Did you know your content ideas can give you monopoly power in your market? That’s because when you really know your audience, your content tells them what they’re thinking and then answers it directly, helping them to know how to think about a topic.

And when they think about your topic in exactly the way you do, you win.

But before you can connect, you have to listen.

Today, I want to talk about how authentic branding, paired with an understanding of your audience, will activate relationships at the top of the marketing funnel, and all the way down.

Remember, this all doesn’t have to happen today. But if you’re intent on brand and service strategy by including your audience in the conversation, this process is for you. Don’t stress about doing this overnight. Keep it simple and then focus on the next thing.

https://youtu.be/eggheR2Mgls

“Understand who you should be talking to for maximum brand resonance.”

What does this mean? Brand resonance is a fancy way to say your brand makes sense to your audience.

Define your ideal client by creating a persona. This process involves going to different resources and finding out where your potential clients hang out. The key is to place your brand where your ideal clients already are, as they usually won’t come to your brand on their own. 

Give the persona demographic data, problems they’re encountering, key values they hold, and psychographic information about how they think. Demographics can encompass details such as income, job title, type of firm they work for, and the size of the company.

“Tap into internal insights to authentically reach your target market.”

All this means is that you should talk with other people in your firm about your clients. Build an understanding of who they are based on shared internal knowledge.

So it’s not a scientific study or focus group. Oh well. It’s easy to do, and It’s more information than you had before, and now you can test the insights you gain from each other in other ways, such as by talking to clients.

Plus, it builds a client-focused culture and lets everyone know that you’re interested in providing leads for them.

“Explore unconventional marketing channels”

Simply put: Find where your audience hangs out and engage them there.

This is the core question of all media buying. 

Related: how does your competition try to reach them? If everyone’s using the same medium or marketing channel, you just need to think things through. Maybe you go back to sending postcards or invite them to a webinar.

It helps to go back to your brand and product, and just think “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could advertise on a blimp downtown.” You may not pull that off, but that’s the kind of thinking that leads to some pretty cool ideas.

“Use existing client patterns to identify your ideal customer profile.”

In plain English, this is just looking at what’s going on around you. Who do we tend to talk to? Who are our most valuable clients? Extra points if you haven’t even tried with these people. It’s just been effortless.

Why is this good? Because it’s usually easy to serve people when you’re a great fit.

When you find these people, you want to understand them.

“Build relationships through value-driven communications.”

Or: what’s in it for them?

How can we guide them, even if they’re not in front of us? Even if they’ve never talked to one of us or even purchased from us before?

It’s like a friendship. You usually don’t plan a vacation together with another family the first time you meet them. More often, you’re at the golf course together or serving together at church. Then one thing leads to another, and you invite them over for dinner.

In business, it’s the same. They hear your name here and there. They see you on LinkedIn taking a stab at a topic. You seem a little more genuine than the other firms. So they poke around your website. They like what they see. So you give them something as an act of generosity.

You’re not planning the vacation quite yet. Neither are you getting the families together for dinner yet. You’re just giving them something of value…to show that you like to help. Something that symbolizes the kinds of tools that you offer in a fuller relationship.

For example:

“Personalize your marketing materials to reflect your unique brand identity.”

In other words, make your marketing material your own…so that it oozes your values and personality. Do it so that nobody will be able to mistake it for your competition’s materials. And then go for the audience that appreciates it.

How do you do it? Simple, just learn a branding process, schedule it out, get all of your senior leaders into a room for a day, and get them on the same page about values, personality traits, and brand story. Then the work begins.

Or you could:

The point is that you end up with a clear, well-organized brand guide that will orient everything you create toward your brand.

And a brand anthem that will orient how you talk about yourself and the core problem you solve for clients.

“Stay agile and responsive to changes in client needs and industry trends.”

Mike Tyson said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Well, marketing plans are no different. The best approach is to plan, measure, and then readjust.

You measure in a few ways:

Plans are useless. But planning is essential. Get your strategy figured out and then be ready to be wrong. This is how the best strategists do it.

How do you know you’re wrong? You measure. Early and often.

Sun Tzu said that if you know yourself and know your client, you’ll win. Or something like that.

At the top, marketing is simple. You know yourself, you know what you do, and why it matters to someone else. All other branding experiences you create get their inspiration from that.

This is a process, so don’t get impatient. But don’t take it too casually either. Like anything, if you don’t start, you’ll never take the next step. Make a commitment, carve out the necessary time, and find a way to make it work. Your firm, your clients, and your career will thank you.

Tech innovations, like AI, come along every few years. The real question is, how will you leverage it—understanding the advantages and disadvantages of AI—to elevate your performance?

AI improves automation and efficiency. It can analyze data, generate content, and even interact with customers. And it’s tough for humans to match the speed and cost.

But ultimately, AI only replaces you for routine and repetitive marketing tasks. Maybe it’s time we talk about all its shortcomings, and what you can do to rise above yet another “disruptive” technology innovation.

I talked with Anait Zubia, former marketing manager at Quora, about how she sees AI, and these insights came from that discussion.

Let’s cover a few things AI’s not very good at and a third piece of advice for how to put it to work, pushing your career forward.

https://youtu.be/N6teW246RdA

For all of the benefits of AI, it doesn’t know how to create objectives, strategies, or even executions for your brand without your help.

AI isn’t a project manager. You decide where AI fits in the process and what you expect it to do. Like any tool in your stack, keep it simple and build from there.

AI isn’t a brand manager. It may understand your color scheme, but it doesn’t know how to connect with people. Your brand needs to do that. It can do a lot of work, but it needs accountability. This is where you put your brand manager hat on.

AI isn’t a leader. Leaders make moral decisions. Sure, we think of leadership as everything from strategists to theorists who help us understand practical ways to get from here to there. But at their base, we expect leaders to be moral actors. It’s a prerequisite (except, apparently, in politics). The bottom line is that marketing leaders are still needed to make sure that what we do—and how we communicate—is moral, not just expedient.

AI is not a replacement. It’s a support. It’s a tool, not a worker. But if you think about it the right way, it can free you up for other things. For example, the time you’re saving from writing a blog outline could be spent reading about leadership, or even walking around the office, exercising leadership by encouraging, problem-solving and helping others make good decisions and get work done.

Leaders bring a sense of order and brand to the work. AI is just a tool that can help you execute. Leaders should view AI as a tool to enhance, not replace, human capabilities, allowing them to tackle more significant challenges in an AI-augmented world.

For brands, we’re bringing a point of view to the areas we speak to. Your ability to evaluate and respond to new trends based on your brand makes your content interesting and gives it depth. But if you rely on AI to speak into your topics before you get a chance to analyze them, you may lose your edge, creating content that’s predictable and not valuable to your audience.

Students of the creative process know there’s a thing called “top-down” thinking, which refers to your ability to form an opinion and dig into a topic before you start receiving information about it from outside sources.

This gives your content originality.

By forming an opinion based on your values first, you’re creating thought leadership in a way that makes sense, unpolluted by the complicated and often-convoluted thoughts of others…or the oft-misapprehended outputs of AI.

This is especially true with political topics.

AI is likely to take an inoffensive approach, which sometimes puts politeness over truth. So if your brand takes a truth-first approach—as part of its values—to making sense of topics, you’ll find AI lacking.

The goal is not “diversity” or “homogeneity.” Rather, it’s helping people make sense of the world, and business, from your brand’s point of view. So as we’re taking our mom’s advice and “considering the source,” we also need to determine what points of view are valid and which aren’t.

It sounds exclusive. It sounds closed-minded. It’s called “standing for something.”

AI may default to answering questions it thinks are mainstream (I’ve even had it give me values judgments I didn’t ask for when asking a technical question), but it also is trained on less-popular viewpoints as well. This gives you the opportunity to ask about the topic as if you’re arguing with someone from a different point of view. This creates some very original content—pulling you deeper into the topic—that your audience is likely to find interesting and useful.

In the end, AI has no idea what’s right and wrong, and so it’s ridiculous to expect it to be objective. The point of view has to come from you and your brand. Don’t let it censor your thinking. Use a top-down approach and record your thoughts so you can push interesting, fresh ideas from your brand that will create legitimate thought leadership for your industry.

We just talked about the ways you’ll be needed—and two aspects of leadership you should focus on—in the age of AI. Now, let’s look at how it comes together.

Anati mentioned the movie “Hidden Figures” as an example of individuals who harnessed technology for empowerment.

In the movie, these mathematicians were about to be replaced by a computer. Instead of protesting their replacement by technology, one leader, Katherine Johnson, learned how to use the new technology and made the case that NASA would need people to run the machines who knew how to do the math. She even trained her coworkers. She was then promoted to management and, in an era of racial segregation, was even put in charge of white workers.

In Hidden Figures, Johnson looked ahead to see where there would be more opportunity, aligned herself with the future (instead of fighting it), and took action that aligned her with opportunities.

We saw Johnson demonstrate what the military calls “Sempre Gumbi:” always flexible. She thought about the implications of the technology and harnessed it. There will always be new technologies and even occasional disruptions. But those who learn how to ride those waves will always be in demand.

Make yourself irreplaceable by learning to harness the disruptions, understanding their implications and how they’ll affect your work, and you’ll never be bored.

While many people fear for their jobs in this time of AI disruption, this is an opportunity to focus more on meaning, leadership, and how AI fits into your workflow.

If you learn to do that, you’ll never fear new technology. In fact, you could be the one driving the train.

How do you truly connect with your brand’s audience? Through story. Great stories stick with us…and the reason why is no great mystery.

They resonate.

From Star Wars and The Godfather to the plays of William Shakespeare, a great story survives time and change because for audience after audience, something true and potent sunk in.

That is, if we break apart the plot of the first Star Wars film, we see a template of events that are millennia old — a young hero who yearns for adventure is pried from home after a trusting guide, and a chaotic chain of events thrusts him into the innards of the Death Star itself. The events are both deeply familiar and yet invigorating…because, on some level, we see our own life parallel the hero’s quest.

So we watch.

In other words, stories like Star Wars don’t exist in a vacuum. They land, and land well, with their brand’s audience…and with subsequent generations of audiences who love the story so much they consume fan fiction, dress up for conventions, and in some countries, lobby to make Star Wars an official religion.

If you’re just joining us, don’t worry. This article isn’t part of a Star Wars series and we won’t be talking about the new Obi-Wan show.

Rather, it’s a series on authentic B2B branding…and my point is that potent brands reach people with the posture and messaging of a timeless classic story. If you’re just joining by the way, you can read more about how the elements of a brand that guides its customer (the hero), mesh with the elements of story by reading this article on how to tell a remarkable brand story.

https://youtu.be/jgXdwIebNHA

Riffin’ on story brings me right to the heart of it.

On the top of the branding pyramid, way above the foundation of a true, authentic purpose —  and above the narrowing, rising layers of personality, metaphor, archetype, history, location, and brand story — we find a sharpened, or…if we’re still talking pyramids, a crudely sharpened capstone. As magnificent as it may look, the whole structure is pointing at something:

Your brand’s audience.

Every author knows that when you’re telling a story, you need to pay attention to your brand’s audience. The same applies for a large corporation, a regional B2B branding agency like Resound, and your own company.

Who’s your brand’s audience? Which hero are you aiming to guide to the finish line?

While most companies have a good, or even a statistically sharpened understanding of who they’re trying to reach, the question is worth asking again, and as simply as possible, from a brand and brand story perspective.

You might respond that I’m forgetting one thing — your brand or company has more than one audience.

Take it easy.

If you’ve got more than one audience, (or more than one product), you’re in good company. In fact, even if you create one product or offer one service, you’ve probably got a few audiences already in the bag.

When we think of any given brand story, four distinct audiences come to mind:

Depending on your type of organization, the specifics of each of your brand’s audience will vary, but the categories will remain roughly the same.

For instance, a non-profit doesn’t have shareholders, but it does have donors who make a financial investment. An ethnic grocery chain’s “community” may not only be its neighborhood, but also the ethnic community in the city in which it plays a role…and that “community” probably includes other competing businesses in the grocery industry.

For each audience, there will be a specific adaptation of your brand story which makes the most sense to that audience.

The story should stay the same, but the way you tell it will differ, depending on whether you’re advertising on the front page of your website or talking with your employees.

Your employees, for instance, need to have a deeper understanding of the story, so that they can in turn relay that story to customers. Even if they don’t regularly interact with customers, knowing the larger story gives employees a sense of purpose at work.

By contrast, an investor needs context, which helps him see whether your goals are plausible given the backdrop and setting of your business.

Customers often don’t have time for much context. They may only give you a few minutes to tell your story, if that much. In other words, your plot and purpose need to move!

Your local community, on the other hand, doesn’t want a sales pitch. They’re not interested in giving you money or buying your service. Instead, they want to hear things like how you’ve helped the community, provided jobs for people, given opportunities, or sponsored community groups.

So, you’ve identified the purpose of your organization and the values which result from that purpose, which together form the core of your identity. You’ve used some tools to further define your identity, and all of this culminated with the idea of a brand story.

But it isn’t enough to just have a good story.

You have to tell the story.

This entire exercise is pointless if your brand story sits on a document filed away on a server. You have to make these ideas about your brand concrete: turning them into images, colors, content, a brand voice, and ultimately into relationships with your customers.

There are many different ways to tell your brand’s story. You can create a video, or write a book. You can write an article, or design your collateral with your brand’s story in mind. You can create a greater sense of identity through your logo, images, and other artifacts within your organization.

But the brand story is the genesis of everything else: all of the other expressions of your brand expand outward from that single point.

The process of expressing your brand outwardly might be gradual. You might begin with a logo or an email signature. Then it might expand to some signage inside of your own office or an update to your website. Or you might just begin with your elevator pitch, and how you talk to people about what you do and your ideas.

The important thing is that, having documented your ‘why’, your values, and your brand personality, you want to take action as a team and ensure that it fuels what you do day to day. You want to make sure that it guides you as you interact with customers, as you communicate in your marketing, and as you make decisions.

These are things you agreed were important; the truths about your brand.

Remarkable brands, (and even if you don’t know it yet, yours is one of them)…resolve to live those truths, not hide them beneath the latest marketing trends or corporate logo.

Everywhere the light touches your brand, your authentic personality should come shining through…and resonate like a classic dose of the hero’s journey.

Well, remarka-fans, this was quite the journey.

Now that we’ve come full circle to your brand’s audience and purpose, we’re excited to tell you that this whole series of articles has been drawn from chapters of our recently released book on branding: ‘You are Remarkable.’ 

It’s out now on Amazon, and if you like what you’ve been reading here, the book will put even more wind in your sails.

If you’re new to the series, we’d also recommend going back to the start and reading through our series on B2B branding.

If your company’s going through a rebrand, if you’re wondering how to take your company’s purpose and show it to the world in a way that’s winsome, scalable, and authentic…we’ve designed our resources to take you there, one step at a time.

You can also give us a call and chat with our team.

If there’s one thing we love more than getting to know remarkable brands, it’s helping them step up to the plate of showing their brand’s audience how remarkable they are.

Thanks for reading and happy branding!

This is it, remarka-fans. How to tell a remarkable brand story

This month, I’m cutting right to brand story—the heart of a brand’s posture toward the world and its customers, and the final piece that ties a brand’s expression, identity, and strategy together. 

If you love a good story, (seriously…who doesn’t?), and if you know that telling one can mean the difference between scaling your brand dramatically or getting little traction with the same old strategies… then you’re in the right place. 

Welcome to the writer’s room. 

If you’ve been following my series on discovering your brand’s purpose and remarkable identity, and then using it to build a winsome, potent brand expression, then you might sense that we’re nearing the summit. 

And if you’re just joining in, that’s also swell… and if you enjoy the view then you’ll probably find the previous stages of our branding journey worth your time. All of the tools we’ve discussed so far, from your brand’s archetype, metaphor, and location to its own slice of history, culminate in your overarching remarkable brand story. 

A well-developed brand isn’t an image.

Or a tagline.

Or even a killer color scheme. 

Those are ways of expressing the brand…but they’re no substitute for its story. In many ways, and when it comes to what the busy world sees and hears, a brand is its story. 

https://youtu.be/CZ7FflRDxJ8

Hollywood screenwriters and those who study ancient civilizations love to tell us that there’s only one story. 

Maybe two… and on the note, the variations I’ve heard are: 

1) a stranger comes to town. 

2) a stranger goes on a journey.  

But if you’re a fan of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey, then you’ve probably had a taste of how much debate, speculation, and back-and-forth exists amongst story and movie buffs. 

Seriously. 

There’s enough of it to fill a thousand masterclasses. But the good news for B2B’s is that the elements of story sharpen down nicely for those building a brand. 

A classic story has five key elements: the balance, the unbalance, the quest, the crisis, and the new balance.

In plain English, here’s what those five elements look like:

Shall we try it? 

The key elements of any story can be stated in five sentences following this format. 

Balance: Once upon a time there was a quiet village where a humble dentist minded his own business. 

Unbalance: Suddenly, a dragon started attacking and burning down the buildings. 

Quest: The dentist went on a quest to find the dragon’s lair and slay the dragon. 

Crisis: He found it, and the dragon was about to kill him in a blaze of fire, when he noticed the dragon just needed a few root canals to relieve the pain in his mouth. 

New Balance: He helped the dragon and brought it back to the village as his loyal pet.

To give another example… one in which you can pick out the elements for yourself:

Sometime in the distant future, the crew of a starship is exploring the galaxy for signs of intelligent life. 

Suddenly, they are attacked and boarded by a horde of three-headed alien dogs, or cerberi. The captain and her two first officers flee in an escape pod to go looking for help, searching the galaxy, only to discover that every planet in the area has been conquered by the cerberi. 

Realizing they must either fight or die, they come up with a clever plan to displace the alpha dog with themselves. The trio succeeds, the cerberi now follow their lead, and they return to their ship as heroes.

This basic structure works for any story.

You probably use something like it already when you’re telling someone about a significant event that happened in your life… or just trying to catch them up on your day.

The structure also works for presenting the story in which your brand plays a role.

Not every story you tell about your organization will have value for your audience, of course. A story that is all about you and never about them might be interesting but it won’t really matter to them. 

For example, the literal history of your company can be presented decade by decade as a “story”, but that story might not do a good job communicating who you are and why anybody should care. 

Instead, think about the larger story in which both you and your audience are characters. It is your audience, not you, who should fill the role of the “main character” in the story. Their perspective, as well as your perspective, should guide the way the story is told.

Your brand is not the center of the story. 

Rather, your customer is the hero, the one at the center of the story. 

Your brand is the guide, the trusted authority who helps your customer reach a positive, transformative ending.

Having oriented your brand as the guide and your customer as the hero, here’s how the other elements play out in real time. 

The balance of your story is the context, the “world” in which the people your organization serves operate. It’s what your audience currently takes for granted as “normal.” 

Again, it isn’t what your organization or industry necessarily thinks is “normal,” because there may be a gap between the way your industry views the world and the way your customers view the world. Try to describe the balance from the point of view of your audience, before any problems come on stage. For instance, for a non-profit that helps spay and neuter cats, a few stray cats roaming around. 

For a company which sells a new system meant to replace the decades-old software tool everybody uses that its competitor never updates, the balance might be how things worked just fine in 1995. The balance might be more general for other brands: like a world in which people commute everyday to work, or a world in which people are busy and easily forget things.

The unbalance of your brand’s story is the problem you’re trying to solve… or just a change in circumstances that disrupts things. Think bigger than just the specific problem solved by a product or service to the overarching cause of those problems. 

The unbalance is about the problem in the world which it is your brand’s purpose to address, the problem you exist for the sole purpose of solving. 

The unbalance might be the neighborhoods flooded with stray cats that keep having kittens, or the consequences of people using frustrating outdated software. The unbalance might be the stress drivers all feel on the road while commuting, or the damaged relationships when people forget and miss an important event. 

The quest, then, is your audience’s journey to find a solution to this problem, looking in every direction and searching through all of the options. 

For instance, the quest might be finding some way to cut down on the stray cat population or searching for ways to fix the software, or looking for a more comfortable way to drive. 

At some point along the quest, your customer runs into you. You become their guide along the quest leading them to the solution. 

The crisis is the point when you come to the rescue! You help them start to neuter the cats, or start to replace outdated software, or start to improve the comfort of driving, or start to better remember what is important to them. The crisis is where your purpose as an organization intersects with the problems people experience.

The new balance in the story is your vision for the impact your organization will have on its customers and on the world. 

Perhaps you envision neighborhoods with stable but gradually shrinking stray cat populations. Maybe you envision people who are more productive because they have more user-friendly software. Maybe you envision people who are more relaxed on the road, or a world where people spend more time together because they don’t forget. 

Your brand might have multiple stories at multiple layers, of course. 

To start with, there should be a story for each specific product or service your brand offers. But even bigger than those stories is the story for your brand as a whole, the one that makes you who you are, and will most likely endure past particular products or services.  

For instance, each model that a car manufacturer sells may have its own story—the kind of problems it’s trying to solve in the lives of intended customers. These stories are parts of a bigger and more important story, though, which is the story of that automotive brand… not to mention its values, history, and the crisis in the world that demands its attention.

If you’re looking for an overarching brand story that incorporates the five elements, you should probably be asking: 

Why do you exist? 

What’s the problem in the world that your brand uniquely solves?

What do you care about? 

How is the world a better place because of your work? 

These pieces all come together in your brand story. 

Ultimately, tools like a metaphor or a remarkable brand story are about the feeling or experience of the brand, not the definition. 

What defines your brand are its vision, purpose, and values. A metaphor or a brand story are a way of giving color and drama to a vision, purpose, and values that might on their own seem dry and lifeless.

One more thing: your brand story needs to be authentic above all else. 

Don’t worry about making your characters more “interesting” or the plot more exciting. 

Be truthful, and stay true to your values. Telling an honest story is what will engage your audience… and with any luck, show them your true, remarkable colors. 

If you’d like some expert consultation on your brand and its story, then check out the resources on our website… or better yet, skip to the quest and give us a call. 

We’re all about brand story… so much so that we wrote a book about how to discover it, express it, and use it to find customers who resonate with what you have to offer. 

It’s called ‘You Are Remarkable’ and it’s out now on amazon.com.

Until next time, happy brand building! 

“Smart” people make things complicated. Effective people start with a simple plan they can understand. And then they build on it. This is especially true in marketing, where you can’t know how your audience is going to interact with your message on a particular media channel. Even experienced marketers can’t really be sure most of the time. So what’s the solution? Hire a confident marketer who knows lots of fancy words, but can’t really explain what they mean? Or do you start simply, even without research, and build from there?

https://youtu.be/BFsmVCFMNS8

The simplest way to get really, really good at anything is to gain an understanding of a simple plan and build on it. Just make a plan and make it work a little bit. Then build on what success you have.

Your working hypothesis means building a simple plan, that, if your assumptions are correct, should work. It’s not like they told you in school that you should “find out everything you can” about a topic. This is going only based on what you know right now.

No hours spent on research that takes you down rabbit holes and eventually has you watching funny youtube cat videos. Just a simple plan, based on what you know.

It’s the same reason old people tell you to read old literature, like the Stoics and the Bible. It’s simple information that, if it makes sense to you, teaches you to think for yourself. If you can grasp fundamental truths, you can use those truths almost everywhere. They give you a sense of proportion that looks like wisdom and knowledge. And they help you to test every bit of information that comes in.

But if you immerse yourself in information, you’re overwhelmed. You start accepting facts before you’re able to evaluate them. It’s like in any cult — or in college if you’re not very, very careful — they give you one point of view, fill you with information that backs it up, giving you no context or sense of proportion. And pretty soon, you find yourself lost. And even though you know something’s wrong, you don’t have the words to express exactly what.

Research isn’t bad. But be sure your brain is in critical-thinking mode before you start accepting data. This will keep you objective and allow you to see things in proportion.

It’s like in closely held political arguments; we get caught up in the emotion and the need to be right. We accept things we’d never believe if we weren’t so bought-in politically. But what if every American thought about right and wrong before they heard all of the opinions and framing? What if, when you heard that a politician did something wrong, you backed up and thought about it non-politically, like they’re someone in your everyday life who did that.

Now you’re thinking, rather than being told how to think.

So let’s say you’re making a marketing plan. Who’s the person in your life who would buy your product? If you didn’t know him, where would you advertise? Facebook, an online forum, a sponsorship? What would you say in the ad? What would make him click on the ad and go to your landing page? What would you say on the landing page to convince him to click and buy?

Now, you have a working hypothesis. Make sure you can test each part of that interaction, so you know at least the number of people reached by the ad, the number of people who clicked to visit the page, and the number of people who bought. And adjust from there.

Trying to seem smart is a trap. The most effective people don’t pretend they know what they don’t know. They keep it simple and use what they know. Be like the simple person who knows what questions to ask rather than the one who knows all of the answers. Because the one who knows how to ask the right questions is the one who doesn’t work as hard and still gets more done, can see through BS, and can make a simple, actionable plan that moves things forward.

For an example of a funnel, check out Mike’s post on content marketing.

For more on the topic of simplicity, read or listen to “Solitude in Leadership” by William Deresiewicz.

At Resound, we believe branding is all about uncovering your authentic identity. But many people (especially in a highly technical B2B company like manufacturing, technology, or engineering) don’t believe in “branding”, or don’t believe it is capable of reflecting anything like an “authentic” identity. They think of branding as a B2B company’s way of “putting lipstick on a pig”, and want nothing to do with it.

We call this “non-branding.”

https://youtu.be/TeJJ0PTeNO8

Non-branding is when a “brand” consists of nothing beyond an arbitrary name and logo (though the logo may just be the name in a stylized typeface). The B2B company has no interest in knowing or communicating what it is outwardly, usually because of skepticism that there is anything authentic about its identity which could ever be known or communicated. The brand is an empty shell and doesn’t really think of itself as anything more than an empty shell.

First, some people in B2B are skeptical about branding because they’re skeptical about their own B2B company. They don’t actually believe in themselves. They’re discouraged by the lack of purpose and vision. They doubt that there is anything beneath the surface to be discovered about its identity. They just can’t buy into the idea that there could be anything authentic, genuine, or intrinsically remarkable about the identity of the company itself. The company really is just a piece of paper filed with a government entity and maybe a couple of bank accounts.

Second, some B2B industry folks are skeptical about branding because they’re skeptical about everybody else’s companies. They’ve seen “branding” before, and it’s all a massive hoax to them. Branding to them is empty, deceptive, and profoundly inauthentic. “Branding” is just a bit of hocus pocus a marketing team makes up with no substance to it. Maybe they’re afraid that “branding” wouldn’t really fit them. When you see a lot of superficial branding pasted on that doesn’t match anything underneath, the most honest approach might look like not branding at all.

Obviously, we’re biased. As a B2B branding agency, we don’t at all share these doubts. We truly believe there is something remarkable about every B2B company which continues to survive in a hostile world where, as W. B. Yeats wrote, “things fall apart”.

There are four primary beliefs causing non-branding:

All four of these beliefs are false. We argue that companies can and should take themselves seriously, and find their authentic identity.

You have a purpose. If your B2B company has survived more than a few years then it inevitably serves a purpose in the larger marketplace or community. Some people must find you valuable, and you must hold true to some sort of values.

The faster you spin a ball on a string in a circle, the stronger the string must be to keep the ball from flying away. The centrifugal forces pulling people away from one another in a modern world spinning at an ever-faster pace are so powerful that it takes a very strong bond to exert the opposing centripetal force needed to keep them together for any length of time. Whatever faults a business may have, it has at least succeeded in keeping people together. That bond that keeps the business from flying off into pieces is some sort of purpose it serves.

Not every business exists to, say, cure cancer or solve the AIDS epidemic, or end homelessness. The purpose your company serves may be fairly modest: it might exist to serve its customers by giving them a better way to organize their projects online, or access to some of the brightest software engineers in the world, or a machine to package their new brand of breakfast cereals, or whatever business your company is in. Nonetheless, assuming a free market and the free flow of information, companies that don’t serve their customers don’t survive long.

Companies that do not communicate their purpose communicate that they do not have values. No one wants a relationship with a company that has no values. A company that avoids branding, that avoids reflecting on its purpose, only attracts customers who have no other choice. It is very limiting. Your “word of mouth” network wouldn’t extend very far if your customers didn’t share your values.

If your B2B company has survived so far, then you probably do serve some sort of purpose, and you do have some underlying set of values. Take the time to reflect on that. Identify it clearly, and you have the starting point for communicating your brand.

Every company (or organization, if you prefer) is made up of people. The word “company” derives from the root word for “companion”, compaignon, literally, someone who shares bread (pain) with (com) another. Companies are composed out of companions who accompany one another in some shared common work.

What is being “organized” in the term “organization”? It’s not papers in a filing cabinet, expenses on a spreadsheet, or digital assets in the cloud. Once again, it’s people who organize themselves into an organization. An organization is people. Your organization is people.

One reason companies tend to neglect branding is that they forget that they are made out of people: living, breathing human beings. The corporate name takes on a life of its own so that the individuals whose paychecks bear that name forget that they are part of the very thing for which they are working. Customers view the business as a kind of temperamental super-human demigod, and they feel lucky if they can get what they want from it without sacrificing too much. The “corporation” feels abstract and distant to the very people who physically embody it. It’s completely crazy and completely normal.

Ultimately, caring about your own brand is a matter of caring about people. Your brand is how employees in the office identify themselves to the outside world. “Where do you work?”, is a question they have to answer all the time. It is the lens through which employees relate to one another, whether in an office or over long-distance video calls. Your brand is the intermediary through which your customers (whether they are individual people, or companies made up of people) relate to your business and your employees. If you care about relationships between people, you care about your brand.

What if a business simply doesn’t care about relationships between people? What if its employees really are completely expendable? And what if how well it serves its customers is irrelevant? Well, then it doesn’t really sound like much of a “company” or an “organization” at all, and one has to wonder how it survives! When an “organization” manages to survive without seeking to produce value in the world . . . like a personality cult, a criminal gang, a state-sponsored monopoly, or a pyramid scheme. . . well, then, frankly, that sort of “organization” is simply too far gone for any of our advice on branding to apply.

We take it for granted that most businesses seek to produce value and are concerned about customer relationships: as Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, put it, “Look after the customers and the business will take care of itself.” So, we take it for granted that relationships matter for all value-producing businesses.

There are still two more causes of non-branding that we need to unpack. We’ll do that in the next article so be sure to get on our email list so you don’t miss it.

But until then, I want to leave you with this thought: non-branding is a real thing.

With our branding agency, Resound, I’ve seen it first hand with clients and others. There are companies in every industry (and especially B2B) that don’t believe that branding is important. They don’t believe that they have what it takes to be remarkable. And they don’t believe that it’s all worth the time and effort.

That’s so unfortunate, not because it’s just good business sense to build a remarkable brand, but because those companies really are remarkable. They simply need to be reminded that they are and why they are.

So don’t forget: you are remarkable.

Check out our branding services on our website if you want to find out more about how Resound helps build remarkable B2B brands. And if you want to improve your own brand, we have a treasure trove of free branding resources that will help you out.

Decision modes affect communication. The method and mood people bring into decision making affect their reasons for buying and how they need information delivered. This brings huge implications to the area of business-to-business sales and marketing. If you can figure out how to connect better with your customers on the basis of their need, delivering the truth in the way they need to hear it — not just based on their personality, but also their capacity/role when they hear it — you win.

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What are “decision modes?” Decision modes reflect personality styles represented in buying behavior. Think about going to the store and browsing. Now think about going to the store to buy something specific you need for a timeline-driven project you’re working on. Even though you’re the same person in both situations, you display two different kinds of buying behavior. In a business-to-business capacity, that’s just magnified.

The problem is that most B2B messages fail to make this distinction or make it without realizing what’s really going on. They either speak to themselves (whoever the owner is) or go too attribute-driven (no-nonsense, brass-tacks, impersonal, and sometimes braggy to seem confident).

Marketing has 2 main parts: media and message. And they both have to work.

B2B buyers are buying for two reasons: what you can do for their company and what you can do for them. Do you ever wonder why B2B websites sound so stuffy and boring, bragging about themselves and telling you what you’ll get? It’s because they need to be logical.

Not because all business people are logical, but because, in the end, business people need to look like they’re making responsible business decisions. They want to trust that you’re going to make them look good if they choose you or even just recommend you.

So how do you get there with your message? Sorting out how to speak to different people in their roles at work can seem difficult, but if you understand a few basic things about how people think in their roles at their company, things could become much simpler, much more quickly.

Think about all the people you’ll need to satisfy.

Think of it as a business version of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Start by checking the above boxes. Make sure your website has testimonials, for example. Make sure you have work samples, showing that you’ve done this type of thing before. Let your site show that you’re focused and speak intelligently on all your outward-facing communication.

Obviously, your website doesn’t show details about how you operate, but a well-organized and well-functioning site that has the basic boxes checked will get you past the first hurdle.

This corresponds to Maslow’s “physiological” and “safety” requirements. They need to know they’re safe with you. So if you’re super-clever, great. But that might not be what comes out on your website. Don’t let your desire to be clever overshadow your dependability. Dependability and professionalism is safety in B2B.

Hey, we’re a branding agency, so of course we care about the rest of Maslow’s pyramid. In fact, we think everyone should be offering reliability and structure with their special, secret sauce that sets them apart from their industry. But we have to get the basics right so that you’ll have a chance to meet them and build relationships, bringing them to a higher level of connection.

B2C can be a pretty quick sale. And even a higher-ticket sale can involve less rigor than a comparable B2B purchase.

So think about how to give them more over time. Many companies create a cascading set of information that gives people more detail until they’re ready to talk to a live person. This could be a website that delivers information simply but offers the customer more depth as they interact. It’s not too overwhelming, but also not too simple. It offers to solve business problems, and also offers enough technical information to demonstrate competency.

This way if the buying process goes long, they haven’t exhausted all of your resources. They’re still a little curious.

This is a bit like the last one. But let’s drive the point home. If your client is in a technical field, to make your B2B prospect feel good about doing business with you, show the following:

At Resound, we’re all a little bit into physics, technology, economics, and the principles that make up those industries and industries like them. This makes it much easier to pick up on the technical aspects of building, engineering, and even finance.

Understanding these principles of B2B marketing will help you create a general plan that will help you build communication to speak to the person who’s buying, no matter what he or she is like in everyday personal buying decisions. B2B brings out the responsible, data-driven shopper in us who wants to cover all the bases and avoid making provably bad decisions on behalf of the company.

If you’re looking for more practical tips like these, consider signing up for our newsletter, registering for our next free video class, or subscribing to our book launch mailing list which will have tons of exclusive insights from our upcoming book.

Competition. What comes to mind? An epic struggle between two teams on a sports field? Candidates vying for an open position at a fast-growing, exciting tech company? Perhaps something more biblical, say, David vs Goliath?

For most of us leading and building B2B brands, the first thing that comes to mind is the other companies vying for our customers and clients.

The competition is ‘the other guys’ and we often know something about them. We may even have seen them at an event, met them, we may be friends with them, and quite possibly used to work for them.

And in my experience running a creative branding agency in Phoenix, as we work with, advise, and help build remarkable B2B brands, the activities of the competition (especially of the marketing variety) are something my clients care very much about. They follow their press releases, size up their booth at the tradeshow, and maybe even set up a friendly meeting with their counterpart in the other firm, and both attempt a little competitive-but-friendly game of digging for dirt.

Researching what competition is up to always seems to sound like a good idea. Stay ahead of the curve. Keep up with the Joneses. Get a leg up. Don’t get left behind.

And I certainly don’t disagree. In fact, I think there’s an incredibly crucial place in your B2B brand strategy for competitive analysis. But that said, I think many brands misplace the energy spent on keeping tabs on their competition. So let’s talk about that for a minute.

Think about the remarkable brands in your industry — or really in any industry. Maybe consider a Nike, Apple, Amazon, or Coca-cola. Think for a moment about Southwest Airlines or Chick-fil-A or Barry-Wehmiller.

Now answer the question, “Do these companies focus more on their own brands or their competitors’ brands?” I’m pretty sure the answer is the former: they are far, far more focused on their own brand than what their competition is doing. Chick-fil-A doesn’t primarily train its staff by showing them what McDonald’s does and then saying ‘do the opposite’. They teach them how to act the Chick-fil-A way first and foremost. They create their own culture, not just ‘someone else’s but different’.

The opposite of these brands’ strategy (when it comes to the competition) is ‘outside-in’ branding. That’s when you’re far more worried about what everyone else is doing than what your brand is doing. Your brand is less about what’s really true about your organization and more about how to position it amongst or against the competition.

I do think there’s value in making sure you’re looking around to see what everyone else is doing (just like a runner in the lead has to take quick stock of the pack every now and again). And we’ll get to some approaches for doing that right later in this article. But I think there’s a lot of temptation for brands to focus way too much on the competition, causing them to lose sight of their own authentic (and compelling) identity.

The real fundamental issue with ‘Outside-In’ branding: you are forever a follower. Your brand never leads. It can’t. It’s created from either the negative space between your competitors or from some herd-mentality (or some mutated amalgamation of the two). Here are some specific issues that arise for ‘outside-in’ brands:

So if we’re not going to use an ‘outside-in’ strategy, what should we do?

These (and all other remarkable brands) are built from the inside out. They are focused on their own identity first and foremost: core values, personality, behaviors, and communication. They know that remarkable brands are leaders, not followers. These brands don’t get caught watching all the other players all the time. They keep the eye on the ball and get to where it will be before everyone else.

There are some incredible benefits from this ‘inside-out’ brand strategy:

So we’re going to build a remarkable, ‘inside-out ‘ brand. We won’t get caught following the competition. We’re going to have a vision, be out in front, and really lead. Is there no place then for competitive analysis? Should we even care at all what they’re doing?

Yes, we absolutely should care about the competition. But we have to frame our analysis correctly:

We research the competition, not to instigate, but to validate our branding efforts. Competitive research is great. It’s a fantastic tool but it has to be applied at the right point and with the right focus to help us build a remarkable, ‘inside-out’ brand. It has to serve the work we’ve already done to find our authentic identity. We don’t create an identity out of our competitive research. We validate that it truly is different and unique.

So here are four critical ways to use your competitive research right in building your remarkable brand.

You’ve put in the time and effort to identify and define your brand values, personality, story, and perhaps even started to build key assets like a logo, name, tagline, and colors. But if you never do any competitive research, you’ll likely find yourself creating things that may look a lot like a competitor’s brand. You certainly don’t want to make a certain shade of red your primary brand color when a direct competitor is using one that is nearly identical!

There should be one consistent thought as you research your competition. “Is what we’re creating truly unique?” Let’s not get caught down the road building a brand that doesn’t truly showcase our unique identity. Competitive research is a great tool to protect against this.

What terms do you find consistently across your competitors’ messaging? Which visuals keep popping up? What overall experience are customers getting from your competitors’ combined efforts?

While it may not be prudent to simply pick up these terms and images and use them yourself (again, you are trying to build a unique brand, aren’t you?), but they do give you clues into the things that your customers are seeing in the industry. You can better get inside their head and even link these ‘industry terms’ or even buzzwords with your own unique, clear and compelling terms.

And let’s be honest: many brands use buzzwords, not because customers understand them, but because it makes them feel like they’re projecting expertise. The reality is far different though: customers are often more confused and frustrated than they are helped by these terms. If you’ve done your homework and know which terms are common, what a fantastic opportunity to bring your authentic brand to bear on explaining the concepts of your work in terms that are far clearer and helpful.

If you never know what your competitors are saying and doing, it’s hard to answer the question from a customer, “Well, what makes you any better than them?” Use your competitive research to better arm your marketing communications and sales messaging for that moment in the customer’s journey when they’re ready to make a decision to stop caring about your competitors and really focus on you.

Competitive research can be a fantastic source of new tactics. Watch how competitors use their websites, social media, and other assets. See which channels they’re choosing to invest in. Observe which customer segments they’re focusing on now. These can all be great sources of new tactical ideas for your own marketing and sales efforts.

The key: differentiate tactics from a strategy. There is a slippery slope here to wholesale copy a competitor’s approach and when you do you’ll find yourself adopting their strategy as well. The problem? Their strategy is predicated on their own strengths and weaknesses, their own brand identity. And yours is different. Yours is unique to you (as no two organizations are the same). And a wholesale strategy copy will backfire quickly as you can’t claim the same identity with the exact same strengths.

So use competitive research to source tactics and then apply your own unique strategy lens to them. Make them yours. Don’t wholesale copy their website, chase their audience segment, or adopt their messaging. Instead, use them as inspiration to further strengthen your own unique brand identity.

Competitive research, done right, is an incredibly powerful tool to validate your brand identity. I highly recommend employing it to strengthen your own efforts and build a brand that is truly remarkable.

If you’re looking for some help with your competitive research we have a free competitor analysis tool that might be a good place to start. And if you want to go deeper sign up for our newsletter, join our next Brand Roundtable Chat, or even give me a call. I’d love to help you any way I can.

If you’ve got a B2B brand – selling your products and services to other businesses – then you know that there are some very unique challenges to marketing your business-to-business brand. A lot of the branding lessons out there are great – and some certainly translate to B2B. But most of those lessons are built on business-to-consumer marketing. These lessons often fail to connect to the B2B world.

I’ve learned a few lessons for B2B brands working with business leaders building and growing remarkable B2B brands leading our creative branding agency. And I want to share some of these lessons today and hopefully help you grow your B2B brand.

Here are three unique challenges to marketing a B2B brand and some ways you can overcome them:

Unlike many B2C brands, the first meaningful interaction a potential customer has with a B2B brand is with a person. Many B2C brands can get all the way from the first ad or marketing message to the first purchase transaction without the customer ever interacting with a human representative of the brand.

Consider how you buy a new drink. You might see an ad on TV and then maybe some sponsored social posts about the product. Then while at the store (or online), you see the product and its packaging, get curious, and put it in your cart to purchase. Even if you deal with a cashier or salesperson, they don’t directly represent the manufacturer. In fact, they probably don’t have any specialized training from the manufacturer to tell you anything more than what’s on the packaging or the Amazon product page. (Having worked retail sales at a big-box electronics store in college, I can tell you the training I got on digital cameras definitely was less than half of the info you can find on a standard Amazon product page these days.)

Now let’s consider a B2B brand – perhaps a manufacturer of industrial machines. It’s highly likely you’re not seeing ads on TV, YouTube or social media for the product. It’s just too narrow a market of potential buyers. Instead, you might discover the brand through a tradeshow, conference, industry publication or direct marketing. You’ll likely have a conversation with a brand rep pretty early in the purchasing process. Perhaps even right there at the tradeshow. And you certainly are going to have even more conversations in the research and final sale phases.

B2B marketing requires a much tighter integration of messaging and the people who directly represent the brand. We’ll take a look at some of the reasons for that later in this article. But the core of those reasons is that B2B marketing involves more human interaction than in the B2C world. These human-to-human interactions happen much earlier in the marketing and sales process than B2C and are much more crucial to the customer experience prior to any kind of transaction.

The relationship with the customer becomes difficult to build if the messaging between ads, marketing collateral, platforms, and the people on the ground is off at all. Trust is threatened and it requires a lot of work for a sales or account rep to catch up. The brand and the people have to all be singing the same song. They should sing with their own personal voice and have the ability to flex to the specific needs of their customers. But all need to be singing the same familiar song.

This is why brand assets like taglines, a Brand Story, and visual guidelines are so, so critical. Without these (and some solid training of how to use and integrate them) representatives of the brand are left without a clear understanding of the story the customer has already been told in other marketing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard from sales reps who are so frustrated with the marketing of their own brand because the story they’re telling customers is so different from what they’ve been told on the website, in an ad, or piece of collateral.

Getting everything AND everyone working together, singing the same song is so critical to building a remarkable B2B brand.

Yes, you can certainly find outlier B2C brands that also have this challenge – think automotive brands selling cars to married couples. But even then the complexity of decision-making in the marketing and sales process is nothing at all like B2B brands. Many of the B2B brands I work with have as many as 5-6 decision-makers to communicate with.

Consider an ERP software brand. Their customers are manufacturers and large service providers who need a system to tie all of their operations together and give them detailed reporting on nearly every aspect of the business so they can track and improve performance. This system is going to be used daily by production, HR, finance, sales, and even marketing. It’s highly likely that the CEO, COO, and CFO will have a big stake in the final decision to purchase this particular software product. Certainly, the CIO also has a big stake in the game (and will likely be responsible for rolling it out and maintaining it). But it’s unlikely any of these people will be the ones doing initial research on different ERP products, initial demos, or even specking out all the needs. There will be at least another small handful of people involved.

So who does this ERP software brand target with their marketing? The tough answer is probably: all of them. Of course, each of these people will enter into the decision-making process at different points, and not all have the final say. But all of them will play critical roles in either making or informing the final decision. And if just one key person isn’t on board with the decision, the sale could fall through.

For B2B brands, marketing to an entire account is tough. It requires a lot of research, strategy, and different messages and types of assets to key on the particular needs, pain points, and context of each person involved from the customer’s side. It’s certainly complex and requires a different approach than most B2C brands.

One of the most important tools for B2B brands in dealing with this complexity is clear and well-researched buyer personas for each of these decision-making roles in a prospective customer’s business. Identifying their unique contexts, pain points, and goals will deliver huge dividends when creating messaging and going to market. You’ll know how to speak to each of them in a way that resonates with their particular needs AND you’ll be able to identify the right assets to create to get their attention.

Compared to a lot of B2C brands’ marketing and sales cycles, B2B brands’ can feel like an eternity. Weeks, months, and even years are the measuring scale for B2B brands as compared to days or even hours for some B2C brands.

There are a ton of factors that play into the length of marketing and sales cycles for any brand, but for some of the same reasons we’ve already mentioned (like the relationship-first approach and a high number of decision-makers) as well as others (like the budgets, length of the contract, and even complexity of contracts) most B2B brands experience long marketing and sales cycles.

Most B2B products and services just can’t be bought on a whim or negotiated in a single stop at an office. They require multiple people, product demos, various proposals, and contract negotiations, and likely some kind of legal review. And that’s not counting any of the marketing cycles prior to any kind of ‘sales process’.

I remember working with a product brand that was looking to get out of selling directly through retailers and instead sell bulk to distributors. They were transitioning from B2C marketing and sales processes into thinking more B2B. One of the more surprising discoveries: the relationship-building process with the big distributors could take YEARS.

While at a tradeshow they got to talking with one distributor rep about how they could get the attention of more distributors – especially the bigger ones in their industry. This rep’s answer: make sure you show up at this tradeshow at least 5 years in a row. Many distributors would watch brands year-over-year at the tradeshow to see if a brand would keep coming back, grow their booth size, and basically prove they were growing. Only after several years of seeing this would some of the big distributors even approach the brand to consider a deal. (And I thought our sales cycles were long for branding projects. Sheesh!)

So how do you overcome these long relationship-building cycles? Clear storytelling, from the get-go. Be clear about who you’re uniquely positioned to help. Know how your product or service solves their unique pains. And clearly demonstrate how it makes their lives better. Bonus points if you can do that with different kinds of media (articles, ads, ebooks, videos, podcasts) targeted at the different roles of decision-makers involved in the process. Best-case: focus on one or two roles that are the most critical to the sale. And it’s not always the CEO role. It could be the CFO or CIO. But there’s nearly always one or two that if you can really get them bought into your brand and your solution, through a good relationship, all the others will be infinitely easier.

As you can see (and probably already know) B2B marketing is vastly different from B2C. A lot of the surface level is similar, for sure. There are ads and content and websites and logos and messaging. But the nuances are what make all the difference. And if you treat them the same, you’ll find your marketing is that much harder and inefficient.

Get a kickstart for your B2B marketing planning with our FREE Relationship Marketing Worksheet. It will help you strategize your messaging, buyer personas, and campaigns.

And if you want to dig deeper on this topic and connect with some like-minded marketers and business leaders, sign up for our new Brand Roundtable Chats. These are limited-capacity, deep-dive sessions to dig into the brand-building issues and challenges in our various businesses. I’d love to see you at one soon!

Content strategy for B2B brands has two primary functions: to build trust and then develop that trust into working business relationships that benefit everyone involved. So how do you think about content strategy in order to set yourself up for building trust, and then converting? Let’s talk about that.

Before we get going, I want to point out that, during changing times, we need to rest upon a firm foundation of values, no matter what’s going on in the world. For this reason, we’re focusing on the fundamentals: building trust through coherent branding and then developing that trust through a series of communications, via an email-based content strategy.

Right off the bat, email should be at the core of most content strategies. Here’s why:

Email allows you to measure and understand what your customer is doing at the individual level. In other words, where your website analytics only shows anonymized summary data, email shows you an email address and a name, including how they interacted with your content every month. If email is at the core of your inbound marketing mix, measuring all your returning customers and their interactions (perhaps together with your CRM), you now have the best data on those most valuable relationships (in other words, people who want to hear from you and who have said they want to hear from you).

Trust gives you repeat customers and higher-value customers. In other words, better relationships. People who aren’t trustworthy have to lower their prices. But if your customer likes and trusts you more than anyone else, you win and they win.

Here are a few possible problems you might be solving by gaining trust.

You could find that building trust is especially important if:

If people are starved for trust, you could be the breath of fresh air they want.

You can use email powerfully to build trust and engage your customers and other stakeholders after a merger or acquisition. Email gives you a chance to talk about the merger, even go into detail, and to address objections without rigid time constraints.

In other words, you can talk to the people who said they want to hear from you and send them information to keep them in the loop. Because in a merger or acquisition, the last thing you want is for people to misunderstand. But if you’re sharing information about everything you’re doing, telling them what to think about it and why you’re doing it, then your intentions become clear and believable.

A content marketing campaign is especially valuable when you’re new to the market and people don’t know you yet. They don’t know what to think about you, they don’t know your approach to business, and they don’t know your character. A gradually growing email newsletter is a great way to help them to know how you think.

Leaders in innovation are by nature teachers. They share their vision and paint a picture of the future. Even if you’re just solving a problem in an innovative way, people need to understand how it works. If it’s a service, they may need to understand a new workflow.

Think of a new app that lets you buy stocks with no transaction fees. Instead of calling your broker, you get on your app. Now what? Some of us go to the internet to find out more about the app and whether it’s trustworthy and maybe even hints and tricks.

The problem is, there are many ways to provide products and services. By having an audience who trusts you and wants to be educated by you, you have an opportunity to help them to think like you. And if they think like you, they’re likely to think of you as an irreplaceable partner in business.

Do you have a way to help people think in a way that’s better than before? And can you offer products and services that help them to live out that new way of thinking? Email is a great way to make them unsatisfied with the old inefficient way to do it, and then empower them to do it better with you.

This leads us to conversions. Let’s say you’re a finance consultancy. You’ve found a better workflow for helping innovative companies (let’s call them companies that build new products) to evaluate their investments more efficiently through the development process to avoid sinking more money into products that could be losers.

For these investment companies, the classical way to look at finances is obsolete. But the industry continues to push classic, one-size-fits-all finance workflows.

For this reason, you know that you need to educate them gradually to the point where they’re ready to hire you as a consultant. That’s the final goal. That’s the bottom of the marketing funnel.

So what’s a marketing funnel? Glad you asked.

Let’s review the marketing funnel. A ton of people will hear about you, a few will be interested, and even fewer will develop a desire to work with you. This is a funnel.

At the top of the funnel is where people enter. They are very likely to be interested in what you’re saying, but many of them won’t descend to the next level of the funnel. Let’s look at the theory of how it works, and then let’s use our maverick finance company as an example.

It’s just classic marketing. You might talk to 500 people and get them to show interest. Out of those 500, you might talk with 100 who are willing to take the next step and email you. Out of those 100, maybe 10 will meet with you. And out of those 10, maybe two will become clients.

So if you picture a funnel, at the top or widest part of the funnel would be those 500 people you introduce yourself to. The people who take the next step would be your 100 people – a little bit narrower part of the funnel but still pretty wide. And then the people who will meet with you are the 10 (getting to the pretty narrow end of the bottom of the funnel) and then below that are the two who actually become clients – the final output of that funnel we’ve been visualizing. This might even be a similar flow to your own marketing funnel.

So let’s go back to the finance brand who is trying to get people to think about financing a different way. The top of the funnel might be people who visited the site after having clicked on one of their ads. Those ads take them to a landing page that summarizes their financing consulting service at a high level (it’s the introduction to your whole system it tells them why the system is important, what kinds of companies benefit from it, and the risk of going with that other classic model). Then the brand gives them a clear path to the next step – a free consultation.

Here’s another way to look at it:

So you’re trying to get people from the top of the funnel which is visiting your landing page, all the way down to where they become a customer or a client.

I use a funnel to help people out with advice. I get with people in half-hour increments and we talk about their problem. If it’s something we can do to solve it, I’ll let them know and we can move on to the next step. But if it’s not, I’ve helped them out a little bit and given them something to think about. In no case do I waste their time and they don’t waste my time.

This is a great funnel when the end result is taking care of people, living out your brand, and then not having your time wasted.

Remember that email marketing serves a branding effort and/or it serves a lead-generation effort. If you know what kinds of interactions you need, you can figure out what kind of funnel you have to set up. And if you know your brand, you’ll be able to do it in a way that builds your brand, even while you’re asking for customers to take action.

So we’ve now just talked about the purposes of content marketing. We’ve talked about ways to think about funnels and how to measure them. Take a minute to think about what results you want to see from your content, and then consider the kinds of results that you can get from setting up a measurable email marketing funnel.

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