Over the last decade, consumer-brand interactions have become more blurred. Post-pandemic, consumers expect their favorite brands to be accessible 24/7 through all means of communication – from phone, to email, to chat, and even social media direct messages. Brands now have the added pressure of creating a more personalized interaction with every single consumer across these different channels.
On top of all this, consumers now have the option of connecting and engaging with brand employees (ie. a company’s CEO on LinkedIn) as opposed to the brand itself (company website). These increased brand touchpoints have led to communication gaps for organizations that use multiple channels, contributing to an inconsistent strategy across platforms.
However, customer expectations are still at an all-time high – and who could blame them? But this means any cracks in brand strategy are even more noticeable to customers. And since customers are more demanding now than ever before, a disjointed strategy will only confuse and push customers away.
So, what can organizations do to ensure their brand strategy is aligned across the organization?
Don’t Silo Your Brand Team
In an ideal world, the brand should touch every part of the organization. It goes beyond social media and newsletters (though those are vital too!). There are many creative aspects of the brand that fly under the radar, including tone of voice, positioning, imagery and more.
However, often non-marketing teams, such as sales, customer success, customer service, and even finance, don’t think to include brand marketers in their communication strategies, potentially leading to a disconnect in messaging and overall customer experience.
In order to better align your brand team with the entire organization, marketers need insight into customers’ ever-evolving demands. To get this information, the brand team needs to collaborate with the entire organization to get input on what they need to provide for a consistent brand message, look, and feel. This all starts with a messaging framework. The brand team should provide clear messaging for all teams to align to the overall brand value props and company values. This messaging can then be tailored for each team and only then does it come alive through sales emails, blog posts, and customer success training sessions. All these customer touchpoints need to be consistent in terms of logo use, colors, fonts, and, most importantly, messaging.
Consistency at every customer touchpoint ensures a cohesive brand experience. Because messaging needs to be repeated across different channels in order for it to stick; otherwise, it’s just background noise.
Marketing Technology News: MarTech Interview with Dorian Kendal, CMO at Netlify
Use Data to Inform Your Brand Strategy
And how does an organization learn what customers want? They talk to them. Without doing so, your team may be executing the wrong strategy and complicating your customers’ needs. For example, brand teams may be over-indexing positioning and messaging on one problem, when in actuality, the target customer wants help solving something else entirely. Doing focused research on a consistent basis can help your brand focus on what your target customer wants and needs.
This includes having insight into target markets, competition, message testing, customer preferences, and more. For example, take a brand team that is focused on posting on YouTube frequently. They may have a robust plan, but with no data to back up a strategy on why YouTube is the right channel to reach their audience, they could be missing the mark. If the team conducted research, they could uncover what types of content/channels their customers interact with the most. Maybe their target audience enjoys receiving content via email or social media, but without research, they’ll never know. The bottom line: data informs your brand and marketing strategy.
Brands should also test their messaging/positioning on their target customer before making large changes to their strategy. In 2021, Wistia did extensive research to understand which parts of the video creation process were cumbersome to users or could be consolidated into one platform. We found that hosting webinars was a top pain point for marketers because it typically involved moving between multiple platforms to get from ideation to post-production. This finding informed Wistia’s 2021 product roadmap, leading to the release of Wistia Live the following year–a feature that allows marketers to easily create, host, market, and analyze webinars all in one platform. Research takes the guesswork out of marketing and branding and focuses a brand’s entire strategy.
Misalignment across an organization is obvious to both current and potential customers. With so many offerings available at the click of a button, it’s essential for companies to create a full-brand experience that speaks to their target customers best – before another company does it. By constantly communicating across teams and baking data and research into everything, organizations can create the most authentic brand that not only attracts new customers but also keeps them coming back.
Marketing Technology News: How to Level Up Marketing Automation With Generative AI
