are great for building brand recognition and awareness while driving sales. See Chapter 15 for details about using advertising to promote your brand.
Offer freebies and promotional deals. The best way to persuade prospects to buy your product is to get them to experience your brand’s value. To do that, you need to get your foot in the door. Offering a sample product, a free consultation, or a 100 percent money-back guarantee are all ways to reduce customers’ exposure to risk, so they’re more likely to give you a chance.
Create a loyalty program. A loyalty program rewards customers for repeat business, and every encounter you have with a customer or client is an opportunity to prove your brand’s value.
Creating Your One-Year Branding Plan
With branding goals in place, you’re ready to build a plan for achieving those goals. Start by outlining your plan. Create a document that includes the following sections:
Goal: What you hope to accomplish by the end of the year, such as 25 new clients or $100,000 in sales revenue. Make sure that your goal is SMART, as explained in “Identifying Your Branding Goals/Objectives” earlier in this chapter.
Objectives: Mini goals that you must achieve to meet your overall goal, such as increasing brand recognition and awareness among millennials.
Strategy: A strategy is nothing more than a big plan. Suppose that your goal is to increase your brand’s market share by 10 percent over last year. You could use different strategies to achieve that goal, such as positioning your brand as being the highest-quality or marketing your brand as the most socially conscious.
Tactics: Tactics are specific activities for executing the strategy, such as launching a website, creating five branded social media properties, or buying $5,000 in online advertising.
Timeline: Break down your one-year plan into more manageable milestones. What do you need to accomplish in three months, six months, nine months, and 12 months to reach your goal? Or what do you need to accomplish each month to reach your goal?
Budget: How much money do you plan to invest in your brand over the coming year? If you’re just getting started, this amount will be a fixed dollar amount; later, it could be a percentage of sales revenue.
Monitoring and Evaluating the Success of Your Branding Efforts
Whether you set personal, professional, or business goals, having a way to measure your success in meeting those goals is essential. Otherwise, you’re flying blind; you have no idea whether what you’re doing to achieve your goals is working and no insight into what you could be doing differently or better.
To measure success, you need two things: metrics and analytics. Metrics are quantitative measures used to track performance, such as sales revenue, customer retention, and online sales conversions. Analytics involves examining the metrics in various ways to gain insight into what you can do to improve performance.
In the following sections, I explain how to use metrics and analytics to monitor and evaluate the success of your branding efforts.
Choosing metrics and key performance indicators
The first step in measuring and monitoring performance is figuring out what you’re going to measure. Here are some important branding metrics:
Brand recognition: The extent to which people in your market recognize your brand when they see your product or logo
Brand awareness: The extent to which people in your market understand what your brand represents or stands for
Brand consideration: The percentage of customers who would be open to the possibility of buying your brand
Perceived quality: The extent to which people in your market associate your brand with high quality
Sales: Metrics that reflect a brand’s success, including the following:Number of salesSales conversion rateCustomer lifetime valueAverage order value
Net promoter score (NPS): NPS is a measure of brand loyalty on a scale of 1 to 10. NPS may be measured in return sales, referrals, or answers to survey questions (such as “On a scale of 1–10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or family member?”).
Note that metrics have no specific value attached to them; they’re just measures, like inches and pounds. To make them meaningful for tracking the success of your branding activities, you need to turn them into key performance indicators (KPIs) — specific goals, such as a 10 percent increase in brand consideration or an NPS of 8 or higher.
Collecting and analyzing data: The tools of the trade
To use metrics and analytics most effectively, become familiar with the tools of the trade for collecting and analyzing data. Here’s a list of tools to consider:
Google Analytics (https://analytics.google.com) is great for collecting and analyzing data on websites and blogs. All you do is insert a line of code into your website’s header, and Google Analytics starts collecting data, including number of users, new users, and average engagement time on the site.
SurveyMonkey (https://www.surveymonkey.com) makes creating surveys and collecting and analyzing survey data a snap. Surveys are valuable in analyzing key metrics, such as brand recognition and awareness.
Sprout Social (https://sproutsocial.com) is one of many social media management platforms. It enables you to streamline and scale engagement efforts via various social media platforms; plan, create, schedule, and publish content to your brand’s social media accounts; and analyze customer engagement data.
Asana (https://asana.com) is a full-featured project management platform that includes marketing tools for planning and tracking marketing campaigns, new product launches, and more.
Salesforce (https://www.salesforce.com) is a full-featured customer relationship management platform that includes multiple marketing-specific tools, including an email marketing platform, a Journey Builder (for tracking your developing relationships with customers), Interaction Studio (to visualize, track, and manage real-time customer experiences), and Datorama (for managing marketing data, KPIs, and decisions). It also includes tools for managing social media accounts, personalizing mobile interactions, and advertising to customers individually.
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