Every marketing campaign should be guided by strategy. Every design, be it a website, app or blog has to be guided by some sort of a plan with clearly defined objectives and KPIs. In this article, I’ll be talking about you, your business and how you can connect better with your customers or product users in the 21st century in the area of branding, marketing and disruption. In most of our work, we have always emphasized the importance of creating a seamless yet personalized customer experience across all digital touch points for our clients. As a digital agency, our mission is simple, we help brands connect better with their customers or users through the process of strategy and design. Our approach to designing digital solutions for our clients starts with what we call discovery or diagnosis session. These sessions help us bridge the gap between business challenges and what the best possible solution could be.

These sessions afford us the opportunity to: 1. Learn BUSINESS/CLIENT: understand you/your business better, your needs, challenges and expectations 2. Understand USERS: who are is their target user, where are they, what’s their expectation and more 3. Define BRAND: who are you, what’s your voice, what’s your tone, messaging, how are you different from your competitors 4. Prioritize GOALS: here we look at revenue and awareness priorities. Revenue prioritization talks to how are you make money, what areas do you wanna focus on in order to increase your revenue. Awareness has to do ways or methods that you can use to make users aware of your brand, which channels do you use to help you achieve your goals.

Before embarking on any marketing campaign, here’s what you need to know about the thing we call a brand. The reason I’m saying this is because many people do not really know what branding is. The impression that most people have is that branding is about identity systems, improving graphics here and there, putting your logo on letterhead or something related to that. That is not branding, the art of branding is the technique of influencing people’s gut feeling through experience. Your brand is not what you say it is, but what your customers say it is. Everyone has a personal feeling about you or your business. If you’re not intentional about your brand, people are going to develop feelings about your brand anyway. You cannot design a brand but you can influence it through what we call brand experiences. These are all the different touchpoints that customers have with your brands. If you’re a small company, a business card, a brochure, poster or rude person on the other side of the call creates negative experience of your brand.

People tend to confuse marketing with advertising. Advertising is an element of marketing that deals specifically with awareness. The effort brands put in driving awareness using various channels, could be social media, billboards, radio or tv, that is advertising. Marketing is all about initiating conversations. It’s about you as a brand, positioning yourself in a certain way in order to look attractive to a specific audience. The ultimate goal is to get them to a position where they initiate a conversation with you. In inbound marketing, the audience you’re trying to attract initiates the conversation. The best way to achieve this is through strategic content creation, if done correctly. You need to create the kind of content that makes you valuable and sets you apart from competition. I will cover more on content stacking in our next article on content stacking. On the other side, outbound is all about you initiating the conversation with your target audience. Instead of waiting for them to come to you, you are the one reaching out. Both are important, so you have to make sure that there is a balance.

As covered in our article on Digitization of Car Buying Experience – what it means for auto dealers, digital disruption refers to the set of ground-breaking changes that affect companies mainly in two perspective, industry and execution. In simple terms, disruption is the interruption of “conversion” either by internal or external factors or parties. Brands that are disruptive in nature are the ones that always stand out. Uber disrupted the taxi/travel industry, they had all the clients, they had the leads, they had the market but they failed to innovate and change at the rate of consumption. They did not take advantage of the resources they had which could have allowed them to keep up with the changing consumer behavior. The same thing happened with Airbnb, Google in how we search and consume information. The role of strategists is crucial especially in the times we are living in. Covid-19 is another beast that I will cover in the next few weeks. So, what we do as strategist is that, we engineer disruption in a controlled environment before external disruption hits. Think of it in this way, if you were your competitor, what projects or experiments would you be embarking on which will enable you to be the disrupter in your industry. Put yourself out of business and approach it from that standpoint. Think of ways to get yourself out of business before your competitors do because, believe me, you are their project. Instead of offering a variation of something that already exists, think of positioning yourself towards something different.