you should be going out to market, what kind of content is resonating with your audience? It even helps establish what messaging is resonating with your audience as well. So it's worth making sure that you've got a single view of your customer which is best often achieved through a CRM platform.
Brent (56:14):
That's pretty much it, from a strategy perspective. There's a lot of depth that can be gone into with each of those stages, but to sort of reiterate the first three or four, make sure you do them, establish that sort of foundational work from a brand perspective.It'll serve you really well as you establish your brand and establish your position, document it, have it well documented, fill it out, make sure it's really quite detailed and not sort of baseline. The details will help you get really quite targeted in what you're doing, especially when get down to understanding your audiences, your audience segments, and also your core messages and that as well. So, it'll give you a good archive of what you need to sort of be doing.
Brent (57:16):
Feel free to connect with us across LinkedIn, Instagram and also Brent Nolan. We should are a lot of insight articles and content that you'll find helpful. It'll just be good reminders on what you need to be doing. It'll probably be helpful kind of information that will assist you on your own journey. Um, also if you go onto our website in the about section of the website, you can download our Brand Strategy Checklist. It has a bit of details as to each of the steps, but it'll be a good reminder as to what you need to be filling out as part of your own brand strategy, so that that'll be quite helpful as well. Thank you.