To drive growth, branding must be a top-down strategy

Branding is critical to your growth strategy. But how strategic is your branding? 

• Is your brand’s story authentic?
• Is your story being told?
• Is it the “right” story? 

As growth-stage companies focus on developing their teams, product lines and operational systems, executives can lose sight of the deliberate planning and execution needed for effective branding.

But this is no time to take your eye off the brand, considering the reach, speed and superabundance in the mobile, social and web spheres. The digital economy has fundamentally changed how consumers and businesses alike come to recognize brands, research product purchases and develop brand loyalty.

(Image, above: I am ALWAYS personal branding)

Take consumer purchasing decisions. According to Nielsen/inPowered MediaLab, Consumers rely five times more on trusted content today than five years ago when deciding what to buy. This trusted content includes your own communications as well as user reviews, but more often than not, consumers are consulting third-party experts.

In the B2B market, 88% of business buyers say online content has played a moderate to major role in vendor selection, according to a report by the CMO Council and NetLine Corp. Expert influencers also predominate in B2B as well as B2C.

This is the environment in which strategic branding becomes not only more important, but potentially more effective (and measurably so) in helping your company make its mark, build a customer base and differentiate itself from the competition. How you tell your brand’s story is critical. C-level engagement in branding is essential to determine how best to drive interest in your company and solutions among prospects, customers and key influencers.

• Make your brand’s story authentic: Brand authenticity sets the stage for earning familiarity, developing trust and building ongoing relationships in your market. Authenticity must run deep. C-level executives need to prioritize brand communications for the whole team.
• Make the brand the “north star” for your company: The unifying idea about who you are as a business and what you stand for. Far more than just a visual identity or tag line, this is your commitment to the marketplace. Through your brand architecture, all products or subsidiaries roll up to this unifying idea, along with unified messaging aligned with clearly stated corporate values.
• Empower your people with the right direction, structure and processes: Don’t silo the brand. Rather, instill it across all business functions and levels, from the C-suite to brand ambassadors on the front lines of sales and customer service.
• Make sure your marketing and public relations efforts are integrated as well: These functions should be working together on earned, paid and owned media, establishing “connected communications”— an integrated approach across digital, social and offline channels such as events and print media.
• And keep the branding strategy on track with business development: Branding is not an 11th exercise as you go to market or face a crisis situation.

Right story = effective story.

This consistent, multifaceted approach leverages all channels to build an ongoing story, compounding the visibility of your brand and paving the way forward.

Reinforce your brand message continuously along the continuum from familiarity to trust to engagement with content that educates, inspires, advises or supports. Rethink your definition of news, to remain top of mind in an environment of ever-shorter attention spans and ever-faster circulation of information.

Issuing news releases and matte releases at key milestones in your company’s growth is no longer enough to keep your brand in circulation. Innovative companies are also expanding social channels, blogs and content marketing programs—using press releases to extend the reach and impact of these communications efforts, as well.

Distribution drives ongoing message discovery to existing and new constituents. Distribute messages not only to journalists on your targeted media lists, but to analysts and other experts, as well as your brand’s followers on social networks. Compelling, well-crafted messages are found by new audiences, redistributed across peer and professional networks and surfaced in search engine results. They can ripple across the web and back to your site for months after the messages are originally issued.

• Listen to your customers, potential customers and other key audiences in social media to determine what they care about and whose opinions they respect.
• Use social tools to analyze these influencers. Who are they? What are they talking about? These are the bloggers, analysts, trendsetters and other opinion-makers who can help amplify your message and build your community.
• Redouble efforts to establish relationships with key influencers. Bring them ideas that could help their audiences as a group and position your company as part of the solution.
• Use press releases to bring the imprimatur of your brand to bear on new areas of your brand strategy. Issue announcements on branded research, seasonal consumer tip sheets on your web site, B2B thought pieces on your blogs and other branded content.
• Unleash the power of multimedia. Statistics show that rich graphics and video make most communications more effective, including multimedia press releases. Here’s just one way: video increases people’s understanding of your product or service by 74%, according to recent research by Digital Sherpa.3
• Ongoing monitoring will help continually generate new ideas that underscore the value of your brand. An added benefit of monitoring is the capacity of social tools and other web techniques to measure the impact of public relations as never before—whether in terms of traffic driven to your web site, responses to calls-to-action or readings of sentiments surrounding your brand.

Even while driving a continuous flow of brand messaging, companies have to be careful to avoid volume simply for the sake of volume. You’re not going to get anywhere today if you don’t have a credible, unique story...Your content needs to provide value to the reader— be it fresh insight, entertainment or problem solving.

At some point, you may find the very reputation of your brand relying in real time on all these investments in authenticity, consistency and engagement—on your unflagging enterprise- wide brand commitment and empowerment. At times of crisis communications, it is even more critical that you and your customers have a very clear idea of your brand identity, its promise to the market, your corporate values, your key messages and how they all relate. Establish shared responsibility for monitoring to help pick up on stories—good or bad for your brand—very quickly. Plan ahead and have a SWAT team of pre-selected, media-trained company experts in place for rapid response. With crisis response that is true to your company’s inherent values, you may find that brand loyalty wins the day.

Bottomline… Stay top of mind: Brand awareness can help on many levels: building credibility, nurturing relationships, generating demand, driving revenue and attracting stakeholders to your venture. Consistent messaging continuously reinforced across channels and over time will help your brand remain top of mind in your market, with a valuable share of voice not only in the media but in all of the channels that are most relevant to your success.

PS: Remember, I am job hunting. Go check out my CV > www.iBradley.com