Why you can’t afford to ignore brand marketing

What is brand marketing? Most startups spend a lot of their energy thinking about growth marketing and forget about brand. And when we say “brand,” we don’t intend it as a synonym for “logo.”

Brand and and Growth are two sides of the same marketing coin. One doesn’t perform well without the other, and who owns what will depend on the size and stage of the company.

But no matter the company stage, you need to be thinking about your brand as much as your growth.

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:

1. Look & feel: Logo, color palette, typography, etc.
2. Tone & voice: The word choices and style in which information is communicated
3. 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 demand generation

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.

Define your brand goals in order to measure results

This step is skipped too often. While it may feel abstract compared to traditional marketing KPIs, being purposeful in your brand will have a positive impact across the business.

In order to define your brand goals, you must have an in-depth understanding of your business goals, including:

1. Target audience: How do prospective and current customers view you? How do you want them to view you?
2. Market category: Where do you lead? Where do you want to lead? Does the category exist?
3. Industry trends: What are the current and future issues your customers care about?

Brand Strategy Framework

With these business inputs, you can organize your brand marketing into 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 understand the goals and priorities for your brand, you can more easily identify what success looks like.

For example, if you want to break into the “PropTech” market category, you may want to measure your share of voice by tracking the mentions of “Company_Name + PropTech”. Once you have this data, you should be layering on growth data to understand which content performed best on this topic.

Here are some common brand marketing KPIs you should understand:

• Brand awareness & sentiment: 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?

You’re likely already measuring some of these things piecemeal. In a future blog, we’ll cover how you can more easily track brand marketing KPIs covering a range of methods: from budget-friendly, scrappy techniques to the sophisticated-yet-expensive enterprise solutions.

In the meantime, don’t sleep on your brand marketing because it may be the missing piece from your growth marketing puzzle.