Recently, our team sent out a survey to more than 150 Influence & Co. clients to find out how we’re doing and to gather some more information about our customer base. One question we asked was, “What are your main goals for working with Influence & Co.?” The responses were varied, and most customers chose more than one of our 10 options, but what we found most fascinating was that 98 percent of our customers cited brand awareness as a main goal.
While this is great to see because we know our executive branding service helps clients improve brand awareness, it’s also disconcerting because brand awareness is vague, up for interpretation, and so disconnected from a real business key performance indicator. The issue is that if we don’t know why a customer is focused on increasing brand awareness, we can’t ensure we’re achieving a solution for the root of the issue.
For this reason, we decided to dive deeper and start asking these questions on sales calls, in kickoff meetings with clients, and throughout our entire engagement process to ensure we’re always on strategy and helping our clients accomplish real business KPIs. The questions we came up with are:
If we don’t know the answers to at least a few of these questions, we’ll be in a constant state of wondering whether something is working. We’ll have to equate social shares and article views to brand awareness — even if we know those don’t make sense as valuable metrics. Ultimately, our relationship will fail.
If we do know the answers, however, we can develop a strategy around them.
To get a better idea of how a situation like this pans out, here’s a recent example:
We’re working with a client in the insurance industry. During our initial phone call, we discovered that the client wanted to create a full content marketing campaign to improve brand awareness. The company is currently going through a rebrand and is in the process of creating some new insurance products.
We knew our content marketing package could definitely increase brand awareness by getting articles published in online publications coming from experts within the insurance company, but we also knew the company could accomplish a lot more. So we opted to dig deeper to better understand the client’s goals.
To do this, we went through the list of questions mentioned above and found out these answers:
Armed with this information, we devised a completely different strategy than we would have by using just brand awareness as a goal. We ultimately moved forward with a strategy that includes:
This strategy is going to help the insurance company reach its exact target audience, build brand awareness and trust within that community, and stay top of mind. So when bankers are looking for new insurance products, our client will be the first company they think of.
Without digging deeper into why you want to increase brand awareness and developing your strategy around the answer to that question, you’ll always end up just creating content for content’s sake and accomplishing no one’s goals. Remember to take time and really home in on the specific goals your team is trying to accomplish, and your content’s success will reflect that.
Kelsey is the COO of Intero Digital.