Episode 17 – Brand Communication Strategies

So a brand communication strategy is, in essence, a reflection of what an actual business or brand stands for being conveyed to the world in a way that it talks to the right people in the right way at the right time, so that people seeing the brand communication actually care about what they’re seeing in it, and it doesn’t waste their time and it’s something of interest. As opposed to – it tries to speak to everybody in the world and no one cares about it because it’s too generic.

Because as a brand, you know, you can stand for particular things, you can stand for particular ways of working and what you believe but you need to make sure that has been communicated effectively across the digital space and across any kind of online or real world’s media.

So the purpose of doing a brand communication strategy is in effect about how your business talks to the world. We get asked a lot by companies who emailed us saying: “Can you do marketing for us? What’s it going to cost?” And obviously, you can’t give a price on that because again, it’s like you know, why do you exist? Like, how do you operate? You know, what’s the benefit you’re giving to the world?

And when we run through these sessions with people we look at the most fundamental parts that can build a story, behind what the company actually does as well as what it actually believes. So we look at things like what’s the features that the business offers the world and the features that the brand offers the world should come with benefits and these benefits are critical because those benefits are what people are searching for, looking for as a service. For example, can you save me money? Can you save me time? Can you help build my brand? Can you increase people coming to onboard with my brand? All the usual generic ones. But the benefits are key because it’s what drives our potential clients’ business.

We also look at how the brand will talk in terms of a personality. So, you know, some brands will talk in a very young or mature way, some might look and speak in a way that is for mass appeal.  For example, McDonald’s or there might be an elite brand for example a Michelin star restaurant. It’s important to know what you are in these different personalities because it affects everything as to how you speak.

And the reason we have, you know, the features and benefits, and the personality sliders, is so that you can connect to your key audiences. So as a brand you should know who you’re trying to target because obviously your product and service won’t appeal to every person in the world. So it needs to appeal to key types of people. So it’s important to know who they are. And then from there, you can start to apply the logic of what is the kind of challenges that these people have? And therefore what the benefits that your brand offers, that you’ve talked about before, to tackle those challenges, and once you have that – that starts to talk about how your business has a purpose in the world. And then from that purpose, you can start to produce content pillars to talk about that in more detail and the content pillars actually aren’t supposed to be generic just to kind of be like white noise or vanilla conversation, they should actually be planned around thought leadership pillars.

So effectively the thought leadership pillar sits at the top: What are you talking about? What’s the bold opinion on that topic? And then what’re the key messages?

Then the content fills those pillars underneath, you know, if I’m talking about the benefits of rewarding people fairly for the work they’ve done that will be in a bold opinion. And how I express that and what I think we should do in that topic to reward people fairly will have a ton of different content pieces that fall off it to explain why and how, and distribute it different ways. By having these pieces in place, it means that you can effectively use the content that you’re creating to talk to people in a particular way for the thought leadership pillars and directly address your key audiences and their challenges with the benefits that your brand offers the world. Until you have these things all understood and mapped out, doing marketing without it is pretty much just throwing money at the marketing platforms or just doing organic content which again eats up people’s time, but it’s like unless you stand for something, you’ll never going to have people like lean into what you’re saying.

If you stand for nothing, you’ll just get generic engagement and generic results.

So I think it’s important to understand the brand, everything about what it offers the world, who you want to talk to and how you want to actually talk to people with key topics of conversation that reflect back to what your brand is about.

And to have one of these brand communication strategies, we highly recommend every person we work with, we do one with and the results ultimately and every time are significantly better than just doing generic marketing in the absence of a brand communication strategy.