Brand activation rallies business, marketing and creative activities that help bring brands to life. Here are 5 simple tips to get off the starting blocks and energize your next marketing initiative toward brand consideration, selection and preference.
1. Identify your Uniqueness
Observe your brand in your marketing communications, website and social media channels and how you compare to your competitors. Make sure your uniqueness is creatively expressed and on par with how you deliver your services and your professional reputation. Talk to your employees, partners and customers to see if they observe the unique qualities and attributes that make you different.
2. Measure the Performance of Your Content
Analyzing your content will help you understand what content is helping your business generate leads, what content you should change, what content you should be promoting and what content you are missing and need to create. Test out different “calls to action” that are benefit or feature driven. Use Google Analytics to measure the time visitors spent on certain pages of your site, blog articles and identify the views, clicks, shares, likes, retweets and comments. Use this data to course correct what matters most to your business; lead generation for new opportunities, customer engagement, sales and revenue.
3. Infuse Your Business Model with Your Brand Promise
A brand strategy will help you connect your value proposition and unique attributes to how you do business as a persona, organization and the services/products you deliver. Changes in corporate direction or updates to your products or services are great opportunities to revitalize how you communicate what makes you different in a competitive marketplace. Your brand is not your logo, name, product or website — your brand is a perception of performance. It’s what your customers, partners and employees perceive about your business, how you deliver services and how it makes them feel.
4. Commit to Compete
Nothing speaks to your commitment to address a business marketing initiative like project readiness. Similar to athletes being in top condition to reach peak performance – you must prepare and trust your vision of marketing success to achieve it. Businesses that desire to achieve improved marketing results must have “readiness” to accomplish their goals. Identify internal team resources and roles, set realistic goals, timelines and a budget to execute a project plan. Appoint a project lead to facilitate internal input/feedback on the success of your current marketing mix. Maybe someone does your blog, another your PR and another your social media and another your manages updates on your website. Once internal ducks are aligned — engage with a digital marketing/design or branding agency to help you review and formalize a winning approach.
5. Go Strong
Don’t be intimidated by the marketing of larger or more successful competitors and don’t play it safe or not to lose. Be inspired by what they are doing and see your business being considered, selected and preferred for what you do. Challenge your self and your team to market your business to the best of your abilities, and gain competitive advantage. Go custom vs templates – as nothing out-of-the-box will fit how you do business or how your business needs to communicate its valuable difference. Engaging in any strategic marketing initiative, whether it be a new name/identity, website redesign, new products or services, marketing collateral, digital marketing or social media campaigns — requires input from all disciplines of vision, strategy, content, creative, marketing, web and implementation. Own what you are missing in your marketing mix and see your business where you want it to be.
Remember, how you communicate your difference is the foundation and strength of your brand.
We hope that you have been encouraged to embrace the activation of your brand as a central focus of your next marketing initiative and hopefully we’ve inspired you to take the next step. If you want to learn more about our brand activation services, drop us a line.
