It is not difficult to understand why cookie-cutter messaging happens. Today’s environment offers many communications platforms for engagement with a variety of audiences within a very small window of time for responses. To further complicate matters, the line between PR and marketing is thin in areas where marketers and communications professionals overlap – branding, content, social and analytics are just some examples of these areas.
Over the years in my career, it became apparent that when PR and marketing professionals work together with their sales colleagues brand intimacy happens, and sales accelerate. At Vermilion Pinstripes, we use a modern marketing framework developed by my colleague, Veronica Lind where it guides teams from identifying, targeting, engaging and selling to their most profitable customers.
Brand is #1
The brand is important for any business. In the eyes of the customer, the brand is the entity that distinguishes the organisation or product from its rivals on the market. As a Forbes contributor Anjali Chugh writes,
“By not paying attention to creating a brand and creating an awareness around that brand, you’re unknowingly depriving your business of the highest potential it can reach.”
Some businesses such as start-ups find it difficult to articulate their brand. Why? From experience, I find that many are more comfortable talking about their products and services when faced with a customer. That’s good, isn’t it? Not really, because what every customer hears about is just a different product or service, and so they think that that business has nothing more than that particular product or service.
To break out of that box, focus on speaking to the most profitable customers. Yes, that’s one set of customers – consider their goals and aspirations, understand their needs, wants and desires, and look for the ways to establish an emotional connection.
Strategic, Structured and Social
1. Strategic
Mobilise your sales, business and marketing colleagues for a brainstorming session to uncover the goals and aspirations of this set of customers and what your brand means to them. Some brainstorming questions include:
2. Structured
Create the brand’s unique voice to be used across a vast spectrum of channels e.g. website, social media, email, ebooks and so on can be a complex task. The brand’s voice must be consistent and appropriate for your brand’s personality in order to communicate effectively. Follow these simple steps to help you shape your brand’s voice:
3. Social
Social media is undeniably one channel that will bring massive returns when applied correctly. Social media can be extended to the entire lifecycle of the customer, helping brands to move customers from each stage of the life cycle, from brand awareness to demand generation and onward to sales enablement, customer support and even customer advocacy. Some tips for your brand message include:
In a future where chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI) are fast becoming integral components of marketing, it is the human touch that will create deep emotional connections with customers.
As modern day communicators who are well versed with leveraging technology to achieve marketing objectives, we need to stay focused on developing messages that speak to our customers’ needs, challenges and aspirations. No matter the platform or technology, humanising communications is essential to creating meaningful emotional connections. To achieve long term business growth, brands need to evolve and constantly seek ways to do that.
This article was published as the cover story in The Singapore Marketer (Jul-Sep 2018) issue. The Singapore Marketer is a knowledge-based Official Publication of the Marketing Institute of Singapore.
About the writers:
Koh Joh Ju is a communications professional with over 20 years of experience specialising in B2B communications. Previously with IBM, Hill & Knowlton and Weber Shandwick, Joh Ju is co-founder of Vermilion Pinstripes, a modern marketing agency based in Australia and Singapore that helps small businesses and B2B organisations connect with MORE of their most profitable customers to grow their business and achieve ROI.
Veronica Lind is the Business and Marketing Strategist at Vermilion Pinstripes. As a Modern Marketing Strategist, her dexterity with technology and her vast experience in sales, business development and marketing have attracted the attention of clients in regional and global markets. To sell without selling is a key virtue she promotes and which has profited businesses that needed a boost of confidence.
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