Part 4 – How to Build a Brand: Engagement

Welcome back…The past few days we’ve been going step by step to build a brand in today’s business environment. Part 1 discussed segmenting the population to highly targeted, highly defined individuals. In Part 2 we described how to create “segment stories” with the core brand message being communicated effectively to each niche segment. Yesterday, in Part 3 we began building awareness using a strategic combination of traditional and non-traditional tactics. So, basically we left off with our segment individuals raising their hand to engage with our new brand. Now what? Conversation.

This is the really scary part for most marketers today. In the past we have been “pushing” messages until the consumer purchased. Easy. Now, the goal of marketing is to create and maintain customers by building a brand that is malleable and will fit into the lifestyle of the consumer based on their personal wants and needs of our products/services. The only way to create this type of brand is to have an open, two way conversation with each consumer who raises their hand. Conversing with a consumer is a scary beast. What if we mess up? What if we say the wrong thing?

Marketing a Brand is like Building a Personal Relationship

We all have personal relationships. That’s the reason we are engaged so much in the social media realm; to maintain old and create new personal relationships. So why would we be afraid to do this for our brand? The basis of any relationship is communication. Think about how you met your best friend, your spouse, your business partner…It didn’t just happen. It was a series of communications that lead to self disclosure, identifying commonalities, and living experiences together. That’s how marketing should be handled today. Like a new relationship of a best friend, spouse, or business partner.

It’s not brain surgery on how to figure this out. Listen and give. Listen and give. Grow on what has happened in the past. Laugh, joke, cry, experience things together… That’s how you create a malleable brand that will become part of an individual consumer’s lifestyle. Think about your life without your best friend, spouse or business partner…scary, huh? Imagine having our customers feeling that way about our brand… What a great feeling that would be!

Use Technology

With the technologies that we are currently using as marketing silos (database or CRM marketing, social media, email, texting, personalized direct mail, personalized urls, etc), we are fully capable of creating a system that would be able to build these types of relationships. Once the consumer raises his/her hand to begin a conversation, we append it in a database. Then each and every conversation or communication point with that individual needs to be appended to the same database. With this information, we can listen to their wants and needs from our brand and give it to them. We can customize marketing communications, converse in the public social sphere; suggest customized product offerings, etc… Basically we would be able to create a brand that would fit perfectly into their individual, personal lifestyle. We grow with the consumer.

Conclusion

Don’t stop the conversation when the consumer actually raises their hand to learn more about your brand. Dive in and converse back. Learn about them and disclose information about you and your brand. Participate in consumer relationship building like our own personal relationship building. Engage. Relationships like this take time, consistency, dedication, and action. Don’t be afraid of your customers… Engage with them.

Your thoughts

What are your thoughts? Is it possible to create a relationship system utilizing technology? Leave a comment and let me know. Check back tomorrow for the conclusion of the series…Part 5.

Part 3 - How to Build a Brand: Brand Awareness

Over the past week we have been discussing how to build a brand in today’s business environment. In Part 1, we discovered how to break down the consumer population into highly targeted, highly defined segments of individuals. Part 2, we discussed how to create a “segment story” for each segment portraying a relevant message around the core brand idea. Now we get to put this information to work for us and begin to build brand awareness of our brand.

Building awareness in today’s overly communicated environment is no easy task. Every company in the world is trying to get a share of mind of your target segments. We need to develop a strategy that makes the consumer comfortable with our brand as well as begin a dialog with the consumer to a point where they will communicate in return. The main goal of brand awareness is to get the consumer to raise their hand and ask for more communication.

In the past, we built brand awareness through mass marketing. Plastering our brand all over TV, Radio, Print, and Outdoor would, for sure, drive awareness to our brand. But the saturation of these media as well as the shrinking attention span of the consumer has created a decline in this type of effectiveness. With that said, I still believe there is a need for this mass marketing to some extent. Below I have identified a strategy to generate awareness, which includes traditional marketing.

Two Steps to Build Awareness

Traditional Marketing/Advertising: This long standing strategy has been effective for years and will always have a place in marketing. This type of marketing is great to get the consumers comfortable in seeing your brand and even driving some consumers to take action. The mass appeal is and will forever be dead though. The use of traditional marketing/advertising has be highly targeted to our niche segments we identified in Part 1 and needs to portray the core brand message through the respected segment story outlined in Part 2. The goal with the traditional media component is to get the consumer familiar with your brand in their life. So, next time they are looking for your product/service and your brand comes up, it is a viable option.

Content Marketing: The other half of the strategy is content marketing. This is basically where you display and discuss relevant content targeted at your niche segments. This is typically done in blog, website, or social formats. Having relevant content designed and communicated for each particular niche segment is the key component in this marketing strategy. Building off the comfort level we created with traditional marketing, we can begin to start a dialog with the consumer when they run across our information in this online environment during their discovery process. The goal of content marketing is to get the consumer to become educated enough about our brand and how we would fit into their individual lifestyle that they raise their hand and engage in a conversation.

Conclusion

Building awareness is a very tough thing to do in today’s environment. A mixture of traditional marketing and content marketing that is highly targeted and relevant to our niche segments is the most successful strategy to become a viable option in their world. We need to make the consumer feel comfortable with our brand and be able to see how our brand would fit into their personal lifestyle.

Your Thoughts

What are your thoughts? Have you seen anything working in today’s environment that isn’t discussed here? What strategies do you utilize to build brand awareness these days?

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Part 1 - How to Build a Brand: Segmentation

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there is a great power transition going on in today’s marketing world. With the saturation of advertising and the increased use in social technologies online, we are seeing more consumers “pulling” messages from brands, companies, other customers, etc. and less effective “push” message strategies. This has lead to a “What’s in it for me?” attitude in many consumer segments.

Consumers want a brand to be malleable to fit into their own personal lifestyle and one that will conform to fit their individual needs. This can’t happen with mass “push” marketing. It can only happen with a conversation and the ability for the brand to listen, learn, converse, and adapt to an individual. Therefore, the end goal of marketing, in today’s world, is to converse on an individual level. But how do we get there? First, and foremost it starts with a very segmented look at the entire marketplace. I have identified, three steps to take to create this strategic segmented view.

1. Identify “Physical Image” of Best Customers: You need to know exactly who it is out of the entire population you want to talk with. Your “best customer” might be your most profitable, the easiest person to work with, the person with the most growth opportunities, etc. Whatever your “best customer” is, you need to identify exactly what it is this person/people look like. There may be a few different “best customers” that you identify. Next we need to create a detailed persona for these best customers.

2. Create Detailed Personas: Once we establish which “Best Customers” we want to talk with, we need to develop a persona, or benchmark on what individuals in this group might look like (demographic, psychographic, geographic, lifestyle attributes, etc). For example, one group might look like this:

• Male
• 25-28 (young professional)
• Lives in cities Kansas City, Des Moines, Denver, or Omaha
• Has a college education
• Purchases on emotion
• Is a Gadget-Guy
• Shops online
• Etc
• Etc
• Etc

The more specific you can make a list, the more “niche” your message to this group can be. Once we have a few personas created like this, we can begin to go find them.

3. Go Out and Find Them: The reason for the personas is to create a benchmark “person” that we can physically go find in the population. We need to identify where the individuals that match our personas hang out, gather information, converse, where/how they’re persuaded, what traditional media they see, what social media they participate, what affinity brands they enjoy, etc. With all this information, we can now begin to put together a marketing strategy for each “persona” segment with a media mix that spans both traditional and non-traditional mediums.

The more information you have about a particular segment, the more relevant power you will have with your message and content. This segmentation is the backbone to building a brand in today’s world. It must be done correctly.

What are your thoughts? Also, be sure to subscribe to get the next parts directly.

Building a Brand in Today’s Enviroment - A 5 Part Series

There was a lot of conversation around my previous post “Is Marketing as We Know It Dead?” about whether or not marketing is still a viable option in today’s business environment. Personally, I don’t think marketing is dead. I think that there is a lot of transition going on right now that will force marketers past their comfort zone and begin to converse with consumers on an individual level. I think there are some tremendous opportunities to build a brand that will fit in to the lifestyle of the consumer, creating a loyalty bond that could never be broken. I think there are still some tremendous need for traditional media. The media mix is a dynamic, constantly evolving beast that needs to be reviewed on a continual basis.

With all this being said, this week I am dedicating to explaining how to build a brand from scratch in today’s business environment. Be sure to not miss a day and subscribe to the feed in the right column on this page. Also, I want this week to be an open discussion, so if you agree or disagree feel free to comment below the post. It should be a great week!