Creating a Brand Plan: Step Six

Belief progression is critical to turning passives into promoters and increasing the sharability of your content. Defining steps of the customer journey and conducting a touchpoint analysis is the beginning of developing your communication strategy. These are three key ingredients for Stage Six of creating your marketing brand plan:

Creating a Communication Strategy:

#1 – Define objections to changing the audience’s brand perception: There is a difference between the aspirational brand feelings we want and the perception of what is real. Consider where your brand needs improvement and how to communicate to each of your personas. Examine stages of purchase cycle when audience is ripe for learning and individual persona needs that must be embraced.

#2 – Connect customer experience to the media tactics: When examining the touchpoints each persona goes through during their journey, realize some are more impactful than others. Consider demographics about the persona (e.g. age, gender, education) to activate your brand in the marketspace. Some touchpoints generate awareness (e.g. radio) while others show active learning and buying signals (e.g. internet search).

#3 – Align your budget and measurement vehicles to determine ROI: Select communication tactics may be daily (e.g. social media) while others may be quarterly or annual (e.g. seminars). Measure daily communication tactics and how the persona impact can tie brand spend back to revenue to find your ROI. If your business is seasonal, understand when to increase or decrease your spend during the selling cycle.

Finally, determining primary and secondary persona opportunities can help your team prioritize where to spend budget. Regionalize your communication strategy based on primary personas and how they are likely to convert into leads. Then define the tactics that make the most sense for each touchpoint during customer learning.

Creating a Brand Plan: Step Five

With your SWOT analysis created, we can move toward brand development and communicating critical success factors. We’ll start this process by looking at brand positioning and the strategic intent behind delivering value. These are three key ingredients for Stage Five of creating your marketing plan:

Critical Success Factors:

#1 – Define the path to creating value for target personas: Intrinsic value for the customer goes well beyond mission, vision and values. Does your team understand the customer journey that builds a long term relationship with your audience? Consider a customer-centric approach to developing research insights by collaborating with your primary stakeholders.

#2 – Develop an Implication Map for each Success Factor: As you develop your long term plan, each audience persona will value different solutions you provide over others. Start with understanding “must have” factors for the audience to realize your intended value. Then create an Objective Statement that connects the Success Factor to the intended value. This can align your team to future positioning, department strategy and how to collectively measure brand lift.

#3 – Measure your Objective Statements through Customer Initiatives: Once your Objective Statement for each Success Factor is defined, you need a route-to-market for achieving the objective. Create program initiatives for each objective with measurable goals for your team. Look to measure how awareness and consumer beliefs changes over time to help validate each initiative and messaging shared externally.

Finally, belief progression depends on a well-defined communication plan and campaign strategy. Your communication plan is the final essential ingredient for activating your marketing brand plan into action. Now it’s time to define how well you understand the customer journey and can you create marketing experiences that move customer to act. We’ll address this in our final post in this series – Creating a Marketing Plan: Stage Six.

Creating a Brand Plan: Step Four

Now that we’ve identified the opportunity, the next step in our plan is to consider competitive forces in the market. One reliable medium for analyzing your current state is to create a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). These are three key ingredients for Stage Four of creating your marketing plan:

Build a SWOT Analysis:

#1 – Be honest when documenting your Strengths and Weaknesses: Connect with your internal team to validate strengths via data-driven sources. Market share growth, employee training and brand awareness in the marketplace are important to review. Partner closely with your digital analysts to define how you’re measuring conversions, learning from discontinues and refining inefficiencies inside your marketing process.

#2 – List the top three Opportunities in the next 12 months: After you have documented your Strengths, a critical step is to analyze Opportunities to grow market share. Prioritize which sales drivers will increase sales at a faster rate based on resources you have available. Many organizations have more than three opportunities that need attention, so clearly defining the initiatives is critical in the short run.

#3 – Objectively define your Threats and how they impact your business: Every brand plan should have a section where losing market share is addressed. Have you considered the implications of competitors leveraging your weaknesses against you? Develop your research insights to show the gaps leaving you vulnerable to Threats. Competitive benchmarking and customer VOC can help you understand where the target audience believes you have an advantage and where you have work to do.

Finally, your marketing plan should be advancing nicely at this point. You’ve addressed the environment you compete in, the opportunities ahead of you and the SWOT that ties both together. But we haven’t discussed your critical success factors, have we? We’ll address this in our next post – Creating a Marketing Plan: Stage Five.

Creating a Brand Plan: Step Three

Once you’ve identified unique differences inside your audience personas, it’s critical to determine the channel opportunity for each. Next we will analyze the customer journey each persona moves through while connecting with your brand. Here are three key ingredients for Stage Three of creating your marketing plan.

Define the Opportunity:

#1 – Determine the steps of your marketing and sales process: Each stage of the marketing funnel allows customers to interact with your brand. Consider each touchpoint inside the customer journey and how you’re connecting with the audience. Clarify each communication sent so the target persona perceives your brand experience as a personalized message specific to their needs.

#2 – Refine your programs to include learning opportunities: When consumers become a promoter of your brand, many good things happen. Help the customer learn as much as they can through positive communications with active tone and visual learning. Use different types of deliverables (e.g. video, email, social media) to connect with the audience based on how they prefer to engage with their favorite brands.

#3 – Validate how to accelerate brand awareness: By asking target personas how they prefer to be communicated with, it allows the customer to personalize their own experience. While older consumers still read the print newspaper, younger consumers often learn via digital media. What are the delivery mediums you’re utilizing that both connects with the audience and increases sharability?

Finally, defining the opportunity always comes with challenges to increasing market share. Some target personas might wait for weeks to receive your solutions or services, while others may want it on demand. Have you considered competitive forces looking to steal your customers based on gaps in your brand plan? We’ll address this in our next post – Creating a Marketing Plan: Stage Four.

Creating a Brand Plan: Step Two

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of defining your current environment, we’ll move on to identifying differences inside your audience. Every customer you do business with has a unique set of needs you must satisfy to grow market share. Here are three key ingredients for Stage Two of creating your marketing plan.

Segmenting Your Customers:

#1 – Define the most important attributes: Once you’ve determined the environment, create target audience personas to connect with based on voice-of-customer research. Enhance the clarity of your audience and segment the differences between current state and desired brand goal. The benefit of segmentation is personalized marketing messages that connect with the problem you can solve for your audience.

#2 – Determine the loyalty of each target persona: While each segment may have unique needs, one persona may be more loyal to your brand than another. Examine the reasons for loyalty and which competitive sales drivers lead to moving the needle faster than others. Then measure your sales volume to understand if loyal customer sales are up or vulnerable customer sales are down. Then begin personalizing your marketing brand plan for each persona.

#3 – Refine the priority of personas in your brand plan: After defining the sales drivers and critical attributes of each persona, refine your strategy needed to accelerate sales. Understand that some personas may be easier to convert into sales than others. What are key messages that critical personas need to hear to maintain and increase loyalty?

Finally, refining your personas is not enough to instantly grow sales. Some personas may be loyal, yet have a small potential to grow your market share. Likewise, other personas who have the potential to increase sales may not be loyal at all. We’ll address this in our next post – Creating a Marketing Plan: Stage Three.

Read Stage One of creating your Marketing Plan again by clicking here.

Creating a Brand Plan: Step One

Your company’s brand is a critical asset to growing your business. It helps your entire team define how to build comfort and confidence with your target audience. Here are three key ingredients for Stage One of creating your marketing brand plan.

Understanding the Current Environment:

#1 – Reflect on your most recent successes: By defining key performance indicators and sales drivers, your team can focus on what is working and, most importantly, the problems your company is highly competent at solving for the audience. Write down key metrics that you’ve achieved in the last 12 months, including new customers acquired, advertising reach and year-over-year increases in milestones of your business (e.g. market share, sales growth, customer service KPI’s, etc.).

#2 – Define where you fit inside the audience’s needs:  Once you understand your successes, it’s critical to examine how the audience’s needs may have evolved. Examine trends disrupting your industry and how your brand is positioned to respond to the change. Write down key attributes for audience needs and how business constraints make it difficult to satisfy those needs. Then define competitive advantages that makes your brand attractive to the target audience.

#3 – Measure your market share in comparison to the recent successes and changes in consumer needs: Create a comparison between how your brand is improving or declining based on the evolving customer. Understand how to develop the marketing strategy to differentiate your organization from the competition. Have you defined in your brand plan why customer preference occurs for one provider over another? Do you truly understand why you’re winning or losing? And what are the key messages you need to be sending to sustain your competitive advantages?

Finally, understanding your environment is not enough to moving your business forward. You must identify the gaps your team faces for audience needs that aren’t being satisfied. We’ll address this in our next post – Creating a Marketing Plan: Stage Two.

Integrated Marketing

Using customer intelligence and buyer behavior to your advantage directly drives brand value. Are you using integrated marketing to generate leads and brand awareness across multiple mediums? It becomes easier to increase customer interactions with your brand and influence behavior in different situations of the life cycle curve if you’re swimming in different content streams so to speak.

Nurturing, qualification and decision-making all occurs at very different stages in the buying process. You can drive value to your audience by using a multiple tactic approach, even when your content strategy is similar or messaging stays consistent. Inbound mediums like pay-per-click and SEO can help move your audience from the status quo phase into considering alternatives. Then use brand building mediums like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to guide your audience through the decision making stages.

Research can help close the feedback loop in the ROI phase and translate customer intelligence into actionable tactics. This help define the journey a customer goes through to become a passionate promoter of who you are. Ask your marketing team this question: are your tactics cooperating with or impeding the progress your brand?

Content for Search Engine Optimization

Google, Bing and Yahoo are all focused on creating a great user experience. To climb the search rankings, you need to keep in mind how relevant your content is and where you land in the rankings. The process of creating original, quality content is essential to being found organically by your target audience.

White papers and web copy should be optimized for SEO. Make sure your copy includes the highest traffic short tail keywords generating many search inquiries correlated with your solutions. Then reposition your content to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and any social site to help aid your reputation as thought leader. Blogs help increase conversions by playing a crucial role in walking your audience through the customer journey.

Pay-per-click links are wonderful for increasing traffic with audiences closer to the bottom of the funnel. Keep in mind there is a game to be played between increasing impact and keywords that propel site interaction. Watch your bounce and click through rate to determine if content is compelling and keeps visitors on your website. The Return in Influence can be measured by an increase in page views, time on page, new likes or followers, or e-commerce conversions.

SEO Keyword Analysis

Your marketing team should understand realize a website must satisfy both humans and Google’s algorithm. Increase your search engine optimization success by adding anchor text weblinks into your body copy. This can simultaneously increase your page clicks per site visit and enhance the overall user experience.  Keep in mind that marketing and branding can only go so far.  By adding content links in your body copy, your website will better support unique information useful to the reader.  Your metrics should specifically measure how your audience engagement is growing through an increase in number of site pages per visitor.

Always conduct market research on the best search engine optimization keywords for your body copy.  One of the most important aspects of search engine marketing is including in your content these phrases that users are actively searching for on Google. Long tail keywords can provide high quality, low volume search conversions specific to your marketing strategy. Short tail keywords increase the frequency of being found in search results, but are more difficult to win in general based on high competition. Add a mix of both to increase your success with local results and support with incremental pay per click campaigns that augment traffic.

Increasing Campaign ROI

When companies consider measuring campaign ROI, they almost always jump to how they’re going to measure the hard costs associated with implementing the campaign. While marketing automation and CRM software does that, it’s also valuable for companies to see that there are actually phases in ROI measurement that lead up to determining the returns in terms of dollars spent/dollars received.

There are many factors rolled up into these phases and your lead management solution should help you pinpoint and track those factors. It should help you determine where prospects are in the marketing sales funnel. It should guide you in tracking behavioral trends, responses to dynamic content and what tactics elicit both. Your lead management program should include a lead scoring mechanism that takes all of these factors into consideration and lets both the marketing and sales teams know where the individual is in the buying cycle so individuals can be delivered content that is unique to their current position. All of these concepts show how a lead is progressing through your marketing sales process so that the ROI can be measured at each phase.

1. The first phase of campaign ROI defines cost-per-inquiry and the value you bring to a prospect’s world. The best lead generation programs measure drivers that increase phase one traffic acquisition.  This may include pull tactics such as blogging and search engine optimization, or push tactics such as press releases or co-branded email campaigns to a co-sponsored opt-in list.  Measure hard costs, such as press release syndication services and email transmission fees, as well as soft costs, such as employee time or social media share-of-voice relative to content.  The success of these tactics should be measured by how effective they are in pushing leads to phase two of the process.

2. The second phase of campaign ROI defines inquiry-to-lead drivers and the lead nurturing tactics that increase participation. Lead definition in phase two directly determines costs associated with prospects who are sales ready and should be contacted by your sales team.  Configure your lead management technology to measure cost per tactic for each vertical, then compare response rates and consumer feedback surveys to understand if your dialogue is building an emotional connection.  Consumer surveying can help profile your ideal customer and understand if your lead management process is successfully qualifying your inquiries.

Training seminars to improve your team’s phone skills are worthwhile inquiry-to-lead costs that drive sales if your channel management strategy is accurately executed.  Direct mail executions to pre-qualified audiences are effective and can move prospects through the marketing sales funnel.

3. The third phase of campaign ROI measurement determines lead-to-close rate. Finally, your campaign management software should calculate lead-to-sales close metrics.  This final phase includes tactical costs, but also engagement metrics that can help you predict time-to-close.  This maximizes your sales marketing plan and return on marketing investment.  Create a lead scoring report in your campaign management system that measures stages of funnel prospect.  Three simple levels may include nurturing, qualifying and proposing.  Eliminate opportunities that have expired through lead filtering tactics or continued thought leader content per opt-in consent.