The shifting trends in media consumption

Media consumption has altered drastically in the past few years. Streaming services proliferate, while cable subscriptions and satellite customers keep defecting and cutting the cord. The internet has irrevocably shifted the media landscape format with major implications for advertisers. 

Dig deeper: Why we care about connected TV and OTT advertising

What’s the difference between CTV, OTT and linear TV?

The two primary differences here are the device used for streaming and how people watch the content delivered to that device.

CTV vs. OTT 

CTV is delivered on large-screen devices, like the TV in the living room. It’s the biggest screen in the house and connects advertisers with multiple people simultaneously. It is delivered within streamed content through services like Netflix and Disney+. It can also be streamed through smart TVs, Blu-ray players and game consoles like PlayStation and Xbox (there were 1 billion in 2019). 

It provides significantly better targeting capabilities than traditional TV, boosting efficiency and amplifying ROI. It’s also immensely popular, reaching 204.1 million worldwide viewers in 2022, according to Insider Intelligence.

OTT is delivered on smaller-screen devices, like tablets and smartphones. It connects advertisers with fewer people and is better suited for developing a 1:1 relationship. Both CTV and OTT can also include video-on-demand (VOD) services. 

Linear TV

Linear TV is “traditional” television programming delivered by satellite or cable, generally only available on larger screens, whether in the living room, den or even a bedroom. 

Programming is consumed linearly — meaning viewers watch episodes as they air and in the order they air. (This doesn’t account for cable/satellite services offering DVR functionality.) Linear TV can offer limited on-demand services, but not in the same way as CTV or OTT.

What are the benefits of CTV advertising

It’s more cost-effective than traditional options. CTV advertising ad impressions increased by 31% quarter over quarter in Q4 2020, according to Conviva’s State of Streaming report. 

Dig deeper: 4 tips to get the most out of CTV advertising

It provides powerful targeting capabilities, improved engagement, increased reach and access to detailed campaign metrics to inform future advertising decisions. While cookies are going away, IP targeting is here to stay. Mobile phones can also be targeted; users often project video from their phones to a bigger screen.

It also offers:

• Cost savings via programmatic buying,
• High-quality delivery of visual ads. 
• Enhanced opportunities for interactive campaigns.
• Performance measurement and optimization. 
• Easy integration with new platforms.

Setting up a CTV campaign: A step-by-step process

Leveraging the benefits connected TV advertising offers isn’t rocket science, but it requires specific steps.

Step 1: Understand your target audience

CTV advertising lets you connect with almost any segment and helps you broaden your reach. Remember that these ads are usually displayed on the largest screen in the home, which often means presenting your campaigns to multiple people — parents and their children, for instance. So, in addition to understanding your target audience, you should consider how others will receive your ads within the viewing group. 

Step 2: Define your goals 

What do we want viewers to do after seeing the ad? Should they:

• Purchase a product or service?
• Learn more about your offering?
• Connect with your brand elsewhere?

How will that action funnel viewers toward the next touchpoint? What is the next touchpoint after that? 

Successful CTV campaigns start with a plan based on clearly defined goals that matter to your success.

Step 3: Choose your platforms

The CTV ad marketplace works across streaming platforms. However, you’ll need to choose your platforms with care. Each one has a slightly different audience composition and membership numbers. 

For instance, now that Netflix is showing ads on lower cost subscriptions, it offers a large and vert diverse audience. Apple TV, on the other hand, has a much smaller audience base, which is less diverse because it doesn’t have the same breadth of content as Netflix. Ask yourself a few questions here:

What type of content does my audience gravitate toward?

Netflix has something for everyone, but what about platforms like Discovery+? HBO Max could be well worth your time and money, but what about IMDB or Tubi? With the proliferation of streamers, advertisers must dig deep and do their due diligence on each potential platform to make informed decisions.

How does the platform handle ads?

Each streamer seems to take a different path here. For example, Hulu places ads strategically throughout streamed content. Peacock has a different viewership strategy and puts all the ads at the very beginning. Consequently, ad placement/timing affects audience retention. The real-time auctions can be slightly different, provider to provider. Each platform’s definition of video completion rate might differ.

Based on your answers to these two questions, you can move on to the next step: creating effective video campaigns.

At my agency, we also like to use keywords for targeting. This helps us find buyer intent signals which are great identifiers of penetration opportunities in the marketplace. Doing so gives more relevance to the personas we pursue and complement other targeting layered in to create the most responsive campaign possible.

Step 4: Create effective video campaigns

You’re putting an ad in a place where premium content is broadcast. Your content has to match that quality. Today’s sophisticated audiences expect company-produced content to be polished and professional. That means doing more than using high-end equipment and working with the right individuals from ideation through production and delivery. 

Various ad formats will be essential to help capture different types of screen sizes but making a storytelling video that’s “ready for primetime” is probably your biggest hurdle.

How to measure CTV effectiveness 

Some of the primary KPIs to include in your dashboard are:

Reach

Reach shows how many people have seen your ad and helps you understand visibility and campaign exposure. To determine this, divide the number of unique viewers by the total number of viewers. Your reach is also tethered to inventory (i.e., how big of a stake you buy in any one package).

Impressions

This is the number of times your ad has been viewed overall and does not account for unique viewers. It can help you determine how often to show your ad and understand overall exposure. Determining impressions is simple — add up the number of times the ad has been shown.

Viewability

Viewability refers to whether a viewer saw the ad. This factors into campaign success because if the ad is displayed but not seen, it cannot build awareness or create conversions. Viewability is determined by dividing the number of viewable impressions by the total number of impressions.

ROI

Calculating return on investment can be tough, but it’s important for determining the overall success of your CTV ad campaign. You can track viewer conversion rate or track brand awareness or purchase intent.

Completion rate/viewer engagement

Completion rate speaks to viewer engagement and it’s just a measure of how many people watched your ad all the way through. A high completion rate may indicate that people are engaged with your ad. However, some platforms don’t broadcast skippable ads, which can skew your results. With some pre-roll, you can sometimes match YouTube’s policy and not pay if someone skips before five seconds.

Frequency

If your ad is shown to the same people too many times within a short time, it can lead to fatigue. However, it can also be a good tactic for building brand awareness. Shoot for balance here and use a measurement tool that tracks the number of times each viewer has seen your ad.

Conversion rate

Conversion is the Holy Grail of all advertising, not just connected TV advertising. It’s also one of the most critical metrics for determining campaign success. Make sure to define what counts as a “conversion” before your campaign goes live, whether that’s a website visit, purchase or something else.

A note on metrics

It’s not always as simple as “video clicks” because CTV ads will likely produce more view-through than first-time click-through conversions. Remember, we’re at the top of the funnel! Give your audience time to absorb and catch up with your brand across all your placements. 

Dig deeper: How CTV can deliver market research for B2B marketers

View-throughs take place as late as 30-60 days for some consumer products and services. This means the content worked, but they weren’t ready to take action when the video played. Meanwhile, we’ve gotten 3-5% CTR on mobile devices streaming a very high-end TV spot we produced.

Your advertising metrics can create audience segments and guide your campaign’s performance. This also allows for clear attribution and precision since you will have tons of data to sort through. The more organized you are upfront, the better.

Moving your advertising game forward with CTV

CTV advertising looks to continue as more and more people shift away from cable and satellite to streaming platforms. However, not all platforms are created equal. 

Advertisers should dig deep to determine which streamers best suit their connected TV efforts. They should then create evocative ad campaigns based on actionable, meaningful goals supported by KPIs to measure progress and success. 

The post How to set up and measure CTV ad campaigns appeared first on MarTech.

Two common types of business evolution today are innovation and rebranding. Although they both indicate change, they are remarkably dissimilar. Understanding what each term implies is critical before deciding on a path for your brand.

Innovation: A definition

Let’s start with the definition of innovation. According to Merriam-Webster, innovation is “a new idea, method or device or the introduction of something new.” 

It’s the idea of creating value by bringing new ideas to life. The introduction of the smartphone and the tablet computer are good examples of innovation at work. Others include:

• The automobile.
• The assembly line.
• The airplane.
• Electric vehicles.
• Biodegradable oil-based plastics.

However, it’s not just about inventing something new. It’s also the process behind what makes it happen. For instance, without the ongoing miniaturization of microchips, neither smartphones nor tablet computers would have been possible. The same applies to touchscreen technology and many other processes and products that came together to allow something new to exist.

How to innovate 

Most organizations like to claim that they are innovative. Many even add it to their mission statement or tagline. However, there’s a world of difference between claiming to be innovative and actually innovating. Is your organization innovative? Let’s cover some important questions to ask.

• Do you see innovation-fueled growth as imperative to success? Do you have a list of cascaded targets that reflect your growth plan and provide guidance moving forward? 
• Do you have a portfolio of initiatives that are risk and time-balanced? Are they coherently described? Do you have the right resources allocated for each?
• Can you outcompete others in your industry by developing and launching innovative products or services before they do and with other competitive advantages?
• Are your innovations launched on the correct scale? Are they placed within the correct markets? 
• Do you empower, encourage and reward your people for focusing on experimentation, creativity and other attributes of innovation? 

If you answered anything but “yes” to those questions, you are not innovating. Chances are good that you’re lagging behind the competition. 

That still leaves a lot to understand here. For instance, when do you innovate and when do you hedge your bets?

As an agency owner, I focus more on innovation to evolve, scale or accelerate if there’s a race to dominate market share and less on conservative reasons, like risk-balanced initiatives.

You must also consider the idea, along with your available resources and capabilities. You’ll find that some potential products are geared more toward niche markets (i.e., luxury goods, many smartphone apps and the like). Other potential products have a much broader market. For instance, social networks can scale globally, although many factors (i.e., network focus), will affect this. 

Innovators must determine the reach and magnitude of any given product or service idea before pursuing it, as this is when you’ll allocate resources and identify the risks involved. Of course, you can always choose to scale up over time, but in today’s ultra-competitive world, that can be a huge mistake. 

To remain at the leading edge, you’ll also need to ensure the required resources and capabilities can be brought to bear quickly. Be prepared for a full rollout and have manufacturing facilities, distributors, suppliers and other partners in place well before your go-live date.

Rebranding: A definition

In contrast, “rebrand” is defined as “to change or update the brand or branding of (a product, service, etc.).”

Rebranding is a commitment to change that is either significant or surface-level. For instance, when Kia changed its logo in 2021, many assumed that was the extent of the rebranding efforts. However, that visual evolution was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It was meant to “signify the automaker’s bold transformation and all-new brand purpose,” according to Kia’s press release at the time.

What to consider before rebranding:

Building a brand identity, new or updated, often requires the right budget and timeline. In most cases, you can expect a rebranding effort to take 6-12 months, depending on what is involved. Attempting to rush the process usually backfires, as well. I always recommend performing a brand audit first. This will lay everything on the table and help you understand what is possible, where the gaps are etc.

Like innovation, a good amount of research is necessary when considering any rebranding effort. You’ll need to create a sense of:

• Who your customer base is.
• How they currently perceive your brand.
• And how that perception needs to shift. 

Research will also help you identify future growth opportunities and the resources and capabilities necessary to capitalize on them.

In addition to research, you’ll need to identify (or create) a competitive advantage. Without one, your rebranding efforts will be for nothing. Take Kia’s 2021 rebrand as an example again. If the automaker had simply changed its logo and tagline, its audience would have seen through the gimmick quickly. 

Instead, Kia has doubled down on reinventing its lineup of vehicles, focusing on performance, environmental impact, affordability and other vital issues. It is this unique combination that makes Kia such a force to contend with on the market.

Remember that rebranding aims to showcase your brand’s strengths in the market and sell more products or services. 

Does your brand need a rebrand or a relaunch?

Rebranding requires a commitment of time, money and effort. As such, it’s always at your discretion. However, you may not see the ROI you want from those efforts. Changing market conditions could wreak havoc. 

You’ll find many reasons to consider rebranding, and the creative decisions will affect the brand positioning, brand creative and brand visual identity. Here are some of the most common reasons.

• You need to align your internal and external brand perceptions.
• You want to define your target market better.
• You want to reach a new audience for a product launch.
• You need to revitalize your brand and enhance your relevance.
• Your mix of products/services has changed significantly.
• Your market position isn’t unique.
• Your visual brand is outdated and in need of revitalization/revamping.
• Your brand image is wrong, and you need a strong brand identity.
• Your brand personality is non-existent or off.
• You want a more positive brand image.
• You want a purpose-driven brand.
• Your organization has merged/been acquired.
• You have a new mission.

The challenges associated with rebranding efforts will vary depending on which of the reasons listed above is true. 

Products, services and processes that address customer needs

Brand innovation or rebranding is more than just changing your organization’s visual identifiers. You must go far beyond replacing your logo and changing your corporate colors. It includes developing new products and services that address your customers’ true needs.

A brand is a market-driven outcome, while innovation is internally driven. Innovation can be considered the process of change that comes from new ideas, such as a new product or service. You must recognize the difference between brand innovation and a new brand campaign. 

Businesses need innovation to advance customer experiences. A new product, service or process that addresses customer needs is a key part of the growth cycle. But to drive success, the new addition must add value. 

It’s also important to remember that a company’s innovation efforts aim to spread innovation principles internally as widely as possible. The chief marketing officer should not be responsible for driving meaningful brand perception and equity. Instead, they should focus on communicating those intentions clearly and concisely. 

Corporate financial services companies don’t win by providing the best service. They achieve victory through word-of-mouth advertising. The benefit of having people talk about your brand and its quality is significant in an industry like this. 

When it comes to modern marketing and idea generation, focus on new products, services and process efficiencies. Create succinct messages that can be conveyed very quickly. Once you’ve uncovered a brand innovation, it needs to be communicated in a way that your customers understand.

Focus on communicating what innovations will mean for customers in their lives rather than on broad, aspirational messages. Your customers have more choices today than ever, and the need for clear value propositions has never been greater. Marketing must lead and not just impress internal stakeholders. It’s vital that marketing ensures that customers understand everything about the new product or service. 

If your offer does not have crystal-clear value propositions, you’ll have a tough time trying to win consumers. A company that is not enhancing its branding is not likely committed to making improvements. Even updating your brand identity design can make you look more legit, rather than scaring prospects away with a dated or unappealing look.

The boardroom must be convinced that a campaign focusing on aspirational messages is doomed to fail because it does not communicate the brand’s value proposition or reflect what is happening with new products or services. 

Everyone must be involved in the brand innovation process. The people inside the boardroom are responsible for creating and implementing new types of functional deliverables that will help achieve meaningful brand innovation. 

Ensuring a successful rebranding rollout

To create a strong brand image, you need an action plan. The rebranding process must be prepared with milestones and a timeline, including the branded asset conversion plan. The transition phase is crucial in a successful rebranding effort, as not all channels or touch points may need to change simultaneously.

Planning is essential for a successful rebranding rollout, including advertising, website and packaging updates. The goal here is to ensure that the transition goes smoothly for customers who will likely have seen many changes in the short time between a branding announcement and the new brand launch. 

It’s also essential to provide training for employees. Empowering them to advocate for the new brand leads to buy-in from everyone involved.

How do you go about innovating your business?

Innovating can be immensely challenging. To begin, pay attention to your product performance across your entire portfolio. Where do you see the most energy? Where do you notice drop-offs? 

You must also be prepared for your launch and have a clear, well-defined marketing plan long before your go-live date. Understand the metrics that indicate success and course-correct as necessary.

Finally, make sure you have the right tools for the job. My article on brand strategy provides step-by-step guidance for innovating your business. Check out the toolkit for more information on each step in a rebranding or innovation project.

How a brand can unlock new product innovation

Rebranding is labor-intensive. It requires a lot of time, effort and money. Just some of the most critical steps you’ll need to follow include:

• Determining your target market and new positioning.
• Creating a value proposition that resonates with those people.
• Reviewing web analytics for insights that could inform your new direction.
• Designing a consistent experience across all touchpoints.
• Developing an integrated brand strategy, including messaging, design and marketing materials.
• Producing assets to support the launch (from website to social media).
• Including targeted content in paid acquisition campaigns through platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

Rebranding can win you new markets and real estate in consumers’ minds. Regardless of why you’re rebranding, your company’s mission needs to be at the forefront. It’s also imperative that you conduct a brand audit to:

• Understand the current perception of your existing brand.
• Quantify the work required for rebranding.
• Find out how successful other brands have been with similar efforts.

Test your rebrand with campaigns

As a final note, you must test your rebrand. Marketing campaigns offer the means to do this by segmenting your audience to gain improved clarity and more accurate data. It’s possible to split your audiences between different campaigns based on specific needs and outcomes and then make informed decisions regarding your rebranding efforts.

Deciding on a path for your brand

Innovation is vital for organizations of all shapes and sizes across every industry. Rebranding can also be critically important. Both require in-depth research, time, planning and resources.

Everyone in the organization should be involved in the discussion so that each team can bring their best to the table.

The post Innovation vs. rebranding: How to choose the best change for your business appeared first on MarTech.

However, most likely, you don’t need a CMO. At least, not yet. 

Why argue against hiring such a pivotal figure in your C-suite? There are plenty of reasons to hold off on hiring an in-house CMO, ranging from the effect on your bottom line to a CMO’s inability to build successful marketing efforts without an established sales cycle to extrapolate from — let alone a team to build out content and campaigns.

For companies and funded startups under $10M in revenue who are seeking demand generation marketing, the following information on fractional leaders should be helpful.

What is a chief marketing officer (CMO)?

Before we dive too far into the conversation about why you might not need to hire a CMO just yet, let’s establish a baseline. What is a CMO? What do they do? How does their presence (or lack thereof) affect different organizations?

Many business owners, CEOs and other decision-makers will find that the role of the CMO has evolved a great deal in recent years. Once upon a time, CMOs were just experienced marketing professionals who oversaw the marketing department and liaised with other executives. There was a lot of trial and error and measuring results was more than a little challenging.

All that has changed with the advent of digital tools and modern marketing methods. Today, CMO positions are more than just higher-level marketing supervisors. They blend technology with traditional marketing capabilities while thriving in a chaotic, ever-changing environment and masters of creating demand. Once separate from other executives, CMOs are now part of the C-suite and can help you achieve strategic goals.

Consultants vs. CMOs

Marketing consultants have their place but are quite different than CMOs. Consultants tend to focus on a very specific, niche area to help you get out of the mud, so to speak. (Like D2C marketing.) Full-time and fractional CMOs are there for the long haul, solving a multitude of problems you have and avoiding ones you don’t have yet. 

In the case of a brand strategy consultant, a strategic marketer can make good sense, since branding, for example, is typically a big, “one-time” thing that you establish and continue to adhere to and build out indefinitely.

Of course, CMOs can consult on specific needs. But most often, they’re more interested in being part of a bigger solution, like go-to-market planning and execution that achieves your business growth plan.

Responsibilities of a chief marketing officer

What does a CMO do? Today, they have four primary roles within the organization. Regardless if they focus on products or services, they:

• Take specific actions to drive growth.
• Are an innovation catalyst.
• Are a capability builder.
• Are your brand’s storyteller. 

Let’s take a closer look at each of the main chief marketing officer responsibilities.

Growth driver

CMOs are responsible for creating and managing a profitable growth strategy. However, many do not feel prepared to actually drive growth in important areas like market share and gross margin. 

This disconnect between responsibility and ability can create big problems for organizations that are relying on their CMOs to help them grow.

Change agent

Innovation is critical to creating stand-out brands and marketing collateral that truly moves the needle. However, it’s not just a vision that must be harnessed to fuel innovation and forward momentum.

It also requires data and intelligence, which means the CMO must be tied into relevant data streams and those often lie outside the traditional boundaries of the marketing department. Dig deeper into the need for innovation and the challenge surrounding it.

Brand storyteller

I will admit, branding can be a big departure point between CMOs. There are mostly numbers-focused CMOs — and for billion-dollar brands milking a cash cow, that’s probably perfect. 

But for SMBs and mid-tiers? You need a storyteller. Brand storytellers create and tell your brand’s story through multiple channels and touchpoints. 

The CMO must act as both a storyteller and an orchestra director, ensuring that all outreach efforts, customer service efforts and the entire customer experience communicates the story you want to tell. Interested in learning more about storytelling for your brand? Check out my piece, How to be charismatic: Marketing with charm, heart and personality.

Capabilities architect

CMOs must also be capability builders. Because of the need for technology, they are centrally involved in the purchase of new tech that will have wide-ranging effects across the entire organization over time and help you avoid the headache of technology. 

To support those roles, CMOs have a laundry list of responsibilities that includes the following:

• Creating and implementing marketing campaigns.
• Overseeing market research.
• Analyzing metrics.
• Overseeing all PR and public-facing communications.
• Working closely with other members of the C-suite.
• Balancing strategic vs. tactical initiatives.

Technology has not only revolutionized the role of the CMO, but also the consumer experience. That means CMOs must now be able to manage all aspects of the business related to customer expectations and service, not just heading up marketing campaigns. 

It’s a fundamental shift from product-centric roles to customer-centric processes. It also means there is a consistent need for innovation in terms of marketing and outreach and greater importance placed on creating a seamless customer experience. 

We also need to respect the fact that a good CMO will come with a vetted, outsourced marketing department or has the capacity of building out a great marketing team, if need be. 

Their understanding of strategy vs. tactics will make all the difference in prioritizing your marketing needs.

​Pulling right from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) “rocks, pebbles, sand” analogy… If you fill a jar with large rocks first, the sand easily slips into all the spaces. But if you put all the niche details in the jar first (sand!), the rocks will be harder to fit later. 

Most companies focus on too many objectives at once. However, it is more efficient to focus on the big, strategic stuff (rocks) first and everything else (pebbles and sand) will follow. In marketing, focusing on rocks is a vital tactic to meet your business’s essential needs.

Dig deeper: 5 CMO tips to transform marketing operations from killer to dream fulfiller

Qualifications of a CMO

To uphold and fulfill CMO roles and responsibilities within the organization, a chief marketing officer should have specific qualifications. These include:

• A bachelor’s degree in business administration or a related field, at a minimum.
• A minimum of 10 years of experience in marketing departments, including significant marketing leadership experience. Big advertising agency experience is also a plus.
• A wide range of technical skills that apply to marketing, including SEO, software design, social media channel lead generation, sales management technology, CRMs and email, for instance.
• Strong interpersonal, communication and leadership skills.

CMO salary and pay structure

No discussion of why your organization doesn’t need a full-time CMO just yet would be complete without touching on pay and salary structure. 

PayScale points out that CMOs today earn $89,000 to $273,000 per year, a not inconsequential amount for startups and SMBs that need to maximize profitability to focus on growth and agility. The average is $175,000. Of course, that will vary depending on whether the CMO is in a B2B or B2C or even a D2C brand.

Why you don’t need a CMO yet

Most startup companies don’t need a CMO. In fact, they probably can’t afford one. Small businesses struggle to turn a profit, so paying a large salary to a full-time, in-house chief marketing officer doesn’t make a lot of financial sense. 

It’s also important to point out that early-stage companies rarely have the replicability that most CMOs need to do their jobs correctly. 

Maybe marketing agencies can fill that gap for a while. But over time, you want someone who really understands the levers that make your business grow short and long term. 

Dig deeper: Is it time to say good-bye to the CMO role or just give it a new acronym?

When to hire a CMO

Product launches can be a perfect moment to take that plunge, for example, but it can be incredibly difficult to tell when it’s time to finally decide to hire a dedicated, in-house CMO. After all, if your company is earning less than $10 million, there’s rarely a need for a full-time professional in this role. The sheer cost is the primary downside. 

There’s also the fact that most CMOs require an existing pattern from which to extrapolate — think of an established sales cycle. Startups and small businesses usually lack that kind of history, denying most conventional CMOs the tools they require. 

Does that mean you need to fly by the seat of your pants? Should the CEO handle all the marketing-related decisions? Who’s responsible for all the duties the CMO traditionally shoulders in an organization that doesn’t yet need to hire a full-time professional? How do you make informed marketing decisions that allow you to compete with more established firms?

The answer is simple. Hire a fractional CMO, instead.

What is a fractional chief marketing officer?

Fractional leadership is nothing new. You most likely have encountered a fractional CFO or legal counsel on a need-to-use basis.

A part-time CMO is an unconventional type of chief marketing officer. In this situation, the CMO only works with your organization on a freelance basis. They are usually found in early-stage startups because they are much more affordable.

A virtual CMO usually emphasizes digital marketing and strategy. The position, typically held by someone with experience in social media, content creation, advertising and digital media, is an emerging role in marketing. Don’t feel too bad if it’s unfamiliar to you.

Another way of looking at it is this: A fractional chief marketing officer is a CMO who does not have a full-time position, but nevertheless has the authority to lead and manage your branding, marketing and advertising efforts. They also become a member of your C-suite with the primary responsibility of overseeing all marketing functions, including advertising, public relations, sales promotion and customer service.

CMOs are typically pictured working for billion-dollar brands, yet I find that even the smallest companies need the same thinking implemented just as the biggest companies do. This is why I’ve offered fractional CMO services for my own clients who are seeking longer-term support, whether we run projects through my agency or not.

The CMO spot is a strategic position, so a small company just getting started may not need full-time strategy assistance. Instead, they will benefit more from a quarterly strategy set-up around tactics for internal marketers to execute with a CMO supervising their marketing team. The good news is that a fractional CMO can come in, design everything and set your organization on a course for success and they don’t have to be behind a desk for 40 hours each week to achieve that goal.

At the $3M–$5M revenue mark is where companies start to develop a clear sales cycle and a traditional CMO can step in and drive. However, it’s not unusual for (non-venture funded) companies to take years to achieve $1M–$3M, much less $5M. A fractional CMO can help you get there in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.

This is important because your content marketing needs to focus on that timeline to speed up the sales cycle. Or if you’re an ecommerce, getting your entire funnel to perform flawlessly and automatically. Quite often, once that is addressed, you may not need a CMO until you are ready for the next phase of growth, like growing from $10M to $50M.

What is the difference between the role of the CMO and a marketing director?

Do you require a CMO, though? Couldn’t a marketing director do the same job?

Actually, the chief marketing officer and marketing director are two very different positions, with drastically different responsibilities and required skills. 

For one thing, a CMO is an executive, whereas a marketing director is not. A CMO also needs to keep pace with other C-suite members, while a marketing director does not. Finally, a CMO has many of the same responsibilities as a marketing director, but also several different ones.

A fractional CMO does all of the above. Quite often, they bring with them an experienced marketing team that can execute things as needed.

Defining your need and choosing the right partner

Whether you need full-time or part-time help is really a matter of where you’re at in terms of business growth, as well as your capacity to meet and match that growth. It may be tempting to hire fresh, affordable talent that’s easy on your cash flow. 

But, again, if finding the multipliers in your business growth more quickly matters to you right now, you may be better off with a seasoned and experienced marketing head who can make a few key decisions out of the gate that can produce multipliers of 10x and as high as 50x ROI. 

At least from my own experience, I know this to be the case. This means that cost is irrelevant since that talent pays for itself.

Before you seek a CMO for hire, understand that creative execution is more important than tech at the beginning of your marketing. You need to nail your story first. I’ve seen that journey take a company years to resolve. 

The right partner can help you get there 10 times faster than if you try to go it alone. Some CMOs know how to develop your brand story, which is the most critical part until you’re a billion-dollar brand.

That said, be aware that a majority of CMOs focus more on metrics based on predictable flow, which is reporting the outcome. The outcome can only be as strong as what you put into it. Hopefully, that means building brand experience.

The post Why you don’t need a CMO… yet appeared first on MarTech.

VC investment resulted in $105 billion raised in 2020 alone. That has translated to immense success for startups like Robinhood, which reached almost 1 million users in 2016. Tapping into that growth can be challenging. Most fintech success stories rely on mobile technology, but 61% of consumers won’t return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing. That’s important because 29.3 billion networked devices will be operating worldwide by 2023.

Let’s take a closer look at the global fintech market structure and the role fintech marketing plays today.

The 5 categories of fintech

Fintech is not just one thing. It’s a disparate collection of different financial solutions, each with its own unique peculiarities. The five primary fintech categories are:

• Digital payments. This category includes mobile POS payments, digital remittances and digital commerce (usually called ecommerce).
• Digital investment. Trading apps are abundant today. Within this category, you’ll find things like neobrokers and robo-advisors.
• Alternative lending. This includes business-focused crowdlending and consumer-friendly marketplace lending.
• Alternative financing. Here, you’ll find crowd-investing and crowdfunding apps.
• Neo-banking. The digital revolution has given rise to online-only banks without a physical branch anywhere in the world. Digital wallets are becoming more commonplace and even legacy financial institutions are finally waking up to the new trends.

Regions outside North America, including LATAM and elsewhere, are just starting their digital transformation. The masses are beginning to understand this new way of doing business, so it’s an even greener field abroad. That said, there is also resistance to this inevitable change. 

What is fintech marketing?

All industries require specific marketing that builds brands, connects businesses with their target audience and complies with the various rules and regulations that govern that industry. The fintech industry is no exception. 

Fintech marketing solutions can be defined as the totality of marketing techniques designed specifically for use by financial technology organizations. However, these techniques must do more than build an organization’s brand and amplify its message. They must also comply with a growing list of SEC regulations that limit the claims that can be made within marketing messages.

Just how big is the market size of the fintech industry? It was valued at $110.57 billion in 2020, with a projected CAGR growth rate of 26.87% and expected to reach $698.48 billion by 2030. 

Generating demand with fintech digital marketing

The entire point of fintech marketing is to build demand and increase market share. To do this, you need to identify your fintech market opportunity. Fintech marketing strategies should be engineered around specific business models. There is no one-size-fits-all solution that will work for all organizations. Let’s dig deeper into what you should know.

Set data strategy

Data segmentation of your customers should really come from your predefined brand narrative, believe it or not. Create two to three compelling messaging pillars to center your content on so that people naturally gravitate toward the solutions and self-identify what they need before a salesperson ever contacts them. 

Gong’s sales data has made it clear, “Competitive deals are won early, when the battleground is still fertile. Competitive deals are won with discovery techniques, NOT closing techniques.” This means spreading your decision tree flow at the top to start funneling in from a wide array of mostly non-branded keywords, for example, to create enough of a spread to learn and scale from.

It’s also a great alternative to an open flow and retroactively trying to figure out the data patterns to identify your audience — a convoluted process I’m very familiar with. Start your efforts with the audiences you expect first and then use user profiles to get ultra-specific concerning the key problems you solve. You might be surprised how close you can get. This will help you map out your fintech KPIs to give you a clear goal to pursue.

With that out of the way, let’s delve deeper into fintech marketing, starting with B2C.

7 fintech marketing strategies for B2C

Below, you’ll find a deeper discussion surrounding the various fintech marketing strategies and how they work. This will also help guide your fintech content marketing strategy.

1. Gamification

Gamification is a technique used to add game-like elements to other content. It’s used in the world of training and e-learning and can be used to great effect within fintech marketing. Gamification does not necessarily mean transforming your marketing content into a game but simply adding appropriate elements to other marketing elements. For instance, earning points, offering rewards and introducing contests are all examples of gamification. Even hipper, digital banking apps are doing this.

2. Referral, affiliate or influencer marketing

Referral marketing, affiliate marketing and influencer marketing all allow you to reach your target audience and build interest. They work very differently, though. 

Referral marketing is precisely what it sounds like — allowing your current customers to refer others to you (usually for a reward of some type). Affiliate marketing allows you to tap into millions of affiliate websites to spread your message, and influencer marketing lets you take advantage of an influencer’s audience to build your brand.

3. Experiential marketing

Experiential marketing is sometimes called engagement marketing or participation marketing. It’s all about immersing your audience within a product and deeply engaging them. It’s focused on doing more than selling products or services. The goal is to get consumers to experience the brand itself. A good example of this would be a free trial of a service that allows consumers to participate and experience how the service or platform works firsthand.

Dig deeper: Donald Glover’s Airdrop stunt at Coachella proves experiential marketing gets bolder with influence

4. Partnership marketing

Partnership marketing is a unique method that allows two or more brands to achieve success based on the synergy of their combined efforts. By working with other brands, you can reach a broader audience and collaborate with other businesses interested in the same audience. For instance: 

• Google sponsors Wi-Fi at some Starbucks locations.
• GoPro and Red Bull also team up to market together. 
• Nike and Apple, UNICEF and Target, and Burger King and McDonald’s are good examples of partnership marketing.

5. Community marketing

Community marketing involves bringing people together around a common theme or cause. Burning Man is a good example of a brand that grew through community marketing. Acorns is a more fintech-focused example. 

For this to work, you need a community with a common interest (investing with a limited budget and little risk appetite in the case of Acorns). That community should feel that they belong together and they should care about each other (due to their shared interest). Fintech strategies for marketing tend to start here, with an internal evangelist leading the charge.

6. Branding

Branding is a critical step in building your fintech business but is often misunderstood. It’s more than just creating an evocative logo or an effective marketing concept. Instead, it’s about building expectations in your audience. Your brand is how your customers see you, but you can guide that perception through actions, adherence to your mission and correctly positioning your fintech business within the wider industry.

7. Content marketing and media production

Successful fintech marketing hinges on content marketing and media production. Simply put, no business will succeed without getting its message to its audience. You do that through content like social media posts, PPC ads, blog posts, videos, and more. It’s all about answering questions, positioning your firm as the answer to customer challenges and educating people. This is the key to inbound marketing that performs.

Fintech marketing should do more than entice and tantalize — it must educate. Your customers face a challenge. Maybe they’re trying to invest. Perhaps they want to accept mobile payments at their small business. Whatever the case, your content must explain several ways they can get around the issue and then position your solution as the best option. However, you must ensure there’s a strategy in place. Otherwise, you could be off-brand, watered down and fail to make the impact that you need. 

Dig deeper: Customer education is a vital part of the customer experience

B2B fintech marketing

The B2B fintech marketing world is unusual in that many brands fail to understand how to reach their audience. Doing so effectively requires a combination of B2B and B2C tactics that are often outside the experience of most B2B marketers. 

It was only five to seven years ago that brands thought using online video to market their business was an absurd idea. The perception was that video was only for TV marketing. Still, many of the decision-makers at these firms failed to realize that Internet bandwidth was increasing exponentially across the country, making high-quality video marketing, not just realistic but incredibly effective. Blinded by the past and unconnected to the present, they simply could not see it. (And this is still the case for some, unfortunately.)

Our team at Noble Digital could never have helped investment platform Fundrise achieve the success we did if they had thought this way. In their case, they were stuck using Google search ads. While PPC can be effective, the problem was that most of the leads generated were unqualified to invest due to SEC regulations. Our solution? A specifically designed video targeting qualified investors that not only moved the needle but dramatically enhanced brand recognition and market share. You need to find partners that come up with actual ROI solutions vs. deliverables that may fall flat.

How to succeed in fintech marketing

Mastering the world of modern fintech marketing isn’t rocket science, but it requires a firm understanding of best practices.

Focus on mobile users

First, make sure that you’re focusing on mobile users. That’s where the bulk of your customers will be. And remember what we mentioned at the beginning of this article. You can’t afford to get your mobile applications’ experience wrong because more than half of consumers won’t give you a second chance. Fintech applications have to be engineered for seamless experiences.

Create valuable content

Next, make sure that you’re creating valuable content. Yes, you’re creating marketing collateral, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be vapid or overtly sales-y. Remember what we mentioned previously — good content marketing educates your audience. Don’t just tell them why you’re the best choice for their needs. Show them that you understand their challenges and pain points, and then highlight the options they must solve those problems while positioning your offering as the optimum solution.

Differentiate your brand

While the fintech industry is relatively new, the problems it solves are not. That means no matter what your business does, it’s not novel. You have competitors. It’s imperative to show your audience how you differ from others out there. 

• What differentiates you from other fintech businesses? 
• What’s the thing that you do better than anyone else? 

Identify your unique selling proposition and then make that the center of your fintech marketing strategy. Need a deeper dive into how to differentiate your brand? Check out this detailed article on branding.

The future of fintech marketing

What does the future of fintech product marketing look like? While we don’t have a crystal ball, there are some interesting trends that we can use to extrapolate critical things for publishers and marketers to understand.

Banks and fintechs collaborate

One trend that’s become very visible in recent months is the growing number of bank/fintech collaborations. What does that mean for your marketing? One consideration is an increase in SEC hoops you’ll need to jump through regarding your messaging.

Sustainability hits it big

With the growing impact of climate change on the global economy, fintech firms, banks and others in the financial industry are increasingly turning to sustainable innovation to attract new investors/clients.

IoT will play a role

Finally, the Internet of Things (IoT) will drive a new era of trust in finance. Look for significant expansion across both wired and wireless networks and other communication technologies, including near-field communication solutions and low-power wide-area networks, to name just a few.

AI in fintech market

Global AI in fintech is often used in finance for several reasons: 

• Loan decision-making.
• Customer support.
• Fraud detection.
• Risk assessment of creditworthiness.
• Insurance.
• Wealth management.
• And more. 

Modern fintech companies’ advances focus on adopting AI for efficiency, enhanced precision levels and quick problem resolution which all lead to a better brand experience.

The takeaway

The future of fintech marketing might not be entirely clear, but it is technology-driven and customer-focused. Achieving success in fintech marketing requires going way beyond just an understanding of SEC rules and regulations. It demands a sound strategy based on deep knowledge of your audience, their challenges and how your offering solves those problems.

The post Fintech marketing today and beyond: Exploring best practices and strategies appeared first on MarTech.

The changes with Google Analytics 4

Google announced that Universal Analytics will officially retire and stop processing new hits on July 1, 2023. Marketing teams have until that point to find analytics alternatives for website analytics. Google analytics alternatives exist, but Google is making things simple for you to stay. Universal Analytics will be replaced by Google Analytics 4. After the official retirement date, you’ll have access to your previously processed data through UA for at least six months.

What makes Google Analytics 4 different from UA, though? The measurement data model is now based on events and parameters. A page view, for example, is an event. A parameter would be tracking video views or page scrolling for example. Here is a long list of automatically collected events and parameters, with no effort required from you.

For those who’ve used it before, you might recognize App + Web since Google renamed it for use as the replacement for Universal Analytics. For those not familiar with App + Web, there are a few key differences between it and the outgoing UA, including a selection of different reports. 

The dawn of a world with no cookies

Cookies have been used for decades to track internet users and deliver a personalized experience. They’re also vital to digital marketing. Google threw a wrench in the works when the company announced that they would phase out third-party cookies from Chrome by 2022. It sent publishers and advertisers into tailspins as they worried about how they’d deal with a cookieless world.

Of course, there’s some news that might surprise the people who are most worried about their fate once Google makes good on its promise. They’ve been living in a quasi-cookieless world for some time now. Both Firefox and Safari block third-party cookies already. Google is, admittedly, late to the party. Of course, since Chrome commands over 60% of the browser market, the news had more impact than when the other two browsers stopped supporting third-party cookies.

Why are all the major browsers no longer supporting third-party cookies? It’s all about protecting privacy, ensuring transparency, and building trust with consumers. The challenge is going to be how to continue building your audience online without them. Meanwhile, rest assured that first-party cookies will still work.

The following formats and channels are not affected by cookie industry changes:

• In-App inventory.
• Audio/podcast inventory.
• Connected TV.
• Digital Out-of-Home. 

Targeting not affected

At our agency, when running media, we use the following targeting strategies based on either second party data or Device ID/IP Address, to not be affected by upcoming industry changes:

• Device ID lookback targeting.
• Point-of-Interest targeting purchase.
• Purchase receipt.
• Mail domain.
• B2B offline data.
• Weather-triggered targeting.
• CRM integration (postal address, email address, IP address).
• Geo-fencing/geo-targeting.
• Blocklist/allowlist.
• Contextual keyword .
• Vertical.
• Day-parting.
• In-language.
• App detection.
• Social hashtags/account follows.
• Automatic content recognition.
• Voter-file targeting.
• Social sharing.

The Crux of the Problem: Identity 

The entire point of cookies is to identify a particular consumer online. With third-party cookies being phased out, you’re faced with the quandary of how to continue to target and reach your digital audience. Most U.S. marketers face significant worries here, particularly when it comes to the following:

• Buy-side adoption.
• Maintenance.
• Transparency.
• Yield.

There’s also concern that whatever new identity solutions are ultimately rolled out; they may not dovetail well with the current tools and platforms that you’re using. The good news is that several identity solutions have already emerged, although there is no clear winner amongst them. For instance, universal IDs are being considered (and rolled out by some organizations, such as The Trade Desk). These work similarly to state-issued identification/driver’s licenses in the real world. All participating companies can then use this ID to identify and target their audiences across the internet.

Another option is to shift toward first-party data. Most publishers and advertisers have access to quite a few channels that offer rich first-party data and maximizing the use of these channels would more than offset the loss of third-party cookies, which, despite their ubiquity, were never 100% accurate.

Two of those channels are email marketing and push notification marketing. Email marketing has been around for a very long time and has remained very effective, particularly for publishers and marketers seeking to gather email addresses and then reach audience members with targeted offerings. 

This is an opt-in channel, which means that consumers automatically have higher trust. It also delivers better ROI and improves yields, while upholding modern privacy standards. Email marketing is also simple to personalize, which speaks to the need to deliver an improved customer experience at all touch points.

Push notifications are also a form of opt-in marketing, and they allow you to reach individuals via their devices. They offer the ability to send real-time alerts, and they can also help you gather additional first-party marketing data. 

Building your future

You already have access to a wide range of tools that can offset the loss of data from any third-party cookies. However, you still need to test to refine your campaigns and maximize your ROI. That can be challenging to do in-house but working with a trusted agency partner can help.

Don’t miss our June 7 Master Class: “Successfuly transitioning to Google Analytics 4”

Understanding the Importance of Google Analytics 4

With the demise of Universal Analytics on the horizon, it’s time to get up close and familiar with its replacement. Google Analytics 4 offers some pretty compelling benefits and advantages, and the learning curve is not particularly steep.

Be prepared

One thing to understand from the outset is that Google Analytics 4 doesn’t care about your historical data. It won’t import past data at all, nor can you access historical data through it. It will begin collecting data from the moment it is set up and you’ll have access to that information only. 

Simple to upgrade

While many platforms force you to jump through hoops to upgrade, that’s not the case with Google Analytics 4. Just go to google/com/analytics. Once there, you’ll need to access your account and then find the property column. You’ll see an option for upgrading right there. Or go here.

Better features for better performance

Another key benefit of Google Analytics 4 is that you’ll have access to better features than what’s currently on offer with UA. For instance, the new Analytics platform offers predictive analysis, as well as deep insights thanks to the presence of well-developed AI and machine learning. The new platform also generates custom reports, and you can track up to 300 events.

Google ads

Google Ads can be improved by pulling the performance data from GA4. It can help you have better ads created on your behalf, improve conversion rates, and more. Of course, assuming that your positioning and messaging of your ads are on point.  AI can’t help much with that.

Greater agility

Improved agility is critical in today’s world, and the new Google Analytics 4 offers what you need. You can tailor your reports to your unique needs, and you get faster access to more detailed data than what’s possible with UA. That means you can make decisions in real-time to deliver the best possible user experience. 

Exploring the differences between UA and Google Analytics 4

While both AU and GA4 share Google’s DNA, there are quite a few differences in how the two platforms operate. We’ll explore those below.

User tracking changes

With UA, you used session tracking to monitor users. That changes to event-based tracking with GA4.

What users are doing

That event-based focus extends throughout GA4. The goal here is simple – to give you the best idea of what your users are doing on the website. 

Digging through your data

One of the high points of GA4 is the access to customizable, flexible reports. With UA, you have set reports that can be customized to some degree, but GA4 is different. It only offers a few top-level, built-in reports. Getting access to specific data is as simple as clicking on the analysis tab. You can easily find key data and organize how your reports display.

Lastly, you can access raw GA data and SQL away!

Can you upgrade early?

Yes, GA4 is available right now. You can upgrade at any time from your Analytics account. The 2023 date is specific for sunsetting the Universal Analytics platform, which will no longer be accessible after that date (although your data will be available for at least six months, as mentioned previously).

Event-based monitoring in Google Analytics 4

As discussed previously, GA4 uses event-based monitoring, unlike Universal Analytics, which uses a session-based format. It’s important to understand these events and how they are categorized so that you’re able to plan and structure your events. 

You will need to ensure that the event that you want is one of those the platform automatically collects. If not, it may be found among the Enhanced Measurement events. You may also need to check Recommended Events and how they are named. Finally, you can create custom events to better suit your needs.

The four event types

Google Analytics 4 is pre-configured with four different types of events. These are as follows:

Custom events. These are events that you create on your own. These should be used if you are unable to locate your event in any of the other categories. Note that custom events may not show up in most standard reports, so you will need to customize your reporting to access this data.

Automatically collected events. Once you set up your data collection parameters, these events are automatically collected. They will show in most standard reports.

Recommended Events. You will need to set predefined names and specific parameters, but it’s recommended that you use these events in addition to the other types.

Enhanced Measurement Events. Once you set enhanced measurements, these events will be automatically collected. They will be displayed on most standard reports, as well.

Setting up Google Analytics 4

If you’ve decided to take the plunge, or you’re just getting prepared for the big day ahead of UA’s sunsetting date, you’ll want to know how to get Google Analytics 4 set up. Thankfully, it’s relatively simple.

• Make sure you have a GA account. If you don’t, now’s the time to create one.
• Go to Google Analytics.
• Click on settings admin.
• Find the property column.
• Select the UA property.
• Click GA4 setup assistant.
• Click “get started” below the heading that says, “I want to create a new GA 4 property”.
• Enable data collection using existing tags.
• Click “create property”.

Follow those simple steps and the setup wizard will take care of the rest. 

Is GA4 missing any features?

While Google does a great job of regularly introducing new features, the company does sometimes take tools and capabilities away, often with little warning. So, what’s missing in Google Analytics 4?

• You cannot set up views.
• Some older reports are missing.
• There’s a lack of ecommerce support.

According to analytics expert and author Avinash Kaushik,  this new platform is a work in progress. After a direct communication with him, Avinash assured me: “Life is about evolution, in that spirit GA 4 has a lot of new stuff that is good, it prepares for a future where privacy changes (like those at Apple) don’t completely kill analytics, and has a new paradigm that scales. Of course, some things are not yet there, but they will get there.”

He went on to detail: “With the integration into Big Query, GA 4 should allow you to take a lot more detail out of GA if you want. And (for enterprise-level brands), if you are using GA Premium ($150,000/year USD), I don’t know if you are losing a lot with the switch.  Adobe Analytics is a good alternative to GA as well.“ 

He also shared a good source of alternative platforms to consider.

What is interesting is how the highest hit-type metrics focus on the next step in a customer journey compared to universal analytics:

1. Engaged Sessions.
2. Engagement Rate.
3. Engaged Sessions Per User. 
4. Average Engagement Time.

This seems to point to showing us when a visitor actually becomes important to measure so we can focus our energies better.  Tire-kickers, be gone!  I am a big believer in qualitative metrics to dig deeper into meaningful answers on user behavior — so bring it on.

Should you make the switch now?

Tracking on G4 only starts tracking the day you implement it. While you can switch over to GA4 right now, there’s nothing that says you cannot use both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4, at least for the time being. That might be the best way to get your feet wet and it allows you to compare them side-by-side. With that being said, there will come a time when you must switch over to GA4 and say goodbye to UA. However, if you’re new to Google Analytics entirely, it’s probably best to start with GA4 since it will eventually replace Universal Analytics.

In summation

It’s highly recommended that brands take advantage of the ability to move to Google Analytics 4 soon. If you haven’t already done so, get your GA4 properties set up and configured. Doing so early will help you avoid any delays and ensure that your marketing efforts are ready to hit the ground running when UA finally retires. 

This will also allow you to find ways to deal with the data that UA currently stores, and experiment with email marketing, push notification marketing, and other solutions to the lack of third-party cookies. And remember – Universal Analytics will stop functioning (other than for access to historical data) on July 1, 2023. 

Personally, I will deeply miss the granularity of UA but we are also moving into an era where we’ve had all this data, yet we’ve hardly used it, let alone understood how it impacted our bottom line.  This new, streamlined version seems to be moving us towards a sharper view of what is happening in your business and getting a clearer answer, faster.

The Google Analytics platform is moving away from simply being a reporting tool. It’s beginning to use AI to do what corporations hire me to do, which is: To be a change agent and tell sharper stories with their data to help clarify where the opportunities are, as well as predicting where things are headed, all while taking action to get there as fast as possible.  

GA4 may be the future of measurement, but don’t forget…analytics in general are more like your car’s speedometer, while your brand is the car engine itself. Obviously a car can work fine without a speedometer but not the other way around!  Your brand is the actual engine that actually moves your organization, but if only you fully leverage it.  I wish some of you were more panicked about your brand and creativity, than your analytics — if I’m being really honest. 

Forrester analyst, Jay Pattisall, said that we have collectively overspent (an unbelievable) $19 billion on technology and have completely underfunded creativity.  At the end of the day,  accessing data is hardly the problem, since your analytics does not fix anything on its own. Once you are done with the work of analysis, you still need talent, experienced with storytelling, to engineer a solution to move your insights towards impacting predictability to your bottom line.  

The post Is Google Analytics going away? What marketers need to know appeared first on MarTech.

A brand marketing strategy is a set of guidelines that help businesses determine their core values and what they want to achieve with the business. More importantly, it also helps outline how those values can be applied to the marketplace. For one brand strategy to be successful, it’s not enough to simply have a few bullet points of what you want to do.

To develop a great brand strategy today, you need both a thorough understanding of why you choose certain types of brand strategies and a detailed outline of what your strategies will be.

Why?

Because the more detailed your brand strategy framework is, the easier it will be to succeed when you execute those strategies.

Knowing the detailed answers to each question will help determine what your goals should be, how you should approach your customers, and how you’ll measure your success in meeting your goals.

Why is branding important?

• Consumers who connect with a brand emotionally have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV).
• Companies with poor branding end up having to pay 10% higher salaries.
• 90% of customers expect to have a similar brand experience across multiple channels, so make sure your branding spans all of the channels and platforms you have a presence on.
• 84% of marketers say brand awareness is the most important goal.
• Branded content is 22 times more engaging than your standard display ad.

“Emotionally connected customers have a 306% higher lifetime value (LTV) for your brand.”

How to develop a brand strategy?

A brand development strategy can be hard to define but encompasses:

• What your brand stands for.
• What promises your brand makes to customers.
• What personality your brand conveys through its marketing.

As you can see, many of these things are intangible. How do you measure how successful you are at conveying a certain personality? How do you measure if you’ve successfully stood for what your brand represents, or if you could be doing it better?

The one main metric for successful new brand development is brand sentiment. And just because it’s hard to measure, it doesn’t mean that you should dismiss it. It may not be as easy to quantify, but it’s too easy for analytical CEOs to dismiss the qualitative work involved in branding. 

As Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky made so clear: “The designing of experience is a different part of your brain than the scaling [of] your experience. It’s a different skill set. The scaling of an experience is a highly analytical, operations-oriented, and technology-oriented problem. The designing of experience is a more intuition-based human, empathetic, end-to-end experience.”

It seems almost trivial, but in a larger company, these two different skill sets would be handled by two entirely different teams that probably don’t often commingle, let alone agree on everything. That’s how you waste time, money, and energy. In a smaller company, you’re often missing a “creative” team altogether. Brian knows how to build a brand because he understands the real levers at play here.

For example, when my agency helped the Shark Tank company, Plated, scale to $100M in revenue in just 18 months, and then exit, you have to understand they had a team of 15 marketers who were struggling with customer acquisition(!), despite having a beautiful brand and a perfectly functioning website and funnels.  So, I really appreciated the founders Nick and Josh saying something along the lines of, “We are the least creative guys in the room … so if you guys say this is what we should do, then let’s do it.”  Great! That’s why you hire experts on the matter, and it’s ok to take a back seat, to a degree, if you don’t have a strong understanding or opinion on the direction.

It’s amazing how many funded startups are in a rush to build their marketing team. The story above should help you realize that there is much to resolve before doing that — otherwise you’ll be burning cash at a higher rate than needed.

Does this resonate? Some see branding as fluffy, touchy-feely emotional stuff and that’s why they often fail with branding. First, that’s a superficial way to approach it. Branding is critical to your brand’s existence! It also feeds your entire team’s culture.  

Let’s dive into this skill set.

Developing intuition

Branding strategy definitely involves the intuition side of your mind. But you can also use data to guide your direction and long-term goals. One way to understand if your brand is on the right track in its branding strategy is to think of your brand strategy as a story you are telling.

A good story is not just something to read on a page — it’s an experience. And for something to be an experience, it needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. At the end of the experience, there must be some kind of change from the beginning.

What causes a change in a story? Tension. There must be tension between your antithesis and your thesis.

In marketing terms, your “antithesis” is your customer’s pain point. Your “thesis” is your solution to that problem. The tension, therefore, is the customer’s problem itself. This is the core of your entire product-market fit, viewed at a subatomic level. If you don’t have any tension there (problems to solve), then you don’t have a business, period!  There also needs to be tension in your customer insights to help inform the most relevant positioning possible.

So, at the end of the day, brand strategy boils down to one thing: storytelling. Your brand’s strategy is its story, its vision, its heart, and soul.

For example, every cinematic film basically has a core thesis inside the protagonist, typically starting with a “vision” of how things could be, or should be — but they are not able to reach it. The antithesis is the harsh reality that’s pulling the character away from that vision of how things could or should be.

This push and pull escalates while the character finally makes a change, internally, externally, or ideally, both. In the climactic ending, the hero’s previous reality is replaced by his vision, which now becomes his new reality.

In the case of “Don’t Look Up,” Leo Decaprio’s character has to transform from his quiet, inside voice, to one of rage and frustration upon learning how hard it is to get an entire planet prepared to deal with a major catastrophe, all while combating multiple saboteurs with alternative and selfish agendas.  The reality at the top of the film stays exactly on course. So, where is the change, you ask? It comes from within himself and his associate Kate, as they each lose their families and a bit of their sanity over the truth of their discovery, which drives the narrative, until they finally find themselves again, while the impending doom lives in the background through the final reveal.

That narrative is the same as classic B2B customer journey mapping. Nailing who your supporters and advocates are, as well as potential saboteurs to a purchase, is critical to building a pathway through the phases of brand awareness and consideration.

Looking at AirBnB’s recent campaign, one can only assume that the business problem was lack of new hosts signing up due to the pandemic, while consumer insight would have been something like: “potential hosts are afraid to host strangers.” Their response to address this crippling objection head-on is the campaign: “Strangers aren’t that strange. Try hosting.”

Now look at the creative response to that simple but powerful six-word statement:

Is your brand messaging and campaigning this sharp?

Notice, they’re not saying everything to everyone? They have one clear message and a story that builds up to make just that one point and nothing else.

If you’re thinking, “Well Allen, that’s great for them but we’re a B2B SaaS platform, but what does that have to do with me?” It has everything to do with you too.  In fact, the more complex and techy your brand is, the more you need storytelling! No one wants to see marketing and advertising all about your “features,” I promise you. Get your audience out of their head and into their emotions and you’ll see your sales go up and your sales cycle reduced. It’s that simple and complex.

“The more complex and techy your brand is, the more you need storytelling!”

Tension has been the basic building block of storytelling since the first Greek plays were performed in the Theater of Dionysus, at the beginning of the fifth century. The plays and storytelling were engineered around the logical flow of crisis and emotional journeys, and this process has carried over to modern times — mostly because human nature has hardly changed since that time.

This is exactly what good branding does as well — it inspires action, change, aspiration, or in some cases, gets your customers to fix something that ails them or change their minds. When your brand is an awesome experience, it transforms your users!

If you don’t believe story matters, then you’re going to have a hard time creating the kind of message that evokes emotion and action. At the end of the day, all your brand has is one amazing story, broken into snackable bits and pieces, told over time, across various touchpoints and pain points. That’s it!

Beyond brand strategy: Brand position and building a strong brand identity

Today, most businesses cannot count on being the only organization offering a particular service or product. Chances are good that your niche is heavy with competitors. The challenge is making your offerings stand out from others. Sure, you can pack in feature after feature, but what comes next?

For instance, if your SaaS platform space is already maxed to the gills in features? What do you do? Cramming more features in does you no good, so how do you make yourself stand out in an ever-more competitive market?

In a sea of competition, you have to compete either on innovation or brand, which means storytelling and effective brand positioning, or, if tapping into a well-funded and robust R&D department that can base new features on actual user problems. If not, that’s ok. For most companies an easier entry point is to become a leader in the pack and to stand out, you have to go all-in on brand positioning and you need to be consistent, memorable, and distinct, all while doing this creatively.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

Before starting my agency Noble Digital in 2012, I was a TV commercial director. My role was to lead a team and execute national campaigns for the largest brands on the planet. In one case, Budweiser hired me to produce six commercials with $600 million in media spend alone over a one-year campaign. So, I have been fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest brand managers out there. In total, I have $25 billion in media spending behind my life’s work, so I want to share what I’ve learned from my “traditional” days of branding as well as now in the current age of branding.

Where did branding start? Many point to Mesopotamia where trading and selling took place at a very high rate. It was a time when the seller could not always be present, so the branding acted as a marker of quality.

The quality of a brand is measured at a high level with attributes like: culture, values, reflection, personality, archetypes, promise, reward, benefit, reasons to believe, advantages, discriminators, and differentiators.

However, there are also attributes about the space that your brand operates in, such as category, competition, source of business, target groups, relevance, and insights.

As we zoom in on the business model canvas, we start to see where the impact of branding falls. In fact, the value canvas has a “value proposition” at the dead center of the business model canvas.

That’s because no matter how amazing your product is, if it doesn’t resonate with your audience, you’ll be dead in the water. Your product-market fit and value proposition form the engine that makes everything flow.

What your customers value is just as important (if not more important) as what your brand values. It informs what you make and how your entire company operates, down to how you speak to individual customers.

Branding is not a superficial exercise in making things “look pretty”. Great branding means customer acquisition performance, hitting sales goals, and scaling revenue streams. Modern branding is about architecting success through both storytelling and engineering to achieve a strong brand experience while meeting fiduciary goals. 

“Modern branding is about architecting success through both storytelling and engineering.”

Here’s the key: the brand story should always come first. The first step in comprehensive brand strategy development is to define who you want to be and what you’re trying to say. Engineering should follow that organizational direction as it’s way easier than trying to take the bigger, emotional factors and retrofit that onto what was already engineered. (This is how website initiatives easily steal a year of your life away.)

Characteristics of a strong company brand

What makes a good company brand? It’s more than having the right visual elements or a solid brand story. Below, we’ll break down the components required to ensure you have the right brand architecture in place to support your marketing plan.

• Physical characteristics: At the base level, we have the physicality of your company brand – its visuals, including your brand logo, typography, company colors, and other visual cues that help consumers identify your brand amidst a sea of competitors. 
• Personality: What is your brand’s personality in your customers’ eyes? Is it playful and witty? Straightforward and dependable? Innovative and creative? Picture your brand as a living thing – how does it act in the world? 
• Culture: Brand culture and company culture are related but different. Here, we’re talking about how the set of values you espouse come together to create the foundation of a company brand. 
• Relationship: How does your company intersect with your customers? What’s the relationship between your products/services and those who buy them? 
• Self-image: How do your customers see themselves with your brand? Do they feel more capable? More innovative? Better prepared? Use this to flesh things out and create a strong visual identity that helps your customers see themselves differently. 
• Reflection: How do you view your customers? How do you portray them in your ads and other marketing collateral? 

Developing a strong brand identity

Using the information in the previous section, you can now begin building a strong brand identity. The goal here is simple – connect what matters to your business with what matters to your customers. For instance, how do your goals connect with the goals of your customers? How does your mission address your customers’ pain points? Effective brand positioning requires that you move the needle from how your customers see your brand now to how you want them to see it.

One brand positioning tool at your disposal is, to begin with, a benefits ladder that takes you from the base customer problem through the various benefits that help solve that issue.

To do that, create a mission statement that encapsulates your organization’s purpose. Once you’ve done that, it’s time to create a single guiding statement (brand positioning statement) that connects with every aspect of your brand, while supporting the emotional benefit that you offer customers. Doing so ensures brand consistency across all touchpoints.

Finally, it’s also important to remember that no brand is built overnight. It requires time. How long did it take for Apple to become what it is today? What about Reebok or Nike? In point of fact, it took almost 20 years for Nike to even arrive at the brand strategy the organization follows today, with much trial and error along the way. For instance, they began by targeting top athletes but realized they would have to broaden their scope to include anyone who valued health and fitness if they were ever going to see success.

Digging deeper into effective brand positioning

Dual Process Theory explores how our brains go looking for shortcuts to process things.  It helps people make fast decisions on an intuitive level. It can also hijack other memories we have and attach themselves to them.  This is why getting into emotions and qualitative research is important as emotional decisions can override our mental decisions. Translation: This helps us cut a 120-day sales cycle down to 45 days.  What would that mean to your bottom line? Go ahead, pull out a calculator and do that math. Whatever that number is, you could easily spend roughly 10% of that total amount (rev + growth) on rebranding — and more if you want to be aggressive.

Your digital brand strategy is a long-term plan that documents specific principles to help keep your brand consistent, memorable, and distinct with time which keeps you at top of mind with your audience. It can also help align employees to the core beliefs and aims of the brand – something I had noticed the power of during my time while working with and consulting the brand Subway, on a campaign.

At the tip of the spear is the business strategy, which leads into brand strategy. What is included in a brand strategy? It covers things like purpose, vision, mission, beliefs, values, attitudes, audience, proposition, and positioning. Once set, the goal is to use that documentation as a guide for every decision you make, whether it be a TV commercial, website build or a search ad sentence.

As you move from purpose to impact, you’ll find your brand system, which is the visualization of your brand persona: brand logo, tone of voice, colors, composition, photography, typography, and motion.

We’ve seen business strategies. They tend to be about growing, with charts that go up into the top right quadrant. Yes, you want to make more revenue. We get it. But how will we actually accomplish that?

Moving into modern brand positioning is really about customer-centric messaging and then making that actionable. But how do you make branding actionable while ensuring brand consistency? It’s all about your brand activations.

Telesign CPaaS platform

As a B2B brand strategy example, Telesign a CpaaS (and IT security) was a C-series funded platform with 500 employees that I was consulting. Telesign pioneered text verification notifications and the company serves large, multinational clients like Microsoft, and has since been acquired by BICS. However, the complexity of their offerings made it challenging for potential clients to understand their services and they were in a loaded space.

The result? Long sales cycles. Basically, sales was doing most of the work and the marketing was missing the mark on how to warm up prospects into warm leads, ready to purchase.

To overcome the disconnect here, we updated Telesign’s brand message house, brand pillars and overall brand messaging, working from data first. From awareness all the way through the handoff to sales. The end result was an update to their content marketing funnel that decreased the time it took for qualified leads to become clients, by half.  That literally means millions more in revenue per year!  This is how branding and marketing strategy intersect into: digital media branding strategy and social media branding strategy. A critical messaging change at the top of their messaging pyramid helped optimize all the content builds that came after, which then gave marketing a better alignment and hand off to sales and assisted them in revenue growth year after year from that point on. Branding can be tethered to sales and if you start your branding strategy off on the right foot, you’ll see a change in all departments. Including your data being segmented is better for future optimization.

LEGO

LEGO’s history dates back nearly a century. Throughout that time, the company’s mission has been “to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow”. By defining that mission early on and then baking it into the company’s very DNA, LEGO has been able to create a thriving brand. You can see this in everything the company does, from the design and creation of new sets to their communications.

For LEGO, it’s not (just) about selling toys. It’s about helping its customers develop. By focusing on developing people, the brand has been able to evolve and grow over time and continually elevate its brand position.

A brand architecture framework

Creating a brand architecture framework can get very involved and could be an entire article on its own. Just use the outline below and it becomes easier to account for your existing products or services, as well as build out future product branding or services.

• Make it easy for people to navigate what you offer.
• Reinforce individual products or services that are your biggest draws/hottest sellers.
• Make sure that you’re able to build a strong company brand and brand equity without damaging the brand of your assets.
• Focus on creating economies of scale by tying asset brands to the parent brand.

The secret to growth

As a strategist, I find that one of the most important ingredients for success is talent, and in many cases, that talent may come from outside your organization. Some of the strongest brands in the world were built by advertising agencies, not internally.

The culture of a successful brand is often repeating the same thing over and over for success.  One important goal for any corporation is to be somewhat predictable with their fiduciary responsibilities. Oddly enough, to get to that place, they often need outside help, since they are not wired for this. Why would a company that relies on predictable results for growth know anything about creativity and breaking molds? If they’re any good at their business, they often won’t even have that kind of talent and thinking internally.

The question of brand management versus brand building

There are two types of people – procedural workers and creative/inventive people. In fact, Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings’ famous culture deck, (now with 20 million views) made it clear that there is a much lower ceiling for procedural work vs. creative/inventive work, where the more you invest in creative talent, the greater the rewards you reap.

What this means is that you shouldn’t expect an individual who has outstanding organizational task management and soft skills to be amazing with creative builds. These are two very different types of people and it’s very rare to find both quality management talent and creative skills within the same individual.

“You shouldn’t expect an individual who has outstanding organizational task management and soft skills to be amazing with creative builds.”

This is why the strongest, most recognized brands on the planet rely on creative advertising agencies to help them refine their brand story for outward-facing initiatives and create a comprehensive brand strategy. Rarely has our own agency seen a corporation do better internally. Internal teams often fail flat-out to deliver effective brand strategies.

“Companies with poor branding end up having to pay 10% higher salaries.”

Creating the right message

Story matters, so to be successful in motivating consumers, you need to create the kind of message that evokes emotion and action.

Why do we do this? Because a well-told story is unforgettable, it translates to people caring about your brand, which inspires loyalty and helps with recall. These are things no amount of tech or media can or will ever do.

Tech and media merely amplify those sentiments. If you don’t have this level of depth to your story, it will just be garbage in, garbage out.

The Importance of Creative Messaging

As CEO of BBDO, Andrew Robertson mentioned at an AT&T Shape event that media leaders like Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook made one thing clear to him:

“80% of available return is a function of the creative and the content.”

Let’s unpack that. A brand’s success is attributed to having the right creative message and not just being in the “right time” or “right place.” It’s about more than meeting your potential customers where they are. You must be able to effectively communicate with them when you do, and that requires creative messaging that ties in with your brand positioning and brand identity.

What does Robertson’s comment mean? It means that your focus shouldn’t be solely on the tech involved; instead, concentrate primarily on story and positioning.

What does focusing 80% of your energy on messaging look like? Well, for one thing, it doesn’t look like this:

Instead, it should look more like this:

Everyone is mostly focused on finite/numerical data, so I find the opposite to be true. Companies are spending thousands to millions on media (blank “billboard” placements) with next to no thought on the story part. So, it’s more like 99% media/tech/stacks and only 1% on creative — and they wonder why they seldom hit performance goals.

The issue here is that marketing is seldom a “math problem”— it’s always a story problem.  The real math happens later, at $50M+ in revenue, when you’re milking a cash cow. Until then? You need emotional stories to engage new customers, regardless of how big or small you are (to create the math problems you’re hoping for). So it is important to understand your strategy first before you focus on the execution of the strategy. 

Translation: Don’t worry about media until you have a creative strategy that translates your brand into an outward-facing campaign for your marketplace.

Define your brand and its objective

Your brand’s objective is simply its purpose. Knowing why your brand exists, what purpose it has in the world, and what it stands for is what defines it from the very start.

When you want to define your brand, you’ll need to ask yourself some questions:

• What problem does my brand solve?
• Who is my ideal customer?
• Who is my competition?
• What does my brand make my customers feel?
• Why do my customers trust me?
• What is the story behind why my brand was created?
• If my brand was a person, what would their personality be like?
• What are my customers wanting/needing or struggling with?

Want some real-world examples? Consider Uber, Webflow, and Airbnb, all three of which have mastered the art of brand positioning.

Once you answer these questions, you can begin to worry about things like brand logo colors and font, your motto or tagline, and other marketing elements to communicate your brand’s overall story.

Let’s look at an example and put this into action.

Let’s say you have determined your brand’s ideal customers are young women getting ready to get married. Your competition includes high-end bridal companies with very elegant looks, but you are presenting yourself as more youthful.

You are trustworthy because you don’t sugarcoat the reality of expensive weddings. Instead, you help brides have their special day without going into debt. You have your story of why you created this brand, and if your brand was a person, she would be a young, thrifty bride who wants a beautiful day but has a practical head on her shoulders.

With all that in mind and knowing you are targeting younger brides, you can stay away from elegant and mature logo colors. Go with fresh, trendy bridal colors that are feminine and pretty. That’s how you translate your brand story into your marketing.

Target market research

Once you understand your brand strategy, you may be ready to jump right into executing your marketing. But before you get started, there is another important step you need to do first: target market research.

So taking the previous wedding example even further, instead of shying away from the fact that your brand is for affordable weddings, you lean hard and with no apology! Like the Airbnb “Strangers” example, use insights to help people reframe and reconsider their stance on just about anything! A perfect example is Jim Gaffigan, a master of shining a new light on things we rarely question and digs in deep on the whole institution of weddings:

Looking at obvious things in a new light helps unlock humor and ah-ha moments for people who are barely paying attention to your marketing or more importantly, their situation… Can you make your audience laugh at themselves? You have to do some work to get their attention. You have to be this sharp.

Researching your market — and understanding who your audience really is and what will grab them emotionally — is a big part of executing your brand strategy correctly. There are some things you’ll need to do in your target market research, including creating a customer persona.

A customer persona is a detailed description of the ideal buyer who would not be able to resist buying your product or service. This persona helps you understand what type of person you are targeting with your marketing. You can’t have an emotional impact if you don’t know who it is you are trying to connect to.

The key to a creative team’s output is to give them sharp insights. Insights unlock the problem at hand and shine a new light on it. Since your marketing is working against the common enemy of attention, you don’t have time to explain it. The insight should be shocking or disruptive. It should have a truth that makes you laugh or cry. Quite often, it’s not even something brand new. Rather, an insight, framed the right way, makes you look at something you already know in a new way.

Understand the consumer journey

The next thing to understand about your ideal customer is where they are in the consumer journey. The consumer journey is a map that shows how a consumer is connecting with your brand at any given moment. It can range from “not connected at all” to “loyal brand advocate and repeat customer.”

Along the way are points like “interested in your product,” “interacting with you on social media,” or “first-time buyer.” Understanding the consumer journey as it relates to your business will help you come up with a roadmap to move consumers along to the ultimate goal.

For example, if you find many of your consumers are dropping off the journey map after their first purchase and never returning to your store, you may need to consider creating a loyalty rewards program or optimizing for a higher quality audience.

Invest in creative brand guidelines

Too often a brand wants to start a branding engagement with us ‘developing brand guidelines’.  I don’t recommend this. This is like walking into a restaurant and letting the chef decide what you want to eat.  It’s all fine if they happen to match your expectations. Realistically, you need to get involved and communicate.  You need your creative partners to start with conceptual ideas of what your brand could be, first. Explore concepts and even design rough, ad-like objects and manifesto scripts to help envision what your brand could look and feel like before locking things down that haven’t even been considered or tested.

Once you understand your brand and your audience on a very deep level, it’s time to think about how you will deliver your message. This is where you’ll start to get creative with things like the logo design, the fonts you use on your website, the colors you choose to represent your brand, the general tone of your advertisements, and the imagery you use so that you can make that execution repeatable.

These elements are very important for creating a long-term recognizable brand. Once people have connected to your brand, they’re no longer considering your values because they know them. Now they are just recognizing your brand’s colors, brand logo, and font and instantly adding you to their basket. So you need to ensure that these elements are chosen carefully and that they truly relate to your message.

Brands do evolve, but it’s important to set the creative guidelines before additional marketing executions. This allows you to ensure that even in the future, your branding will match your story.

Competitive analysis

Another thing that brands need to research before executing a marketing strategy is the competition.

Competitive analysis is extremely important because it helps you understand what specifically differentiates you from the competition, and that is something you’ll want to focus on in your marketing message. Even if you’re a new product in a new space, you still need to understand your neighboring spaces. When we helped Biohm probiotics, they were essentially a new product but they didn’t have the capital to go out in a naked market where no customers were looking, so we piggy-backed by entering them in the probiotic space and then doing education campaigns to help them understand the critical differentiators.  This is why they launched selling out of inventory three times in opening months — because we did our homework right.

If you attempt to execute your marketing first, you may end up saying the same thing as every other company out there, which doesn’t inspire the customer to shop from you over them.

Summary

Overall, branding has not changed dramatically in the last decade or two. What has changed is the explosion of placements and applications for expressing your brand across new and upcoming outlets, platforms, and opportunities. 

The most important takeaways about brand strategy in 2022 are:

• You need to research and understand your customer, including insights.
• You must know what your brand stands for, and what your brand story is.
• Craft your brand story and know how it intersects with your audience. 
• You must build your marketing techniques on an understanding of your customer and what your brand stands for before you ever begin executing marketing campaigns.
• You need people with both good organizational/management skills and great creative skills. They are usually not the same people and quite often not in the same building.
• Don’t be afraid to look outside your organization for help when it comes to creativity and strategic branding/brand positioning. The biggest brands in the world work with ad/creative agencies for that very reason.

It’s that easy and that complex. Take the time to do this right from the beginning, and you will have a much more successful marketing strategy.

The post Building a brand strategy: Essentials for long-term success appeared first on MarTech.

Creative content must be held accountable for performance because it is the single largest lever you possess in the marketing process. Remember, sales success comes down to one thing: an emotional connection with your audience. Facebook and Google highlight the fact that 80% of a company’s marketing success hinges on creative messaging. Only 20% of that success stems from technology.

However, content alone is not enough to achieve creative marketing success. It must be combined with an innovation strategy and the right technological tools. Otherwise, it’s impossible to achieve ROI. An equal mix of creativity and innovation process, supported by technology ensures reach, engagement and the ability to succeed.

Creativity vs. innovation vs. technology

To discuss this intelligently, we must break the situation down into component elements.

• Innovation: Really, innovation is nothing more than taking an existing idea or product and making it better by applying creative ideas.
• Creativity: Creativity is an indirect path to innovation by harnessing unique ideas to achieve key improvements in an idea or product.
• Technology: Technology is the ability to apply scientific knowledge in order to achieve a practical purpose, such as audience reach in marketing.

Often, marketing collateral fails to perform because so-called “safe” choices were made and there were too many hands stirring the pot. The focus is usually on technology, and creativity and innovation fall by the wayside. Marketing should not be a design-by-committee process. The secret to achieving real, measurable, repeatable results is to allocate the right amount of time, the right budget, and the creative talent necessary to achieve your goals.

Forrester put things clearly into perspective: “Shift the $19 billion, earmarked for technology and move over to creativity.” Tech is black and white, on or off. It’s binary. True innovation does not stem from a zero-sum game. Innovation is elusive, and perhaps even a little frightening, but creative content’s ability to resolve insights into a clear, provocative direction aligned with brand goals and strategy while fostering innovation is unmatched.

Data-driven marketing

Data-driven marketing delivers vital performance in measurable, trackable ways. Your marketing efforts must be based on accurate data insights used to inform innovative builds, initiatives and campaigns. Unfortunately, marketers often get lost in the binary-nature of data and fail to realize the true potential to inform performance. Data actually contains multiple dimensions that hold the key to success.

However, there are two problems with this situation. First, it can be challenging to pair the right insights with the right creative content from the beginning. Instead, brands often lean heavily on using louder and louder calls-to-action in an attempt to simply drown out the competition.

Second, many decision-makers fail to understand the difference between creative content and innovation, or where innovation actually begins within the marketing process. Creativity is related to imagination, but innovation is tied to implementation. Both are required to create results that can be measured, tracked, and quantified.

In your strategy development, you’ll first define your brand goals, then you’ll use accurate data insights to fuel creative ideation. That ideation spurs the birth of unique concepts, which are winnowed down until you arrive at the winning concept you will follow moving forward. You then develop your brand story variations to test, and finally, you’ll move into production and then performance tracking.

“Innovation is NOT an event. It’s a process.” 

– Guy Kawasaki

The creative ideation step is where innovation really begins. Sadly, too many organizations simply rush toward their goals without taking the time required to envision the steps necessary to achieving innovation and performance, develop ideas that fuel marketing direction, and, ultimately, achieve success.

Of course, many people struggle to move from objective data insights to razor-honed creative content. This short video highlights the entire process:

Success hinges on design

Achieving success doesn’t happen by accident. It requires design and planning. Design-strategy is just corporate-speak for “planning phase.” Of course, it’s essential that brands begin from the right starting point. To do that, brands should begin by developing user stories and mapping out user flows across multiple touchpoints. The challenge here is if you leap from ideation to implementation without a solid design phase, you lose the ability to create compelling, success-driving content. Creative innovation requires time, creative development, and the right budget.

Jay Pattisal, principal analyst for Forrester, points out, “Rather than bolting creative on at the end of the process, as an established look or defined list of deliverables, initiate the project with creative problem-solving to help define the problem and craft a solution at the start.”

Pattisal hints at something most corporations are guilty of doing. That is, leaving creative for the end. Ultimately, it becomes little more than an afterthought. Failure to invest in creative properly, at the right time in the design process, is exactly what delivers lackluster results.

Think of the design process as a waterfall. It allows all your builds to cascade into performance. Creatives provide you with the means to take ideas and transform them into wireframes, fleshing them out, with each pass informing the next and answering vital questions about whether you remain on strategy while taking advantage of new trends that align with business goals and incorporating those into creative assets.

Stakeholder involvement

It’s not sufficient to create the right design strategy. You also need to ensure that everyone involved is part of the conversation. Stakeholder involvement ensures that any creative content is built in alignment with your goals and KPIs in mind while incorporating feedback from the C-suite and accelerating the process and avoiding unnecessary bottlenecks or issues with quality.

Innovation and user value

Innovation makes your brand more memorable, but it’s important that you focus on delivering value to your end-user. Remember – it’s about them, not you. Content should be user-centric, not brand-centric. Otherwise, development flow will suffer and your end result will fail to achieve critical goals.

Managing innovation and trade-offs

Nothing exists in a vacuum. Everything is connected. Problems, challenges and trade-offs will rear their heads during the development phase and it’s essential that these are handled early before you spend money on creative production. Those builds cost time and money. Innovate, ideate, and then plan, while testing and dealing with hurdles early on in the process.

Constraints give creativity and innovation power

Accurate data helps confine the canvas when it comes to creative content. It sets boundaries. It defines the what, when, why, how and who. It also helps inform the flow and configuration of technology around the creative choice, transforming mere content into innovative marketing collateral. Clear data insights help provide content creators with an accurate map of their sandbox.

Early optimization is crucial

Do not wait until everything is said and done to worry about optimization. It should not be left until after everything is built. Instead, work with creatives from the beginning to ensure that data insights are shared and make certain that the potential problems and hurdles early on. Test ideas through surveys, pitches, direct feedback and more. Production should be the end result of all your feedback, as it is simply too costly in terms of time and money to redo it all if things go wrong later. Do it all right the first time by working with creative story designers capable of helping you connect with your audience to reach your brand goals.

“Marketers often get lost in the binary-nature of data and fail to realize the true potential to inform performance. Data actually contains multiple dimensions that hold the key to success.”

Conclusion

Creative cannot be an afterthought. Technology cannot be your main consideration when it comes to marketing. Ideation leads to innovation, which should then lead to the development of an overarching strategy that guides you forward from idea testing to content creation to user engagement. It is imperative that decision-makers shift their focus from technology and put it on the humanity of their message while embracing innovation and creativity to deliver larger returns. Data insights can fuel innovation and hold the key to developing the right creative content if you take the time to decipher it accurately.

The post Creativity and innovation should fuel technology choices appeared first on MarTech.

What is creative marketing, though? How should your analytics strategy work in this regard? How do you get from having objective marketing data to ideating, strategizing, and then embarking on a creative marketing campaign?  Quite often, it is something that is an afterthought, despite representing 80% of your campaign’s success.

It can be a massive challenge, and not everyone is up to it. It requires turning objective data into a story format that appeals to each consumer’s subjective viewpoint, by putting information through the filter of creativity to develop stories, emotion, and an entire campaign for your brand.

What kind of objective marketing data is there?

Perhaps the most important step here is to lay a strong foundation. To do that, it’s important to understand the types of objective marketing data that can and should be used. Of course, there are some obvious ones, including your market demographics and customer satisfaction information. However, there is much more to it than that.

Not only are there various types of objective marketing data, but there are multiple dimensions that must be understood and focused on. For example, various data points that paint the entire picture… like the length of video watched is an important metric, but you also need to focus on other dimensions, such as the version of the creative in question and the context of the creative itself.

The challenge facing organizations is this – too often, creative collateral is looked at as being one dimensional when the truth is that they have multiple dimensions that go far beyond mere “clicks.” A single video has storylines, characters, story arcs, reveals, reversals, CTAs, sound and produces emotions. All of these parameters affect and also hinge on the emotional state of the viewer.

Why are you still treating creative like a one-dimensional data point?  It is not.

What is creative marketing?

It’s tempting to lump all marketing activities under the heading of “creative marketing,” but that’s inaccurate at best and foolish at worst. You cannot equate cold calling with an AR/VR experience, even though both are technically marketing forms.

So, what is creative marketing, then?

At the most basic, we can define it as a marketing initiative that involves a more complicated process than simple “plug and chug.” A good creative marketing campaign can communicate an organization’s message to potential customers in a novel way that overcomes barriers and ensures engagement, helping that organization stand out from the competition for the right reasons.

The key is to create the right user experience to pull out the insights or actions you want to achieve. It is, ultimately, all about the user.

From analytics to actionable marketing insights

Turning hard data into a flourishing, creative marketing initiative may seem like an oblique process from the outside. However, there are concrete steps that every creative marketing campaign needs to fulfill.

Collect your data

The first such step is to collect your data. This will form the bedrock on which all other decisions and actions are predicated. What sort of data must you have in hand? Who is your audience? What does your ideal customer want? How will they consume the creative information? The end product should be an executive brief that clearly outlines your business goals along with the gaps you currently have in getting there.

Develop a brand story

All creative marketing campaigns ultimately boil down to storytelling. You cannot do that if you lack a brand story. It’s essential that your business has a compelling story that speaks to why you do what you do and what sets you apart from competitors. Without one, you encounter numerous issues that will ultimately derail your efforts.

Without a compelling brand story, the CxO is left to lead the way making decisions based on faith in what they believe works, rather than factual information derived from analytics and an emotional framework to guide it. The strategy becomes derailed by so-called expert recommendations, new tools and capabilities that may not bear at all on your goals, and shiny objects, resulting in analytics strategies completely divorced from reality.

Ensure your brand story flows across mediums

Your brand story cannot afford to be medium-centric. It must be medium-agnostic. That is, it should flow smoothly across all mediums, from blog posts to social media interactions to video storytelling.

This flies in the face of the age-old advice to choose a medium and stick with it. True, some mediums may not offer value to you. However, that is not the case for all of them. A good creative strategy takes into account the various platforms that work for your organization, as well as your audience, and then builds across them all at once.

Why not start small? Simply put, when you’re building out a customer journey, your audience will require multiple touchpoints. It is best to create your story all at once, rather than piecemeal and waiting to see if it works. If you take that stance, it will fail. What makes it work is building the entire flow, not just a single piece.

Brainstorm

By this point, you should have key pieces of information in hand. You know who you need to reach. You know how you intend to do that. You even know what story you want to tell. Now it’s time to think about how you intend to communicate your message.

Execute

With the decision on communication method made, it is time to execute. Once you have a great idea, you must bring it to life. Make sure that you’re budgeting for the creative talent that you need to execute your creative marketing campaign. For many creative writing campaigns, a production specialist, such as a video marketing expert or creative concept team, can be brought in to help bring your dream to life. Let’s be honest here. If you have not spent most of your career developing and crafting stories, you will need to hire the best talent you can afford.

Here is it what this looks like from a high level.

Conclusion

Develop a robust analytics strategy and pull actionable insights that inform your creative marketing efforts. Collect your data. Figure out what story you want to tell. Figure out how your story will flow, and then bring it all together and make it happen with the right talent to bring your organization’s story to life.

The post Turning objective data into creative marketing appeared first on MarTech.

No one wants to think about personality and charm when trying to boost their sales or bottom line, but you absolutely should. It turns out that the same thing that determined popularity in high school is also essential to your brand’s messaging, marketing and lead-nurturing.

What is charisma in the first place, though? How do you even define “charismatic” and what role does it have in the success (or lack thereof) of your marketing? How can something so ineffable be the essential ingredient to creative campaign success?

More importantly, how do you execute that?

We’ll take a closer look at what charisma is, what being charismatic entails, why people respond to it and how anyone can use this basic knowledge to be more appealing in strategic campaigns.

What does charismatic mean?

Individuals are brands just as much as any startup, small business or enterprise. Everyone has a reputation. We’ve all got a perceived value. We deal with varying levels of popularity with friends, coworkers, even family members. Success is determined by how effectively they define, develop, and market that brand identity. However, what really sets us apart from one another is something much more difficult to measure – charisma.

What is charisma? How do you define charismatic? It’s surprisingly difficult to arrive at an “in a nutshell” answer to the question of what does charismatic mean. Authorities from The New York Times to Psychology Today have agreed that there is no universal definition, but “you know it when you see it.” Merriam-Webster gives us this definition of charismatic: “having, exhibiting, or based on charisma or; a person who possesses special traits that attract, inspire, or fascinate other people: a person possessing charisma.”

This, at least, is a starting point for exploring bigger questions, such as how to develop charisma or how to be charming – those previously mentioned charismatic personality traits that attract, inspire, or fascinate.

Charismatic personality traits

The foundation of charisma is the possession of specific personality traits and abilities. While possessing these traits and abilities does not necessarily guarantee that you will be charismatic, they are necessary to become so.

Self-Confidence. Most charismatic people have a high degree of self-confidence, according to Forbes. They like themselves, they’re comfortable in their own skin, and, what’s more, they inspire confidence from other people. They know their worth and never try to be someone other than who they are.

Look at Cardi B. has a ton of confidence. Love her or hate her or her music, she understands how to command an audience:

How does she create “the Cardi B Effect?” As NPR pointed out:  “A branding power rooted in specific authenticity, created and permeated by…. blunt honesty, rapping, laughing, mild to moderate twerking, tongue-curling, teeth-kissing, chart-topping and regular degular Bronx girl antics.”

More importantly, she can bring a group of people together in the same physical space that would never hang out in the real world. Now that is a special gift. She speaks her beliefs, which has held a truth to many types of people of all backgrounds.

Joy. While we might struggle to define what charisma actually means, there’s no denying that one of the most immediately noticeable traits is that spark of life these people seem to have. They are passionate, and they live their lives with joy. They’re able to persuade others to join their cause through passion.

In general, storytelling always has an arc… basically outer, personal or inner conflicts, in a characters life and the story is how clever, creative they are in closing that gap, dynamically. Did they step on people or lift people up in doing so? In the case of Audi’s campaign “promote yourself,” their TV spot portrays a woman who has ALL THREE gaps. The CEO salutes her as employee of the year, in front of everyone at the firm… (outer) She SHOULD be feeling joy… but it’s clear she is not. (inner) What is missing is doing things her own way, starting her own company (personal) It’s not handed to her, she has to go out and grab it… that’s why we like her.  The visuals bring in references from the book “The Secret” (she updates her a “Vision board” list with a NEW vision that foreshadows her inner feelings). A Jerry McGuire “lite” departure (making a scene when she quits) while showing determination, defiance, confidence… and even inspiring onlookers from inside her office and out in the streets (outer: she takes actual steps to act out her dreams) becoming a visual inspiration to everyone watching her.

When you create all that level of context, with all those layers and layers of emotion, story and visual communication, that is what a full emotional story of what “joy” really looks like:

It also feeds into a bunch of other emotions like:

Empathetic. According to Inc., the most charismatic people in the world are also empathetic. That is, they’re easily able to put themselves into someone else’s shoes. In addition, they create empathy in others. That is the secret of how charismatic people connect with others with such seeming ease – they make their audience feel empathy with them.

Able to express emotions well. This is one area where many of us struggle. Sure, you can express anger, or maybe happiness, but what about subtle nuances of emotion? Charismatic individuals can express the full range of human emotions, and they do it well.

Quick-witted. All charismatic people share a quick wit and have the ability to adapt to subtle changes in a situation, according to CNBC. This allows them to say the right thing at the right time in order to influence others, and to tell the right story for each situation.

Amazon’s campaigns have done a great job as capturing these last three.

Even at the end, the daughter “hangs up” on her dad, with a charming attitude, keeping things real before things get too “sweet and syrupy.” In mere seconds we experience real, authentic people, with a lot of love and connection, living a full life and expressing real emotions that we can all relate too… or at least aspire to.

Funny enough, the Facebook Portal spots look exactly the same. In fact, I was incorrectly searching for “Alexa” on Youtube before I figured it out. The problem with this is that there is little differentiation between Facebook’s campaign and Amazon’s campaign. What I liked better about Amazon, was the fact that they only reveal that they are talking through the device at the very end, which becomes a delightful surprise and really reinforces how seamless their experience is. Here there is no surprise and the scene plays out awkward at first until the parents move into a new stance that makes us feel authenticity:

Just to be clear, make sure you don’t cheat out on the emotions and story because that is really what you should be paying for when you have your team or partners help you create your campaign messaging! The emotion is where the magic is. It’s not enough to show that END result only. When you do that, the story flatlines… or worse, doesn’t exist. This is what most, forgettable advertising has done for decades, they do what is call in the acting world “playing the result.” They show an emotion, with no arc, no build up, no context and expect you to take it at face value? The problem with this is, without struggle, or context, emotion (joy, happiness, excitement, etc) just comes off superficial because the story and the character or the story didn’t earn our respect, so to speak. It didn’t give us an experience.

In this example the voice-over is doing all the work of trying to provide context. But I don’t feel anything so I tuned out. What do you think? Is that Nirvana in the background as a nursery song?

But know that you don’t have to be so “on the nose.” You can also go completely against what you want to convey to make a deeper point, but you just have to do it with style. You can create a ridiculous problem that goes against all norms… while adding comedy to the situation like AT&T has done with their “OK” campaigns:

All of the characteristics and abilities mentioned above apply just as much to organizations, brands and even marketing campaigns as they do to individuals. They have personality, as well, and must understand and think about the same things that you or I do.

For example, when/how/why do you make a connection with any person to begin with? Typically it’s when you open up about a fear, a loss and you make yourself vulnerable to them which produces empathy from the other party and eventually a bond. Your storytelling should be no different. Just look at what films win at the Oscars every year, year after year and you’ll see this is exactly what they do.

Now that we have explored charisma and charismatic meaning, it’s time to turn our attentions to another topic. Specifically, we’re going to take an in-depth look at how to be charming and how to develop charisma.

How to be charming: Tips and tricks to unlock your charisma

It’s all well and good to understand the traits that help define charismatic individuals, as well as brands and successful marketing campaigns. But how do you unlock your charisma? For those wondering how to have a charismatic personality, these tips and tricks will help.

Engagement: Be present by actively listening

Active listening – the art of truly paying attention to what someone else is saying or doing – is a hallmark of charismatic individuals. How do you show that you’re actively engaged in listening to the other party? It’s communicated through body language. It’s expressed by making eye contact. It’s shown by putting down devices so that you can focus on what is being communicated.

Brands and marketing teams can tap into the same trick. This means user-first thinking instead of brand-first thinking. By engaging with your ideal audience through social media, and ensuring responsive customer service and/or marketing teams, you show that you are actively listening to what your customers care about. Of course, this goes well beyond simply replying to comments left on Facebook posts, although that sort of engagement is vital, too. It touches on creating media that explores the topics that your audience cares about most, whether in written format, infographics, or online video. It also includes taking additional steps to show that you value what your audience thinks and wants, such as surveys and polls.

Why, though? Shouldn’t the situation be the other way around? Actually, no. You’re in business to support your customers, and you cannot do that if you do not listen. There are additional benefits to be found here, as well. For instance, actively listening to your customers will help you discover success stories that you can share with your audience. It helps improve customer retention, and creates brand ambassadors. It even has an effect on customer spending, bolstering your profitability.

So, listen actively. Know what’s being said. Show that you care. Be part of the conversation.

Know your strengths and play to them

As mentioned previously, charisma comes from having self-confidence and being able to inspire confidence in others. It’s about knowing what you’re good at and leaning into those skills to help bolster your confidence when it is flagging. Maybe you’re a jokester. You can use humor to help improve your sense of confidence, but also to connect with others. Perhaps you’re adept at researching facts and figures and then assimilating the minutia and painting an accurate picture of a topic. Maybe you’ve got the gift of gab, or perhaps you’re very persuasive. All of these can help build the confidence that you need for success.

The same thing applies to brands and organizations. What does your business do best? What are your startup’s strengths in comparison with competitors? What is your unique selling proposition? Identify your strengths and then play to them in your marketing campaigns. Do you do humor well? Are you empathetic? Do you solve problems? You must show your audience how you add value; you can’t just say that you do. It’s essential that you get out there and prove it.

Be less self-centered

You’re out on a date, and the other person just won’t shut up about themselves and how great they are. They’re the most amazing at this, and the greatest at that. Meanwhile, you’re grinding your teeth counting down the seconds until you can cut the night short and head back home alone. No one likes an excessively self-centered person. There’s a whole psychological classification devoted to it called narcissism. Asking questions about the other person, and listening as they speak is far more charming than droning on endlessly about yourself.

In the same vein, brands and organizations need to break out of the narcissistic marketing mode they’re stuck in. Sure, your product is the best on the market. Your service is amazing. Stop talking about it already. Endless self-promotion will do nothing but drive your audience away. They’re not really interested. Instead, engage with your audience. Listen to them. Ask them questions. Get involved in the conversation (and to have a conversation, there must be a two-way flow of information, so stop overtly promoting). Become part of the community and drive value.

As a counterpoint, Cardi B. seems to break this rule, as her intense presence seems to suck up all the oxygen around her at times. It works for her but the effect can be polarizing for many, so it really depends on your objectives. If your brand is not even on the map, an aggressive approach could have short to long term gains that make it worth taking the risk to stand out over others vs. being a forgotten and failed brand. It really depends on your brand and position in the marketplace.

Think about it this way: For most brands, creative messaging that appeals to emotions is more effective than calls to action that demand a specific behavior.

Broadcast passion and positivity

Those who have a charismatic personality are passionate, and they practice positivity (most of the time). Those character traits are important because other people are attracted to them. A passionate person can win over even naysayers to a cause that matters to them. A positive person uplifts others to the point that people actually seek them out just to spend time in their presence.

There is also the fact that sharing passions fosters empathy and intimacy, whether you’re running a fundraiser to support a nonprofit with a cause that matters to you, or you’re fighting for social recognition of a little-known medical condition that affects someone close to you. Passionate people help others see things from their point of view – they open eyes and broaden minds. They teach, and bring others together. They create a sense of community and camaraderie.

Brands and organizations can tap into the same thing. How? Consider showing interest in the passions of your audience. What is it that fires them up? What gets their engine revving? What causes, topics, or issues ignite their own passions? Consider supporting nonprofits that are involved with causes and issues that matter to your audience. Support social movements that have value to your customers. Get the brand to take a more active role, as well.

In addition, you can also focus on creating positive messaging – don’t sling mud at the competition. Don’t be negative. Create uplifting video content, be positive on social media. Creative messaging is definitely more charming than the alternative.

Become a better storyteller

When you communicate with others, do you do so with a focus on what you want them to feel or take away from the conversation? If so, you’re short-circuiting your success. Instead, those with a charismatic personality focus on how others feel during the conversation. It’s not about the message. It’s about how the story makes your audience feel – the emotional connection you establish with someone else.

The same thing is true for brands and marketing campaigns. Use humor, passion and a shared human connection to create stories that resonate with your audience on an emotional level. Think about it this way: when you create a marketing video, do you start with an idea for the message, or do you begin with a specific audience or customer persona in mind?

If it’s the former, you’re in trouble. If it’s the latter, you’re on the right track. The best videos begin not with a message, but with an audience or persona, and use their needs, interests, and emotions to lead them on a journey.

In conclusion

When it’s all said and done, charisma can be built over time. That applies to both individuals and brands, and it offers immense rewards. Whether you’re seeking to be more successful on a personal level, or you want to build a stronger, future-proof brand with outstanding customer loyalty, learning how to be charismatic is an essential step.

The post How to be charismatic: Marketing with charm, heart and personality appeared first on MarTech.

Before I graduated from the Art Center College of Design, Lynda Weinman was my teacher for web design. Yes, THAT Lynda — who created Lynda.com and sold it for $1.5 billion to LinkedIn (just to give you some perspective on where I’m coming from).

Back then, I was fortunate enough to be around creative geniuses tackling technology in new and innovative ways, which I only later found out was not the norm. Back then, we were focused on making a website look cool and on-brand, as well as delivering relevant messaging… but in this new day and age, the X-factor for websites includes the engineering of a seamless experience to make conversions as frictionless as possible through UX (user experience) and testing. The result? A multilayered experience around product-market fit that I like to call Brand-Response.

Brand-response doesn’t stem from techy, click-baiting tactics… rather it stems from something way more primal and strategic: storytelling. This is how you can turn your branding into something original and connected while also integrating the latest tools to enhance that story experience.

Let’s be clear: There are two modes of a website’s existence:

1. Launching/Testing: This is when you are finding and proving the market. This can easily take months, or longer if need be. This is the essence of your brand, your story and your tribe.
2. Scaling/Maintenance: This is when you have a thriving business and are beginning to scale or are already scaling. This is the essence of your brand and your tribe plus tech plus sales enablement tools.

I find many are confused about what mode they are in. If you’re not selling out from a ton of demand, then you should not be focusing on “Conversion Rate Optimization” — not by a long shot.

If you are still finding your audience, your tribe, then you need to focus on your brand promise(s) and story. You’re still in the launching/testing phase. Some call it the MVP (minimum viable product) phase, or if you will, the “good enough… for now” phase.

Here’s a statistic:

“The ‘right [creative] message’ accounts for 80 percent of the return path,” Andrew Robertson, president and CEO of BBDO Worldwide, said at the AT&T Shape conference last year, and this figure has been confirmed by both Google North America data and Facebook data.

This means that your storytelling, your messaging, is 80 percent of the reason why your lead generation works or not… and that only leaves 20 percent for the “sales enablement” stuff that I won’t cover here since you can find a gazillon articles that already cover that. But please understand that tactical “tricks and tech” are your smallest levers for success. Below, I’ll focus on the biggest lever for success, which is storytelling.

Unless your business is already scaling out of control, getting your story right is where you’ll see the biggest gains.

Consider this scenario: You have a website that has consistent organic, paid and social traffic, with great page metrics such as time on site — but you are not capturing the most important users with the highest intent to convert. How are you able to communicate your value proposition while instilling trust which will lead to a conversion? Here are some steps to consider while developing a highly targeted lead-gen website.

Understand your users

Consumer research is going to be the most important thing for your business at this stage. It is very important to create content around your user base’s needs — but you don’t know what those needs are until you do the research. This research helps you determine:

• What kind of content to create.
• How to present your message.
• What kind of language to use when writing for your audience.
• How to use imagery that resonates with your users.

Your message, as well as the language and imagery that you use, will be some of the most important details you can determine from the start. Learn how your audience connects on an emotional level to make them feel the need to buy your product or service. For example, if your audience connects to a product by feeling lucky to be part of an exclusive group, you’ll want to choose language and imagery that highlights exclusivity.

Consider how the consumer moves through your content. For example, my agency, Noble Digital, builds content based on the See, Think, Do, Care framework. I will use videos to demonstrate my point about content flow, since it’s more fun to watch than read web copy, plus it’s a good reminder of the fact that your website can and should be using video whenever possible.

SEE
The first step in the consumer journey is seeing entertaining/inspiring content. For example, the video below is for people who want to be inspired by visual imagery. They don’t want to buy anything, they just want to dream about what they could be. Your CFO may not see any point in spending money on this type of content, but consider this type of content to be a primer. It gets people looking at your brand, gives them a reason to start to care and funnels them to the next step. This type of content is usually more effective when distributed off your website, with links leading them to your website to learn more.

THINK
The next type of content is for people who want to learn something. For the video below, the audience consists of people who play soccer and also want to play a better game, help their team win or find the right products to help them enhance their game. This type of content sets you up as a company that wants to help, and it can be used both on and off your site.

Or you could blend the education with the entertainment — a bit of See and Think at same time, such as in this video:

DO
This type of video is meant to inspire action. This one is for people who play soccer and know they need new shoes to play at their best. These people have been convinced of this need and want to make a purchase right now. This can be a separate video, or it can be a part of other videos.

Consider something like Think and Do at the same time. This type of video teaches them something and gives them a challenge:

Nothing super techy here, right? Just basic logic flow, moving users through a decision tree: If they click on this, then you will serve them that. If people click on the “shop predator” overlay, then you’ll pixel them for retargeting, and you’ll probably give them a new journey, while the others might need to see this a few more times.

See and Think should be prioritized over Do. The Do is merely the result of See and Think. If you push “Do” too hard, you are just a direct marketer/salesman with no creativity, style or grace. There is no need for direct marketing once they are on your site! When they are on your site, it’s time to entertain your audience and tell your story. So tell it well!

By the way, video is one of the best tools you have to do engage your audience, and yet it is so underutilized, or not done as well as it could be.  Video will do a few things for your website presence:

1. Entertain, educate and create an emotion in the user.
2. Speed up the sales cycle (for B2B and complex services, video is indispensable).
3. Increase time on page, which may have the added value of signaling to search engines that you’re meeting searchers’ needs (if they came to you via search).
4. Increase retention and brand recall (Can you remember the subject line of the last AdWords ad you clicked on? Thought not.)

Customer Care comes after a conversion, when a user has ascended to being a potential evangelist of your brand.

Your understanding of how your customer gets to the point of relating to, learning from, using, then praising the virtues of your brand will inform all the content you need to create. Once you understand the role your site can play, you can add consistent touch points via content — white papers, videos, blog posts, infographics and so on — that are decided upon and created based on your knowledge of how and where to best target the audience.

But in order to do all that? You need to get to the research. Talk to your consumers via focus groups or surveys and understand what they need to feel connected to your product or service.

Creating credibility

To keep leads coming back to your site, it’s very important to sprinkle elements that support your brand’s credibility consistently throughout the site. Examples of social proof that ease your prospects’ minds include:

• Customer reviews.
• Reviews from professionals or industry leaders.
• A list of how your products have been featured on other websites, in other videos, on podcasts or in any media that you don’t own.
• An enumeration of the number of people who have used your services (Think of McDonald’s “number served” counter on their signs).
• Images and graphics.

The last one is undervalued but extremely important. Users are drawn to images, and being able to see a product up close, in action, will help them decide to purchase something they were on the fence about. Beautiful images are able to connect with users emotionally with instant speed, in a way that text can’t emulate. Users are more likely to get a feeling of purpose and power from a beautiful image of Nike shoes on an athlete, for example, than they are from reading a paragraph about the wonders of the brand.

Segment your users — creatively

When you hear “segment your users” you may think: back-end… data buckets, code… Tech!  Ugh!

Well, when you do this “mechanically” using questionnaires, forced pop-ups, page takeovers, or drop-downs, then yeah, I can see why your eyes are glazing over. I just want to run, too!

How about doing it creatively, with visuals?  I love this landing page example from Adidas.

On the “front end,” users are impassioned to choose based on their desires (not the brands’) psychologically, emotionally and visually. On the back end, they are also self-segmenting themselves to appropriate pages while producing clear data that allow the brand to later understand who is responding to what. This is a win-win.

And it’s not techy at all, is it? It’s in fact a very human way to encourage user flow. Use basic logic around “pains” and “gains” to guide your audience to what ails them or inspires them.

Notice the calls to action (CTAs) in this example have nothing to do with buying anything. They instead focus on of what the user wants to do with the shoes, or the brand promise. When you can get the user to dream (not thinking, but visualizing) and see themselves as one of these two images, then you’ve got them! This is user flow at its finest.

Map and measure out your primary and secondary KPIs

So, in the case of Adidas, the primary goal might be to segment users between product lines, first and foremost, and secondly, to drive them to a purchase. This is clearly a bigger communication strategy that goes deeper than just simply selling.

Selling is not always the best top goal. Why? Because you’ll have a hard time creating a return path once you go for the kill.  Let’s face it, the average conversion rate of most websites is three to five percent. That means that 95-97 percent of the people that visit the first time will not purchase or even take any secondary actions like an opt-in, so you have to assume there has to be additional flow built into your funnel.

For most brands, you have to decide on an “experience,” like encouraging and inspiring your site visitors to identify themselves with the brand first. In a way, this is indoctrinating your customers. In the Adidas example, the user thinks, “How much chaos or control do I want in a shoe? Hmm… I never thought about that. Will they look cool on me? Will it help me perform better when I play soccer?”

Yes! You want your prospective customers to get lost in those thoughts… not “well, how much do they cost?”

Buying is often the last thing on your user’s mind unless they’ve already been to the site at least once or a few times. So think about that first-time experience. How many layers of inspirational thought can you put into your message that will also overcome sales objections?

Again, remember “brand-response,” which really means “vision-reality.” You have to balance “marketing vision” with the “sales reality” of handling sales objections, every step of the way, for different audiences that are in completely different stages of their journey.

A good website will have multiple layers of communication happening at the exact same time and can direct all that traffic the way only the most sophisticated intersection does — flawlessly.

Easier said than done, but this is the art of web design. It’s part art, part infrastructure, part goal setting.

So shoving a bright red “buy” button in front of your audience is the last thing you need to worry about. Users seldom have a hard time finding the purchase path when they’re ready to buy. So please stop wasting your time and energy focusing 80 percent of your time on that. That is not going to increase your bottom line in a meaningful way.

Rather, focus on your brand promise and the users’ gains and pains. I know… you thought this article was going to be about adding more pop-ups, analytics tools, and heavy UX blah, blah, blah? Nope! This is about story, story, story! And you have to make that story as inspiring and visually appealing as you can afford to.

Let’s say you’re not entirely sure whether your website is visually awesome or not. If you’re not quite sure, this means you definitely need to make it more visual. Trust me, when your website looks amazing and your story is flawless and inspiring, you won’t be able to stop sharing it or talking about it. It’s an awesome creation when done right.

The difference between primary and secondary KPIs

To be successful, you need to understand the difference between primary and secondary KPIs. The primary KPI should be something that the user can access on your website. This is something that they initiate after being given the opportunity to imagine themselves with your product through your story. The primary KPI should always be very easy to find, such as on the header of the website or on a sidebar.

Here are some examples of primary KPI options:

• Email sign-up form.
• Request a phone call.
• Free download of an asset (such as an educational white paper about your product).
• Purchases (of course).

Secondary KPIs, on the other hand, are things that you are measuring on the back end. These are things that you have set goals for and are keeping track of without the consumer even being aware of them.

Here are some examples of secondary KPI options:

• Watching x amount of a video.
• Increased time on site (e.g., reading multiple blog posts).
• Social shares.
• Click-through rates on advertisements.
• Sales cycle patterns between first click and purchase.

How to measure your KPIs

Having all these KPIs in place is great — unless you aren’t using them to learn more about your audience. If you’re just collecting data and not considering what it actually means, it’s useless to you.

You need to understand how your social shares help you, and if your social shares are down, you need to know why and what you can do to raise them. You need to understand why users aren’t signing up for your email newsletter and what you can do to make that more enticing.

There are some tools that can help you better analyze the data that you get from your KPIs, such as:

• Google Analytics.
• Google Analytics Event Tracking.
• Custom JavaScript to track clicks and other events.
• Heat mapping to see where your users are spending time on a page
• A social shares plugin on WordPress.

Understanding and incorporating your leads into the funnel

It is very important to understand where the lead is within the user journey. Asking for additional information on your form can be a great way of collecting data that you can later use to segment. The common form generally asks for the user’s name and email. But if you can gather more information to help segment your users right then, it will help you incorporate your leads into the right spot in the funnel.

Adding a list of checkmarks that apply to the services they may be interested in, for example, will allow you to optimize your leads and focus on those with higher intent to convert. You could also add some questions that will allow you to gather more consumer insights, such as:

• How did you hear about us? This helps you discover which of your marketing avenues are working the best.
• What is your age range? This is a common question that businesses ask, presenting a range of ages for consumers to choose from. This helps you learn more about who is seeking out your products and services.
• Ask about their level of expertise relating to your product. For example, if you sell computer equipment, present a multiple-choice question that states “I am a…” with options such as “computer hobbyist, IT service provider, business owner” and so on. This question helps you determine what type of customer is seeking you out.

It’s important to keep the number of questions low at any given time. With more data inputs comes more user friction! So don’t get data-greedy. If you put the user through too much, your dropoff rate will only rise.

Segmenting the data — MQL vs. SQL

MQL refers to “marketing qualified leads” — in other words, engaged leads. These are people that are initiating contact with you, rather than the other way around. You aren’t sure exactly how interested they are (they could just be browsing), but their actions make it very easy to determine where they are in the sales funnel.

SQL means “sales qualified lead,” and that means that the lead has already been vetted by your sales efforts as having very high interest. These are people who click on your PPC ads — you had to pay to get their attention, but because they clicked on the ad, you have a good idea that they are pretty interested in what you have to offer.

Based on the additional data supplied by a form, or by the way the user converted on the site form vs. white paper or content download, you can segment them into higher levels of leads.

And then, based on the segmentation of these levels of intent, you can initiate different strategies with the two groups.

For example, your messaging will be different for those who arrived via a click-through on an advertisement. For these SQL leads, you’ll need to focus on why they clicked your ads. Solve their problem with your product.

But with MQL leads, you don’t know what their problem is. So instead, your messaging needs to be more focused on getting them to envision themselves with your product.

Promotional offers also will be different for SQL and MQL leads. For SQL leads, when you know why they are there, you’ll want to give them promotional offers that get them to buy right then. You already know they plan to buy a product — so offer free shipping to entice them further. With an MQL lead, however, you don’t know if they intended to buy anything. You need to make them feel like they have nothing to lose, so consider a “first-time buyer” discount or something similar.

The level of your own engagement will change based on whether a lead was an SQL or an MQL. It’s very important to contact SQLs faster and more frequently, because you want to take advantage of the known interest. With MQLs, you’ll need to keep your message in front of them without overstaying your welcome.

Once you know what type of lead a user is, you can then go back and add in layers to help accelerate certain users through your sales funnel. Watch for specific behavioral patterns that signal they’re ready to talk to sales, despite not having completed the entire funnel.

I’ve helped brands that were in growth transition — meaning that the types of customers they have now are different from the customers they want to begin attracting. If that’s the case, you need to go back to your product offerings and update them, as well as rebuild your user strategy around your new business plan. Then re-brand your story, and perhaps even re-visualize it for yourself. And then, update your website around that strategy.

Testing for conversion rate optimization

So this is the final aspect of developing a website. You now have an amazing brand identity; your messaging is clear; your products and offerings are amazing; you have designed for complex offerings like B2B or SaaS platforms and you have videos to help speed up the sales cycle. Right?

I’m also assuming you already have plenty of lead traffic flow and your business is booming. You might even be in “maintenance” mode. Then, and only then, you are ready to fuss over CRO. If you do this any earlier than you should, you will be spinning your wheels and feeling like you’re getting so much done when you’re not at all. If you’re testing button colors while your brand message is all about you (instead of your users), you won’t be going anywhere for a while.

One of the most important aspects of running a lead-gen website is consistent testing — but again, only after you’ve accomplished the other objectives first. Things that are important to test for CRO include:

• Image types.
• Copy.
• Pop-up timing.
• Button color.
• CTA copy.

Remember that testing is never “finished.” Even if you have a booming business, you should always be tweaking these things to keep attracting new buyers.

Have you ever noticed that conversion rate optimization focuses on conversion rate with no mention of revenue or any actual business metrics? That’s because it involves a series of micro goals around a big goal. The complexity of optimizing your site will be tenfold if your message and product-market fit is not rock-solid. So if this is still being proven, you might not know which way is up once you starting bringing CRO into the fold. Kind of like when you start split-testing a mediocre-performing Facebook ad set.

You also need to have statistically relevant levels of traffic flowing to the pages you are testing for CRO to even make sense. The amount of traffic you need for testing to make sense will depend on the size of your business and the size of your industry — but consultants who do this for a living suggest that even small businesses in niche industries should be seeing about 1,000 visitors per month before they bother with testing.

Be sure you give yourself several months to run a respectable test if your traffic is low. But heuristic (experienced-based) analysis can go far if you set it up correctly.

Conclusion

The importance of beginning your lead-gen efforts from the point of view of a storyteller cannot be underestimated. Remember, the steps for creating the best lead-gen website are:

• Understand your users.
• Create credibility.
• Segment your users, creatively.
• Measure primary and secondary KPIs.
• Segment the data into MQL and SQL leads or conversion states.
• Testing.

All of this data that you collect is useless without the final step of testing. If you collect data on one set of copy, one type of image, one CTA, and then you never change those things and collect new data, how will you be able to tell what was truly performing well?

Maybe you thought 10,000 views a month was wildly successful — until a slight tweak earned you a million views a month! You can generate more leads than you thought possible with these steps… but the quality of execution is everything.

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