If you’re a business owner or CEO of small to mid-size company and you feel that you might be falling behind in today’s digital marketplace, here are 5 things every CEO should know about branding.
Your brand strategy should be to deliver an authentic and consistent experience. If you haven’t clearly defined that experience on paper and shared it with your team, then you don’t have a strategy for your brand, which is akin to coaching an IPL team on Sunday without a game plan.
People receive recommendations from friends or family, from industry leaders, or even from strangers who share their opinions online. They prefer to “research” a product or service before buying, “controlling” their sales process and deciding if they’re going to engage or purchase. With so much information available online, people check out what brands are saying and judge for themselves if it’s accurate. If it’s not, they move on.
Marketing is part art and part science, but new digital channels have placed more emphasis on the science. It’s impossible to predict human reactions with a high level of accuracy consistently, so good marketers define their hypothesis, test it on a small scale, collect data to measure results, and refine, expand or stop depending on their results. Think of marketing campaigns like experiments, and double down on what’s working. And make sure to collect the necessary data to be able to measure.
In the earlier days, this was pretty easy for many brands. Simply purchase media in TV, radio or print that matches your target demographic and place your ads. There were a handful of TV and radio stations, and maybe 10 to 20 print publications to evaluate. Today, there are hundreds of different channels, serving smaller but more targeted groups. Many people no longer read only print newspaper or magazines. They’re choosing new places to interact with content, and you must be visible where they’re interacting.
Digital media has created a many-to-many connection between a brand and its employees. The market can interact with employees at many levels, and voice pleasure or displeasure from any interaction, at any time, for anyone to see. Smart companies train their employees about their brand standards and personality – how to treat people, converse with them, and support them – so everybody works to create that unified experience with the marketplace
The CEOs and business owners who’ve embraced these concepts are still on the front end of the curve. If you don’t have a plan in place today for at least a few of these concepts, you’re at risk of having your market embrace your competitors, and becoming irrelevant.
To start, document the strategy for your brand, and have your team embrace the above concepts and deploy them throughout your organization. If you need help, Get in touch or call us on +91 99871 05505.
