A brand is more than a logo.
A company’s brand encompasses all the foundational elements that make up its presentation to the market. The elements of brand include:
- Look & feel: Logo, color palette, typography, etc.
- Tone & voice: The word choices and style in which information is communicated
- Positioning and values: The impression we leave behind
While most companies focus on the first component of brand (look and feel), the most successful companies master all three.
Smart brand marketing fuels product growth.
Marketing is both an art and a science. Brand marketing done right is about continuously evolving the brand to find or increase traction. Until your reputation in the market is driving customers to your product without much prompting, you haven’t found product-market fit.
Developers ship code, continuously integrating new features, while delivering a consistent product experience.
Brand marketers ship new brand messaging and positioning, while maintaining a consistent brand experience.
They work with growth marketing to A/B test it on the home page and/or ads. They test the media’s interest with editorial pitches. They learn, they iterate, and they cascade improved brand messaging across the business to drive better results.
Brand and Growth go best working hand-in-hand, both guided by the same north star: measurable business outcomes.
A great brand needs product input.
This step is skipped too often – even by the marketing team. While it may feel abstract, product and technology leaders should be purposeful about brand, in cooperation with their go-to-market teams.
Make sure your team has the following inputs from product in order to define the brand goals:
- Target audience: How do prospective and current customers view you? How do you want them to view you?
- Market category: Where do you lead? Where do you want to lead? Does the category exist?
- Industry trends: What are the current and future issues your customers care about?
Brand Strategy Framework
With these business inputs, the go-to-market team can create a strategy framework like the following example.
Goals
- Which category do we want to break into?
- What story do we want to create?
- How do we want to shape the broader industry narrative?
- How do we compensate for any weaknesses?
Opportunities
- Where are the gaps? What is no one else saying or doing well?
- What unique experience, data, or viewpoints can we offer to the market?
- What strengths do we reinforce? Where do we have the most credibility?
Approach
- What are our defining characteristics?
- What values should our brand reflect? (This should align with your company values!)
Touchpoints
- Where do people interact with your brand (website, social, trade shows, etc)?
- How can these channels be optimized and in what priority?
How to measure your success
Once you've put in the work to create a strategy, you should hold the team accountable through measurement. Here are some common approaches to measure the success of your brand efforts:
- Brand awareness & sentiment analysis: Brand studies can be expensive, but it’s relatively easy to cobble together data points from win/loss reports, customer feedback, and field reports to get a sense of your brand pulse in the market.
- Content performance: Validate messaging and trends by what people are finding, reading, & sharing on your blog and other content.
- Brand cadence & availability: How often are you shipping strategic deliverables? How easy is it for employees to access and leverage the brand?
- Share of Voice: How do we dominate the conversation on a certain topic? How do we compare to our competitors? Counting the number of articles in a quarter, compared to year-over-year and compared to competitors is an important signal.
Now that you have the context, framework, and success metrics there is no reason to continue ignoring brand and risk slowing the growth of your product.
