NEW RULES OF EFFECTIVE BRANDING FOR THOUGHT LEADERS.
Never assume people know who you are.
Why spend a king’s ransom on brand identity, websites, social networking, advertising, in order to build your profile? Traditional marketing organizations allocate on average 60% of their budgets on paid media. For all that you’d expect people know who you are. Managers cling to the belief that brand recognition has been achieved and that the public widely accepts and understands their organization’s claim to leadership. It just isn’t the case.
“Best practices” do not communicate your leadership.
Haven’t you wondered why you end up disappointed by your latest marketing or branding endeavour? Could the problem be the everyday, off-the-shelf tactics to which most organizations default? Designing a new logo and developing taglines, while important, can sometimes amount to little more than window-dressing; new advertising or publicity-seeking events often simply interrupt, rather than draw audiences with content they actually care about.
Establishing your leadership requires conveying the deep insights and experiences at the cornerstone of your brand. Branding is no longer simply just who you are, what you do and how you do it. It is increasingly about what you know.
Understand that people aren’t talking about you.
What have you done to nurture your audience’s interests, or to maintain contact with those who have interacted with your brand? With your Facebook page and Twitter account, there’s a framework in place so you can connect with your audience. But what about?
As more and more organizations start virtual conversations, the mushy, undifferentiated middle only gets larger and more opaque. Social networking can’t make your organization more meaningful or relevant unless you first share unique and engaging content. What are you giving people to talk about? Smart organizations ensure engaging content is at the core of their outreach; they convey depth and meaning in order to build audience share.
You cannot be valued if you aren’t saying anything of value.
Instead of tuning-in, audiences are turning-off. Literally. Most direct mail ends up in the garbage; people hang-up on phone solicitations; junk email is directed to spam filters. Why? Marketers have mostly forgotten how to say anything of value. It’s hard to have an effective brand if you can’t rise above the distracting onslaught of marketing noise.
Effectively-branded organizations are articulate and engaging. They concentrate on being indispensable sources of knowledge, are willing to challenge audience thinking, and determined to be at the centre of vital public conversations their audience cares about. Their brand is always on; always giving people something to talk about; always working.
To stand out, you must lead.
To be relevant, organizations have to reflect the interests of their community. But many do too much listening and absolve themselves of their responsibility to stand for something concrete. Organizations like this tend to look to branding as a short-term mechanism to grab media attention. Relying on marketing gimmicks in this manner will, in the long term diminish perceptions of their actual value.
People are looking for leadership. Put mission-supporting content and leadership at the centre of your brand building effort. Start concentrating on how to be an indispensable, outwardly-oriented source of knowledge and interact with leading ideas, and you may become the leader people want to associate with, and talk about.
Be everywhere your audiences ask to be engaged.
To develop a sense of relevance, aim to be greater than any one product or campaign; transcend place, and be intrusive about transmitting what you know. Ongoing, substantive communication is one of the few dependable ways to improve your odds of marketing in a fragmented and overly-mediated marketplace.
Leverage technology to its fullest potential and aim to live in the minds of people instead of on the shelf by providing anytime, anywhere access to what you know. Redefine and expand your customer base by providing meaningful high-value digital experiences regardless of where people live.
You should never delegate your brand strategy.
Where is your innovative thinking coming from? Are you, time and again, defaulting to standard marketing tactics? By asking consultants to create and effectively control their brand expression, by letting these consultants tell them what to say and how to behave, organizations risk creating a culture of dependency.
Without self-sufficiency organizations can become susceptible to flawed thinking about approaches that don’t suit their real identity. The key to avoiding years of regret and corporate penance is to become your own guru and allow yourself the freedom to unlock new value from leveraging hidden assets.
Every time you transmit knowledge, you renew your brand on the inside.
Organizations often forget that customers aren’t always their most important audience. If you don’t keep your organization’s story renewed for a new age of listeners on the inside, the lessons of experience will be lost. Your future success requires new managers have a firm grasp of the details of the events that shaped the organizations. A strong, well-communicated identity describing the organization’s values and purpose gets people interested, draws them into your community, and influences their behavior.
For social organizations, this is essential for developing relationships with volunteers. The strong flow of volunteers is a barometer of good health and indicates your success at engaging community. Building brand awareness – which shapes the expectations people have about you – is your opportunity to grow a community from which the next generation of volunteers and donors will emerge.
“Publish or Perish”. It is truer now than at any other time in history.
Everyone wants to be McKinsey, Harvard, the Mayo Clinic or National Geographic. Their approach to brand building is within the grasp of any and all, small and medium enterprise, nonprofit, university, or government agency. Building a deep brand is a matter of choice. Success requires a willingness to address the new consumer demand for interaction, participation and unique content.
To build relevance, share your content. Chances are you know something no one else does. Recognize the fundamental human need for trust based on an exchange of knowledge, leadership, and communication.
It’s not who you are and what you do. It’s what you know.
Telling people who you are and what you do – standard brand positioning – is no longer enough. Merely telling them that you are different doesn’t cut it either. Your identity is what you can prove not what you say. You need to provide tangible proof of your leadership. More and more, an organization’s unique value proposition centers on what it knows and how this unique asset is channeled. But it begins with substance.
The importance of content – original, compelling content – cannot be overstated. By embracing thought leadership as a core value of their brand, organizations can stake a unique territory; stand for something clear and definable in the minds of audiences; produce value beyond their core offering; and build broad communities of interest from which support will emerge. Thought leadership is the starting point for market leadership.
The medium needs a message.
Organizations fail to understand that value that comes from content developed out of passion and niche expertise. We are drowning in information and data, yet there is an absolute scarcity of useful or valuable content amidst this haphazard mix of trivial information such as contests, inane videos, mindless drivel, rules, regulations, or product information and warranties. Content marketing as it is evolving is not knowledge marketing, and is therefore not helping cement the perception of your leadership in the marketplace.
All content is not knowledge: there is a vast difference between information and knowledge. Endeavour to create content that is unique and valuable and that, above all, adds a voice and point of view to your organization that is unique and that can connect with your audience’s wants, needs and unexpressed desires; creates an entirely new dialogue based on shares values — rather than “following the herd” and pushing brand-created marketing messages.
Leverage all media.
The advent of social media does not invalidate traditional communications tools — particularly if you’re not providing the substance that gives people something to talk about. Organizations have always had to be multi-channel masters offering customers multiple points of contact to what they know. However, the Web and in particular the advent of social media has made it possible for any organization to easily apply to principles of knowledge marketing to create a leadership brand.
Consider the many customer touch points: a combined hybrid scenario where you leverage print publications, direct mail events will promote a flow between print and electronic media, amplify your brand and expertise and increase audience engagement and participation.
