We marketers spend a lot of time making our brands visible. Before you do that though, make sure your brand is credible before you make it visible. Here are 4 ways to increase your brand credibility.
What your brand stands for is important, but it’s not important if you’re not being considered. You need first to be in the considered set of companies or brands like yours, or as I like to say, ‘positioned in the category’. In plain English, what people think about you doesn’t matter if they’re not thinking about you. We absolutely need to be positioned in the buyer’s mind first, and there’s no point positioning around the wrong idea.
Marketing tactics to increase your brand credibility
Consider this, let’s imagine you’re using all of the normal modern B2B marketing tactics to begin with. Here’s how to use them to increase brand credibility and position in the right category:
- Create at least one great digital asset as lead bait on your site.
- Add great trigger campaign for those who want to download that lead bait or that asset.
- Then email your list, the list that you already have, which you’re probably going to invest in building, occasionally to promote that asset.
- You’d be blogging at least once a month, about some of the elements that you tease out from the assets. I think blogging weekly is about the right frequency, but certainly no less frequency than a month.
Are the assets you’re using appealing to your target market?
Think about the asset, what are all the stories it is telling?
- Tease out one or one of those elements into the blog, and then use that to sell the asset itself.
- Send that blog, that weekly or monthly blog to your email list, post it on the socials.
- Retarget visitors who have been to your website using both Google and the social retargeting, and display.
- Advertise to demographic and to your email lists.
In other words, you’re going to be really visible to your target market. Perhaps invisible to people outside of your target market, but super visible to those who are in the target market.
We want it to be positioned with our target market, but what else?
If you do all of those things mentioned above: the asset, the email trigger campaign that follows the asset, the blog that leads to the asset, the social posting, the online advertising, etcetera. If you do all of that, what lasting effect do you want to have? Of course, you want to be in the considered set, or positioned in the category, and so talk about the topics that matter to that category. Certainly that, but is that all? Or do you actually want to shape what the market thinks it needs? Think about these things:
- why the market needs you,
- when the market needs you,
- and what they need when they go looking.
Now, you’re not going to try and say: “Here’s why you need us,” but, “Here’s why you need somebody that does something like this”, your brand credibility will increase when you shift your communication from you need “us” to “Here’s when you need people doing something like this, the circumstances, the use cases, and when you go looking you’re going to need to have these characteristics. You’ll need a supplier that does these things.” That’s your opportunity to create bias in the market. That’s what we’re supposed to do as marketers.
Certainly, all of that comes to position us but we also want to shape what the market thinks it needs from anybody to our advantage. And so, all of those tactics again, the lead based, the trigger campaign that follows after it, the blogs that lead you to it, the posts on social, etcetera, etcetera. All of those things need to shape the market. That’s what we should be doing. But shape it around what? We need tactics to shape the market in some way that creates advantage for us. Now, what’s that going to be? That’s the essence of the point I want to make today.
Shape the market by focusing on the problem you solve better than anybody else
Brand credibility is about being certain you can deliver a particular promise to your target market. So, the thing that we most want to focus on is the problem that you solve better than anybody else. Now, it might be that you solve it better because of some unique advantage, or simply that you’ve chosen to focus on it. It almost doesn’t matter at this stage. What does matter is you know what that problem is.
If the market throws out this problem, then anybody can solve that problem. If the market is worried about this problem, then I’m on my own. That’s what I want. When you think about all that communication, it needs to be playing a role in getting the market to understand that there is a real problem and that it needs to be addressed. Because if they have that particular problem, that’s to your advantage. And, all of your communication needs to be talking about that problem.
Think about the problem you’re really good at solving first
You can’t work that out after you’ve sent the communication. All of this communication needs to have the effect of getting the market worried about that particular problem, and to position you as the authority on that particular problem. That’s where your final plan comes in. You need to get your whole team together, sales, marketing, finance, and ops, and identify what is that problem that we are uncommonly good at solving.
Again, either because of some natural advantage or maybe just because we’ve chosen to focus on it. I kind of don’t care at this stage, but you do need to agree what that problem is.
All the tools you need to build brand credibility and brand visibility are in Funnel Plan
There are some great tools inside of Funnel Plan to help you to do that. Then, work out the strategy that best makes sense given that problem. Which market most has that problem? What solution fully solves that problem? What channels great at uncovering that problem? Which competitors can also solve the problem? You need to shape your strategy around that chosen problem.
If you don’t have a Funnel Plan you can get a free one here, go to FunnelPlan.com, get your team together and see what I’m talking about.
Loads more lined up for you next week, until then may your funnel be full and always flowing.
Our thanks, this week to:
- You for watching this week’s show,
- Lisbeth Peña for blog production
- John Ang for video production
- Hugh Macfarlane for scripting and presenting this week’s show
