In terms of advertising effectiveness, the Digital Revolution in marketing has severely underdelivered. In fact, the latest research shows advertising is about 50% less effective than it was 10 years ago.

In the mad rush to feed an always on economy, marketers have unleashed a tsunami of online advertising content the likes of which the world has never seen before. Fact is, we’re now producing more content than people can possibly see – much less read, watch or listen to. This deluge of digital flotsam and jetsam is the Internet’s version of The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Except 1,000 times worse. No wonder the average person is more likely to complete Navy Seal training than click on an online banner. In fact, online advertising performance is so bad, email marketing – yes, email – is 40x more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter and drives more conversions than any other marketing channel including search and social. And don’t even get me started on the deluge of fraud, bad data, privacy issues and annoyances online advertising has spawned. If marketers in the 90s followed the same approach as today, most of their advertising budgets would have been spent on the Yellow Pages, classified ads, small space ads, coupons and direct mail. Hardly the stuff of building a famous brand. So what is the reason behind all these bad decisions being made that has led to the biggest drop in advertising effectiveness ever?

Content saturation, impression fraud, malevolent bots, unreliable data and ad blockers only account for some of the drop to advertising effectiveness. While each of these has been proven to erode performance, there’s one massive, underlying mistake we see the vast majority of marketers making that is the mother of them all.

The underlying reason advertising effectiveness has cratered is that the vast majority of marketers have abandoned brand strategy. Those who believe it is more important to do than to plan now outnumber those who believe in strategy first, tactics second. Yes, doing is absolutely critical but doing without first strategizing why, for whom, how and what you expect to achieve in both the long and short term is like firing a gun and then aiming it after the bullet has left the barrel. Developing a brand strategy before doing anything else is the marketing equivalent of measure twice, cut once. Practically, every mistake and lost opportunity in regards to advertising effectiveness can be attributed in some way to a missing or poor brand strategy. Trust me, investing in a brand strategy first will give you a geometric return on the time and money you put into it.

A great brand strategy is really an overall business strategy that drives everything you do - not just communications. Think of it as an Operating System that not only guides how you promote your business but how you conduct it. It should answer why you're in business and how you will support and deliver that why along every consumer/customer touchpoint in a meaningful and memorable way through communications and operations.

A successful brand strategy inspires both your agency and employees to create legendary brand experiences that deliver your brand promise through every customer touchpoint on and offline. Companies with successful brand strategies have:

• Better products

• Better employee morale

• Higher productivity

• Better customer service

• Better long-term stability

• Higher customer satisfaction

• Better advertising

• Greater awareness and likeability

• Less employee turnover

• Easier recruiting

• More positive publicity

• Easier decision-making

• Smaller media spends to acquire the same or better results

• Perceived higher brand and product values

• Higher profit margins than their competitors

Here’s the key to developing a successful brand strategy. Successful brand strategies only happen when you understand, articulate and gain consensus on a Higher Business Purpose. Your Higher Business Purpose is not to be confused with the popular yet ineffective “higher purpose” movement making the rounds that believes every business should be solving some sort of social, economic or environmental injustice. No, what we’re talking about is identifying, defining, gaining consensus on and activating the one thing that will drive your growth and revenue beyond all others.

IN SHORT, YOUR HIGHER BUSINESS PURPOSE IS A UNIQUE AND VALUABLE BENEFIT PEOPLE REALLY WANT AND NEED THAT YOUR COMPETITORS ARE UNABLE OR UNWILLING TO PROVIDE.

Sounds easy enough, right? It’s not.

In our experience, most agencies and marketers are at best only paying lip service to brand strategy. We’ve compiled a simplified step-by-step list of the crucial things you need to do to develop an effective brand strategy. Each of the six steps below are iterative. Skipping just one will result in an inferior strategy.

1. Know Your Customers

It’s not enough to know who they are, where they live and what they like. You need to really know what media is most effective in reaching them and do the appropriate research to find out that one thing they want and need that only your brand can satisfy. We find research works best when you:

• Analyze first and reliable third-party data to uncover possible insights

• Pursue hypotheses about these insights through in-person or online qualitative research

• Test and confirm your hypotheses through statistically viable quantitative research

To find out how Immortology uncovers insights you can use to dramatically grow your business, click here.

2. Know Your Competitors

You need to study their strengths, their weaknesses and understand which ones are real threats and why people choose them over you. You need to understand their unique position in the market so that you can truly differentiate yourself from it. But most of all you need to know what their Achilles heel is - the things they are unwilling or unable to do that your customers want. To find out more about how we can help you gather the competitive intelligence you need to grow your business, click here.

3. Know Yourself

Self-analysis is hard and you’re going to need to hire an objective third-party to help you with this one. You’ll need to codify your long and short-term business objectives and make sure they’re realistic for the market you’re in and the budget you have to spend. You’ll need to define your core values and honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses. You’ll need to define why your company exists and what you really want it to be when it’s reached its full potential. If you have any existing advertising or brand communications, you should work with your agency to help them identify what worked, what didn’t and why. You’ll need to compare and contrast these findings to make sure they don’t conflict with what your customers really want and need and the main benefit you provide them is positioned to be unique from your competitors. To find out how we can help you take a good hard look at yourself – warts, opportunities and all – click here.

4. Find Your Higher Business Purpose And Develop An Overarching Brief

So after you’ve completed Steps 1, 2 & 3 above, it’s time figure out what your brand’s Higher Business Purpose is. This is the most important step because your Higher Business Purpose is like a mini business plan that will drive and guide everything your brand does moving forward. When we say Higher Purpose, we’re not referring to a pie in the sky, Kum Ba Ya, save the world kind of a purpose. No what we’re talking about is defining how your company can profitably make people’s lives better that’s different from your competitors. In essence it synthesizes all the learning about your business, your competitors and your customers into a powerful statement that acts like a brand promise and value proposition on steroids. Warning. Seek the help of a professional on this one. To see some Higher Business Purposes we’ve written, click here.

Once you’ve defined your Higher Business Purpose, it’s time to put it into an Overarching Brief that synthesizes all everything you’ve learned in one document. It should include:

• The business challenges you want the marketing to solve

• Top competitors + their strengths and weaknesses

• Your ideal audience – defined both demographically and psychographically

• How they engage with your brand

• What they desire most from your brand

• What we want them to do

• Your Higher Business Purpose statement

• The key message that will get them to do it

• Why they should believe your key message

• Why will the message be welcome and invited

• Business objectives you want the marketing to achieve in what amount of time

• Production Budget

• Media Budget

• Required Deliverables

To see some integrated campaigns based on Overarching Briefs we’ve developed, click here.

5. Gain Consensus

OK, so now you have valuable customer insights, you know your competition, you understand yourself, have defined your Higher Business Purpose and put it all into an Overarching Brief. The next step is to make absolutely sure the key stakeholders in your company approve it. Verbal agreement is not enough. All stakeholders must actually sign and date the brief. Even better, have them sign a pledge that they believe in Higher Business Purpose as defined and will do everything in their power to support it. Event better still, have every single one of your employees sign it and post it in a prominent where they all can see it every day. Then you’ll need to follow-up every six months with surveys to gauge the percentage of company employees and customers who know and understand your purpose. As the percentages rise, so will your market share.

6. Create A Master Plan To Fulfill Your Higher Business Purpose

Your Overarching Brief, Your Media Plan, Tactical Briefs for creative and operational initiatives to support and deliver your brand promise, Production Schedules, they all go in one place for easy access. We call it the Integrated Marketing Communications plan or IMC for short. Your IMC plan should be reviewed every quarter and revised to adapt to market and business changes/opportunities. It should contain the following:

• Your Overarching Brief

• Tactical Briefs for each paid, earned or owned medium defining target, desired actions, target/media specific key messages. Based on the Overarching Brief, Tactical Briefs define specific goals and actions for each marketing tactic you pursue (Video, Social Media Campaign, Email, Outdoor, Website Development, Email, Brand Identity, etc.)

• IMC (Integrated Marketing Campaign) Plan a 12-month calendar that includes all marketing tactics to be developed plus:

  • Presentation deadlines

  • Production schedules

  • Approval deadlines

  • Media deadlines

  • Media placements by channel and run schedules

  • KPI reporting schedule

And there you have it, the six steps to developing an effective brand strategy - the single-most impactful thing you can do to grow your business. To find out how we can help you develop a successful brand strategy for your business, let’s talk.

Eternally Yours: