Let’s take the buzz out of this term by looking at what it is, and what it means for your business.
Think of the answers to these questions as ingredients to a recipe.
In the same way that you don’t eat ingredients but rather a meal crafted within ingredients, the beauty of having these questions answered will allow you to create something beautiful. Something of value.
It’s not enough to have the ingredients. You need a flame, maybe another dash of salt, more acidity, and you need time for all these elements to become the thing. The thing will attract the right customer, employee, and partnership because all this time, the thing lived inside those looking at how you do what you do.
Business owners also lump branding in with marketing because the overlap of visual communication seems natural. Let’s be clear: Marketing lives in the marketing department, and branding lives in every department!
Let’s break it down:
Why knowing who you are is the most important thing.
Having a consensus about who you are and what you do seems straightforward. In our brand strategy workshops, we often see exco members who have opposing views about what they do – and don’t even know it. Fix this first, or somewhere down the line; something will have to give…
Your purpose: If profit was taken out of the equation, what do you want to achieve.
Your Mission: We will accomplish X by Y because Z
Your Vision: What your world looks like when you have nailed the mission.
If you manage to make it past this image, we can dive deeper:
Break down what you do to the benefits to your customers.
Functional benefits: The immediate, apparent pros to using your product
Emotional benefits: Ask and answer, “When I use this product, I feel ________”
Self-expressive benefits: Ask and answer, “When I use this product, I am ________”
Social benefits: Ask and answer, “When I use this product, I relate to people who are ________”
People will literally camp outside a closed iStore before launching a new iPhone because they have managed to package all these benefits into one thing.
Think of the answers to these questions as ingredients to a recipe.
In the same way that you don’t eat ingredients but rather a meal crafted within ingredients, the beauty of having these questions answered will allow you to create something beautiful. Something of value.
It’s not enough to have the ingredients. You need a flame, maybe another dash of salt, more acidity, and you need time for all these elements to become the thing. The thing will attract the right customer, employee, and partnership because all this time, the thing lived inside those looking at how you do what you do.
Business owners also lump branding in with marketing because the overlap of visual communication seems natural. Let’s be clear: Marketing lives in the marketing department, and branding lives in every department!
Let’s break it down:
Build a benefits sheet, that will help your team discuss your offering and positioning to add value
If you don’t have a crystal clear image of the persona in mind when you create your products, marketing material, social content, lead magnets, and funnels, stop and craft that persona first! Name her, discuss her hobbies, and where she goes on vacation. What she does in her free time. Whether she’s on Facebook or Instagram, or both? Does she listen to podcasts? Would she listen to ours? If so, why? These questions matter as your brand efforts are a race for attention. You can filter dozens of bad marketing ideas by putting this girl’s wants and needs on the office fridge.
Conversations like these will not only help the marketing team with creative elements but will also inspire the product designer, the sales team, and definitely your accountant!
Build a customer persona, that will help your team discuss your offering and positioning.
Here, you’ll need a bit of system thinking. We use this model to get things going!
Link your strategies in this way and make sure that word-of-mouth marketing is somewhere on this graph. (Normally this would be at 9 o’ clock on a watch face)
If you manage to make it past this image, we can dive deeper:
Firstly, if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it!
Pick as many growth metrics for your business as listed below as possible. Calculate the values for each.
| Metric | Definition | Formula | Grow by |
|---|---|---|---|
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Net Promoter Score (NPS): |
NPS measures customer satisfaction and loyalty by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the company to others. It helps businesses gauge overall customer sentiment and identify areas for improvement. |
Percentage of Promoters (customers who score 9 or 10) - Percentage of Detractors (customers who score 0 to 6) |
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|
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): |
CAC measures the cost incurred by the business to acquire a new customer. It includes all marketing and sales expenses divided by the number of new customers gained during a specific period. |
Total Marketing and Sales Expenses / Number of New Customers Acquired |
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Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): |
CLV represents the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over their entire relationship with the company. It helps assess the long-term value of acquiring and retaining customers. |
Average Purchase Value × Average Purchase Frequency × Average Customer Lifespan |
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ROAS: |
ROAS stands for Return on Advertising Spend. It measures the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. ROAS helps businesses evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns in driving sales and generating revenue. |
ROAS=(Advertising Spend / Revenue Generated from Advertising)×100 |
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Conversion Rate: |
Conversion rate measures the percentage of website visitors, leads, or prospects who take the desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, or subscribing to a service. It's a key metric for evaluating the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts. |
(Number of Conversions / Total Number of Visitors) * 100 |
Analising feedback and re-engaging with |
For each of these, set a monthly growth percentage target and track that target weekly, at least! Our clients win by getting daily tracking scorecards on these metrics via a fantastic app called Databox. We also use this to communicate various custom-built business intelligence metrics.
Set engagement targets: You can ask: “Is this thing working?” a thousand times. You won’t know if you can’t measure it to a goal. Even if things seem dire, one can find inspiration in missing targets as long as you had them in the first place.
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Branding creates advocates. Marketing creates leads.
Branding is long-term. Marketing is short-term.
Branding defines your trajectory. Marketing helps your cash flow.
Branding is about getting people to feel something. Marketing is about getting people to do something.
People will share content because of:
Social Currency: The content allows someone to seem informed, intelligent, progressive or anything that could resonate with their identity.
Triggers: What keeps people talking about things after the fact,
Emotion: Ideas that spark happiness, anger, sadness, whimsy will be shared more than ideas that don’t.
Practical value: It’s built into our DNA, help them survive, and it will thrive.
Story: Information can travel under the guise of what seems to be a story.
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Podcasting is a kind of content marketing that allows you to establish yourself (or your brand) as an expert in a field.
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