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Why Do Brands and Social Media Work So Well Together?
Stop Wasting Your Marketing Dollars
Marketing as an Added Value Service
Business Week Special Report - June 9, 2008
500 Companies Fast Adopters of Social Media

Why Do Brands and Social Media Work So Well Together?

In marketing, the critical question is: How do I ensure that every dollar I spend is being maximized to benefit my company to the fullest extent possible? The two key components to that equation are Branding and Social Media. First, brands guide every decision and action in a company whether that is around marketing, product development, customer service or hiring. Think of it this way. Your brand’s promise to customers is the answer to one simple question, “What’s in it for me?” Thus, how you deliver products, what you say in marketing, who you hire to represent your business, how customers are treated, etc are all critical factors in delivering against that promise. The brand is the rudder for your company that ensures that you aren’t just working hard at your company, but your company, your marketing, and your employees are all working hard for you.

Brands help to attract higher quality leads, justify pricing premiums and close more sales. This is why Business Week advises to not spend a dime on marketing without a strong brand strategy. But brands are no good unless they are fully infused into everything your company does. In marketing, the brand encapsulates the reasons to buy, not the means to communicate that message. And marketing has always been seen as complex and costly, and usually results in some degree of frustration because you have no idea if it is really working or not. There is a saying, “I know that half my advertising is working for me, I just don’t know what half.” Without the right marketing, there is no way to get your brand message out to prospects in any scalable way.

This leads to the second key: social media. Social media is the most cost-effective way to target your prospects with dramatic scale and precision. Additionally, some of the best social media tools are often free to those that know how to use them. Brands and social media work so well together as partners because there is no better way to add power to your marketing message than through branding, and there is no more powerful way to get the message out to incredibly targeted prospects, in mass, in a more cost-effective manner than social media.

What do we mean by social media? Ask that question to 20 different people and you will get 20 different answers. The crux of it is that the internet has completely changed the #1 factor that influences purchase decisions, which used to be word-of-mouth. The Online Publisher’s Association conducted a study of the top purchase influencers on all stages of the buying process and found the internet to be the top purchase influencer by a factor of more than 2:1 over traditional word-of-mouth.

Social media often refers to blogs, podcasts, wikis, communities, video portals and hundreds of sites that aggregate user content. The internet has not only put individual voices online, but created an environment that is both participatory and collaborative. It has spawned a whole new movement being termed, conversational marketing. This is word-of-mouth on steroids.

I had lunch recently with a friend that decided, as a hobby, to start blogging about restaurants that he frequents with his wife in the Phoenix area (www.ericeatsout.com). After just a month or two, he now has more than 400 unique visitors a day, people from as far away as the east coast are following his recommendations and local restaurant owners and press are calling him about his service. This is a great example of the power of social media and conversational marketing.

According to Technorati.com, there are more than 112 million blogs, 175,000 new blogs coming online each day, and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media. When you combine all this with search engines that can pinpoint exactly what social media someone is looking for through keyword searches, you start to see the power of how easy it is to find online conversations about virtually any subject.

Social media provides the opportunity for marketers to not only participate in these online conversations, but to create some of your own. Any piece of content, from articles to press releases, videos, podcasts or white papers, along with many others, can be placed online, optimized to come up as individual search engine results and therefore be found by consumers online through keyword searches.

In fact, these consumers are what I call “hand raisers.” They have physically taken an action to search for content that is relevant to what you offer, meaning that they are not only self-qualified, but in the mind-set to be open to your marketing messages at that particular point in time. Most traditional marketing simply casts big nets out over demographic or psychographic groups in hopes of finding people that are in the purchase process. If these people are not in the mindset to buy, or simply not interested, you still pay to reach them as readers, listeners or viewers. In social media, the cost to optimize content is extremely low, but incredibly powerful.

But remember, this new conversational marketing/social media trend is all about attracting people to your company. Once they arrive at your website, come into a store, or call on the phone, it is the brand that will reinforce your company’s relevant differentiation. This happens through living the brand promise at every customer touch point in order to connect on both rational and emotional levels. Neither side of the marketing equation (branding or social media) will work well without the other.

This is the essence of why brands and social media work so well together. And you can bet that this very article has been placed online, optimized for search engines, and is being found by numerous people that have yet to come to know my company and what I offer. Now is the time to put this power to work for your business.

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Stop Wasting Your Marketing Dollars

When the Harvard Business Review recently stated that few executives could say what their strategy is, it gave the impression that a tidal wave of businesses are potentially wasting a lot of time and money in marketing. I have witnessed this many times in my own experience where individuals within top level management teams each have a very different interpretation of the company’s strategy.

April 1, 2008, HBR Article Excerpt – “The thing is, companies with a clear, concise strategy statement--one that employees can easily internalize and use as a guiding light--often turn out to be industry stars.”

In addition to your employees, your partners, vendors, customers and network can all be advocates if they are empowered to properly and simply represent the company. In essence, your company’s strategy or brand is the key to making all your marketing efforts work much harder. The better you are at creating a brand promise that relevantly differentiates your company, the more likely you are to attract the right leads, and close a much higher percentage of them.

In addition to your employees, your partners, vendors, customers and network can all be advocates if they are empowered to properly and simply represent the company. In essence, your company’s strategy or brand is the key to making all your marketing efforts work much harder. The better you are at creating a brand promise that relevantly differentiates your company, the more likely you are to attract the right leads, and close a much higher percentage of them.

Creating Your Brand Promise

Most companies don’t see themselves in the business of marketing and thus spend little time trying to craft a brand strategy. If you are a company that tries to attract new clients or additional sales, then you are in the business of marketing. But don’t be confused by thinking that your elevator speech is your brand. A brand is a guide for every action and interaction that surrounds your company. This not only includes marketing, but product development, customer service, pricing, incentives, sales presentations, point-of-sale, events and much more. The brand embodies the total experience with your company that builds trust, expectations and perceptions over time. It is the consistent filter thru which every decision from within the company should be judged. This is why so many companies waste their marketing dollars without a solid brand strategy in place. HOW DO I CREATE MY COMPANY’S BRAND STRATEGY AND STOP WASTING MY MARKETING TIME AND DOLLARS?

Below is a simple, four level outline of how to start thinking about creating and conveying your brand promise and entire brand story. It is a guide for what to say and when. This is important since we could all talk for an entire day about our businesses, but not all of that information is important for marketing.

Level One – The Brand Promise

This is the level of communications that is commonly missed entirely. As an example, think of how many websites you have gone to that provided no real understanding of how the company would solve or meet your needs. They simply talk all about themselves or focus on features and benefits of their product. All that is Level Two information that I may want to hear, but only if I know what the company or product is going to do for me first.

All websites, ads, elevator speeches, brochures, sales presentations, employee training programs, etc. should lead with the brand promise. The brand promise is what we all want to hear when on the other end of a sell. Make sure you know what your brand promise is and don’t be shy to use it.

If your brand promise follows the five principals set out below, it will be your most powerful marketing tool for converting leads into sales.

Use a customer benefit orientation (don’t talk about you)
Understand and acknowledge your prospect’s unmet need that you address
Consider both rational and emotional connections to your brand.
Never promise more than you can deliver
Create a singular statement that is easy to remember and re-articulate

Here are three examples of brand promises to help envision the end product:

This is a brand promise for the Mazda Miata when it was first introduced into the United States:
o The Mazda Miata promises to bring the joy of driving within reach
The Ritz Carlton is a great brand and a wonderful brand promise example:
o The Ritz Carlton promises to employ ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen
To show how a local company and business-to-business marketer can create a brand promise, I have included my own statement as a marketing consultancy for review
o StudioHDV promises to take the cost and complexity out of marketing
To show how a local company and business-to-business marketer can create a brand promise, I have included my own statement as a marketing consultancy for review
o StudioHDV promises to take the cost and complexity out of marketing

Judge for yourself the ability of each brand promise above to stand up to the five guiding principals. Also think of the power of each of these brand promises if used properly, as a guide for employees, marketing, new product development and more.

Level Two – Reasons to Believe

Once you have caught your prospect’s interest and attention with the brand promise, then it is time to give them all the reasons to believe that you can deliver against that promise. If you lead with these reasons, it is very likely they will fall on deaf ears. Reasons to believe tend to fall into a number of categories:

Credentials for the company or management
Clients or projects
Product or service features and benefits
3rd party endorsements/testimonials
Unique point-of-views on relevant issues, topics or industry news
3rd party endorsements/testimonials

Level Three – The Rest of the Story

There may be far more that your company does than expressed in the brand promise and the specific reasons to believe in that statement. For instance, I do brand strategy, but I also do focus groups, customer interviews, advertising, online marketing, sales training, etc. This is not a plug as much as to say that we all have a number of offerings. But are they all equally important to introduce right away, put on the front page of the website, or show on the cover of the brochure? Not necessarily. But they are an important part of the full brand story and building a lasting relationship and loyalty over time. It is very tempting to want to mention everything that we do all at once, but that really only serves to confuse the prospect. These messages are best placed on the services page of the website, discussed deeper in a conversation, or carefully placed within context in a brochure. Examples of this level of information are:

The full line of products or services, packages or bundled offerings
A deeper dive into any one topic area, the rest of the story
Price-of-Entry information or attributes that you must have to be legitimate, but won’t differentiate you (i.e. ATMs, online banking, branches, etc. for banks)

Level Four – Purchase Accelerators

Purchase accelerators can be used anytime to help move someone along through a natural purchase process from awareness through consideration, evaluation, trial, purchase and loyalty. If you aren’t thinking about your purchase accelerators, then you should give this area some consideration. Purchase accelerator examples are:

News that establishes leadership and credibility
Incentives (discounts, bundles, trials, etc.)
Downloads, blogs, white papers, POVs, etc.
Consultations, seminars, comparisons, trials, value calculations, etc.

One of the most effective descriptions of how to stop wasting your marketing dollars is found in a special report from Business Week that came out in June, 2008 entitled, “A practical Guide to Branding.” The sub-head reads, “Define your brand identity—your product's "personality"—before you spend a dime on advertising or marketing.” The opportunity for most of us is to make our very first step as business owners to develop our brands. The article goes on to highlight this through three main points:

1. Studies show that companies who market their products or services without first establishing their brand identities are not likely to achieve return on investment.

2. If you're spending money to advertise and market without being connected to a brand position, you might as well pile the money up and burn it.

3. Branding is about getting your prospects to perceive you as the only solution to their problem.

The question then becomes, “How do I develop a powerful brand that creates the perception behind my company’s offerings that I am the only choice for prospects?” This is where the large Fortune 500 companies start out right…they know their customer inside and out. They know their customer better than their competition, how the product or service fits into their lives, what trends effect purchase decisions and how to apply those learning’s into a balanced brand promise that connects both rationally and emotionally with prospects. Sounds simple enough.
It is actually quite simple to stay in touch with your customers. And that can happen in part through the ongoing sales and service process, but that only scratches the surface. There is just no replacement for direct one-to-one conversations, which is why phone interviews are my most often used brand research tool.

The following are tips on how best to interview your customers or prospects to unlock the secrets of what will really motivate them to buy from your company. If you accomplish this, then all the marketing dollars you spend to drive qualified leads will have a much greater degree of success. It is the most important first step that you can take as a marketer of your company.

How to Interview a Customer for Branding Insights

It is important to remember that people aren’t always very good at articulating what they are thinking or feeling. So it is crucial to make sure that you think about three things as you prepare to conduct your interviews:

1. Ask the same kind of question from different points-of-view.

a. This allows people to answer the questions in a different way, getting more feedback than you normally would get from one straightforward question and answer.

2. Think of ways that you can give examples which will allow interviewees to better articulate feelings.

a. One of the most powerful areas that you will want to uncover is the emotional connection people have to your brand. Rational reasons get you on the consideration list, where emotional reasons are usually the reason one brand is selected over another.

3. Talk to your most loyal clients. And if you are just starting out, talk to prospects that you think embody what will be your core customer group.

a. Loyal clients are the ones that stay with you over time, provide the most stable income, are willing to pay more for your service and can be your greatest advocates. In essence you want to create more of them by understanding their thoughts and feelings about why they are loyal to you. Only then can you try to emulate that in marketing and other customer relationships.

What Questions Should I Ask In An Interview?

There are ten categories of questions that you will want to cover in your interview. Each relates to a very different set of insights.

1. Reasons to Purchase – Ask people very directly why they actually bought. What triggered the purchase and what was the most important reason why they thought it was a good purchase decision.

2. Benefit Categories – Ask how they benefit from the product or service. You will find that people naturally start talking about very rational benefits (saves money, more durable, easier to use, etc.). These are very important to know, but it is equally if not more important to know the emotional benefits delivered. This is where you might have to give some examples (trust, fear, safety, pleasure, confidence, security, etc.).

3. Emotional Triggers – This is where we want to know how important the emotional connections are to them and their lives. I often ask people to rate the importance of this product in their daily lives, their retirement planning, their ability to be productive, etc. I have them answer on a scale of 1 to 10, and then ask and probe why. This gives them a great way to project about the true emotional connections to the brand.

4. Unmet Needs – This is an area that usually comes at the beginning of the interviews. I may ask about what set of events or inputs led up to a purchase decision. This gives you a great background into what true needs or desires are and how the purchase decisions form.

5. Pont-of-Difference – This is to establish what makes you different from your competition. You have to understand how others think you compare in order to relevantly differentiate your company.

6. Areas of Strength –I usually start out by saying that every company is good at many things or else they would have gone out of business a long time ago. That is a great lead-in to ask what your company does well.

7. Loyalty Stimulus - I usually say to interviewees that they have been selected to interview because they are a loyal customer. And then I ask them if they agree. Most always they say yes since they were hand selected. I than ask for them to articulate what it is about the company that heightens their sense of loyalty.

8. Points of Weakness – After discussing strengths, you can ask if there are areas where the company could improve in order to serve you better.

9. New Opportunities – This is a time to ask if they see any new opportunity for the company to address a new idea.

10. Anything Else – There is always an opportunity to give the interviewee a chance to say something about the company that has not already been covered. This open-ended approach can reveal some very interesting insights.

Once you have the answers to all of the above, the road to a powerful brand promise becomes a much clearer path.

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Marketing as an Added Value Service

Marketing has historically been a series of actions that are undertaken to exert influence over consumer preference and choice. However, the trap is to think about marketing as a means to talk about your company versus solving a prospect’s unmet need. You can begin to fill your prospect’s unmet need before a single purchase has ever been made. Marketing itself can deliver against your brand promise.

An emerging model is to think of marketing not as a force of influence, but a valued resource that is utilized at the discretion of the customer. Can marketing be a source of value itself? More than 50% of business-to-business marketing professionals in a recent survey planned on using webinars as a lead generation tool in 2008. Biznik is a great example of valued collaboration within efforts to market your company.

Other ideas include blogs, networking sites, newsletters, tips, alerts, seminars, education, bundled services and more as areas of great opportunity for marketing to extend value.

1. A world-class rodeo roper and instructor just added a yahoo community to his site to help novice ropers collaborate (with his help) as a means to promote his schools.

2. While attending a women’s expo, a marriage counselor handed out a pamphlet with 10 great exercises for couples to explore over dinner.

4. A dog trainer hired teens to hand out branded baggies to pet owners at parks, trails and events. 3. A bed & breakfast mailed out CDs with the sounds of nature to attract more vacationers to their Napa Valley location.

5. A local gym emailed out a simple calorie counter to all existing members that quickly spread to friends and family.

6. A local band offered one of their latest songs as a free download off their website.

7. A local bakery offered a recipe for a gourmet cookie or pastry every month.

This doesn’t mean that we are doing away with advertising, direct mail or websites. But it does mean that we have to start thinking differently about how we create value for customers beyond the product or service itself. As business owners, we need to think in terms of creating long-term value that leads to satisfaction and referrals. Large or small, if companies need to support a value proposition over the long term, then what is marketing’s role in that value creation? What value can marketing provide in addition to the product or service itself?

The Internet has enabled value-based marketing in tremendously scalable and affordable ways. Knowledge is value if packaged correctly and assembled for your customers. Google is a shining example of the value of information, aggregated into relevant, consumable portions.

Value-based marketing has the potential to change the way that consumers perceive your company, more as an advocate than marketer. The definition of an advocate is “A person who speaks or writes in support or defense of a person, cause, etc.” An advocate is seen as an ally, a helper, a resource and is usually in a better position to gain trust. The end result is a translation into increased sales and loyalty.

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Study: Inc. Business Week Special Report - June 9, 2008

A Practical Guide to Branding

Define your brand identity—your product's "personality"—before you spend a dime on advertising or marketing

Talk to entrepreneurs about their marketing and communications efforts, and they'll often use the words "branding," "marketing," and "advertising" interchangeably. “That reflects the pervasive confusion about the terms”, says Gail Guge, managing partner of Wilkin Guge Marketing in Ontario, CA. "About 15 years ago, 'branding' became a buzzword in the business vernacular, and people still get the words mixed up all the time," she says.

That confusion is unfortunate, because understanding the concepts and how they mesh is vital to every company's bottom line. Studies show companies that market their products or services without first establishing their brand identities are not likely to achieve return on investment. "If you're spending money to advertise and market without being connected to a brand position, you might as well pile the money up and burn it," Guge says.

Rob Frankel, a branding expert and author in Los Angeles, calls branding the most misunderstood concept in all of marketing, even among professionals. Branding, he says, "is not advertising and it's not marketing or PR. Branding happens before all of those: First you create the brand, then you raise awareness of it."

Your Brand Is Your Personality

And while many people think successful branding is only about awareness, it's not, Frankel adds. "Everyone knows about cancer but how many people actually want it? Branding is about getting your prospects to perceive you as the only solution to their problem. Once you're perceived as 'the only,' there's no place else to shop. Which means your customers gladly pay a premium for your brand."

Your product or service is not your company's brand and neither is your logo or your business card. Your brand is the genuine "personality" of your company. "It's what your customers think of you and say about you when they've left your company," says Rodger Roeser, president of Cincinnati-based Eisen Management Group, a public-relations and brand-development firm.

Your brand is what your company stands for and what it is known for. "Look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself what you stand for. Go around the room with your leadership and ask them what the company stands for. Settle on one or two brand pillars and build your brand around them. If you can't define your brand, your customers won't be able to, either. And the risk is that someone else will define it for you—probably your competitors," Roeser says.

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The Promise You Make To The World

Steve Cecil, a copywriter and verbal-branding expert with Where Words in San Carlos, Calif., says a brand is a promise and branding is the act of devising the promise your company makes to the world. “Marketing,” he says, "is the strategy that differentiates your brand promise from all the other brand promises in that increasingly crowded house called ‘your category’."

Think of marketing like a toolbox containing branding, advertising, direct mail, market research, public relations, and other tools. "Marketing represents the combination of methods organizations use to persuade their target audience toward some specified behavior such as sales," says Stephen Rapier, of Glendale (Calif.)-based The Artime Group.

Advertising, Rapier says, can take many forms: print, as in newspaper and magazine ads; outdoor, such as billboards; online Web banners; and broadcast advertising on radio and TV. "Typically, the goal of advertising is to grab attention, create positive perceptions, and prompt response while conveying information consumers will find relevant to their needs," he notes.

Your Brand is A Lifestyle

A successful marketing strategy uses all—or most—of the tools in the box depending on the job at hand, Cecil says. "Crafting a winning marketing strategy is challenging enough even when you have articulated your brand promise and is probably impossible if you haven't."

If you have not specified your company's brand, don't spend another dime on marketing until you do. While everyone's familiar with megabrands such as Apple, Nike, and Virgin, small companies can also develop potent brands and market them successfully, says Steve Manning, managing director at Igor, a branding and naming firm based in San Francisco.

"A brand creates an image in the mind of the consumer. It says something is different at your firm, something worth more than business as usual. If your firm is a commodity, your customers will choose you solely on the basis of price or getting something for free. If you've got a brand, you're selling a lifestyle and you can sell anything you want," Manning says.

More elements of this Special Report are available in the related items box on the upper right side of this page.

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Study: Inc. 500 Companies Fast Adopters of Social MediaTogether?

Fast-growing private companies use social networking and blogs much more than Fortune 500 companies, according to new research.

February 9, 2007

The nation's fastest-growing private companies are making use of social media -- including blogs, social networking and podcasts -- at a rate more than twice that of Fortune 500 companies, according to a new study

The University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research surveyed companies from the 2006 Inc. 500 list, to gauge the level of familiarity and usage of six forms of social media -- blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking and wikis. Out of 121 respondents, generally managers and other senior-level executives, 42 percent claimed to be "very familiar" with social networking, followed by 38 percent with message boards and 31 percent with blogging.

Across the board, respondents were familiar with all types of social media, including 16 percent being very familiar with wikis, which are typically a lesser-known type of social media on average.

Companies were also asked about their actual usage of the various types of social media, and message boards had the highest adoption rate at 33 percent, followed closely by social networking at 27 percent. Blogging had a lower percentage of usage among respondents at 19 percent, and podcasting was the type of social media with the lowest adoption rate at 11 percent.

"These responses are surprising and will likely shock even the most fervent believer in social media," Nora Ganim Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research and a leader of the study, said in a statement. "They indicate that corporate familiarity and usage of social media is racing far ahead of what many have predicted."

These results contrast with previous research that found only 8 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a public blog. The purpose of the study, which was not conducted at the request or on behalf of Inc. magazine or Inc.com, was to see if there was a difference in the knowledge and usage of social media in companies selected by growth rather than revenue. The respondents represented a wide range of the Inc. 500 and were diverse in terms of industry, size, and location. Four respondents were in the top 10 of the list, seven were in the top 25 and 22 held one of the top 100 spots.

Additionally, a majority of the Inc. 500 companies acknowledged the critical role that social media plays for their future success, with two out of three respondents indicating that it is "very important" or "somewhat important" to their business and marketing strategies. A breakdown of the results shows that 26 percent deemed it "very important" while 40 percent thought it was "somewhat important."

"For those of us who have been following fast-growth companies for years, it's no surprise that they would be at the forefront of using innovative technologies to enhance their visibility, marketing, and interaction with other companies," said Edward Sussman, senior vice president of Mansueto Ventures, the publisher of Inc. and Inc.com.

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