Brand strategy marketing training to win more customers – Smart Insights

A successful brand strategy means your business’ channels, digital experiences, and tone of voice need to home in on what your key customers want.

We’ve got marketing training to strengthen your branded consumer goods company’s relationships with your target audiences.

In order to build a loyal fan base, your brand strategy and style need to reflect your overall vision for the business. Having a brand strategy that jars with your product/service will put customers off and confuse them about who are and what you offer.

However, integrating your marketing strategy can be hard, especially today in the age of digital disruption where every customer has an omnichannel experience. That’s why our complete marketing training covers all the key elements you need to build a strong brand strategy.

The RACE Framework for consumer branded goods

Our popular RACE Framework is a simple, actionable planning structure for marketing leaders looking to streamline their omnichannel marketing strategies and tactics, in a data-driven, customer-centric approach to strategic marketing.

With the RACE Framework, consumer branded goods marketers can plan, manage and optimize their marketing activities across the customer journey touchpoints of reach, act, convert and engage.

Since all our marketing training is integrated across the RACE Framework, Smart Insights members and their teams can confidently apply marketing tools and templates to optimize their key channels and platforms to optimize their customers’ journeys.

Set goals and objectives

Setting clear marketing goals and objectives for your brand strategy will help you get buy-in from colleagues and brief agencies better.

It will also give you and them more confidence that you can achieve your targets by putting in place the right marketing activities to deliver them.

You can use marketing goals and objectives for both specific campaigns and longer-term ‘always-on’ digital marketing activities like organic or paid search marketing that are run continuously.

Why does a brand strategy need clear marketing objectives?

In this interview from Think With Google on ‘why clarity on marketing objectives is critical’, Google’s Global VP of Ads Marketing Marie Gulin-Merle talks to Jason Spero, VP of Global Performance Solutions at Google, about the challenges faced by brands today.

They discuss how marketers can navigate increasing complexity with a clear focus on their brand’s objectives.

Within digital marketing, there is often a focus on the volume of response but not the quality, value, and cost of response.

For meaningful use of data to inform your brand strategy, it’s essential to go beyond volume measures to understand the quality of traffic on the site and whether visitors have engaged.

Brand strategy objectives example

Our VQVC template, from our ‘set goals and objectives’ module in the RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path, defines four types of measures that you should define when goal setting for your brand:

• Volume
• Quality
• Value
• Cost

Our marketing training empowers consumer branded goods marketing leaders to set goals and objectives to support their businesses’ visions. With our tried-and-tested marketing tools and templates, you can track your progress and boost your performance to achieve those all-important KPIs, efficiently and effectively.

Persona definition

Personas offer brands of all sizes an opportunity to create more effective, customer-centric communications. Our brief definition of a persona, coined by Dr. Dave Chaffey is:

“A summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations, environment and behavior of typical distinct audience types”.

Foviance/EY Seren define a persona as:

“A fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users, identified and selected as a key target through use of segmentation data, across the company in a usable and effective manner.”

The key thing to remember when defining personas for consumer branded goods, is these personas need to sit at the center of every decision you make about the brand strategy going forward.

We recommend using between two and six main personas, which are carefully researched and representative, to provide the best balance and focus for your brand strategy.

Beyond just simple demographics, the templates we have created for Smart Insights members enables you to consider:

• Motivations/goals
• Buying decision behaviors
• Platform usage
• Customer journey mapping

Our ready-made templates and actionable insights are used by consumer branded goods marketers around the world. Interested in joining them? Find out more.

Persona example

Our practical, editable marketing templates support brand marketers and managers through the step-by-step process of researching and creating personas to support your brand strategy. Here’s the beginning of one of our example personas, young Jordan Clarke the ‘trendster’!

Why does a brand strategy need personas?

If you’re still not convinced, here are 4 reasons why your brand strategy will benefit from persona implementation:

1. Objective rather than subjective direction
2. Increase conversion of key audience
3. Optimize site and experience to meet customer needs
4. Encourages more targeted media spend and integration

We’ve got marketing training to support you and your team in developing and implementing market research to inform your brand strategy. Not just personas, we have resources for SWOT analysis, competitor benchmarking, segmenting, targeting and positioning, and more.

What’s more, all our brand strategy marketing solutions are fully integrated across the RACE Framework, so you can plan, manage, and optimize the key elements of your marketing strategy to win more customers.

Planning acquisition and budget

No matter how marketing techniques change over time, every company must remain focused on this simple fact: customers are the lifeblood of business.

Creating and growing demand for your brand requires a constant focus on the fundamentals – finding the best marketing mix to effectively communicate value and target the right audiences in the right way in the right place at the right time.

Your budget for customer acquisition will include a mix of paid, earned, and owned media, sometimes including offline experiences as well as digital. It’s crucial for brand strategists to consider the customer journey when planning marketing channels and managing landing pages to optimize website journeys.

Customer acquisition plan

The map below, from our ‘define acquisition plan and budget’ module in the RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path, demonstrates the average monthly customer flow for loan products by channel.

In this case, both online and offline touchpoints are crucial in the customer journey. This means multichannel journey tracking has implications for acquisition budgeting too.

Customer acquisition budget

Our tried-and-tested 4 stage acquisition budget helps brand managers plan and forecast their ROI. Briefly, each stage consists of the following:

1. Enter revenue targets and calculate traffic and conversion targets
2. Apportion your marketing channels’ contributions to targets
3. Allocate financial (and staff) resources to support the above activities
4. Map customer acquisition and tweak your plan and budget if needs be

Brand strategy planning framework

Finally, it goes without saying that without a dedicated brand strategy planning framework, it will be very difficult to effectively manage your brand’s acquisition strategy. That’s where the RACE Framework comes in.

Our popular RACE marketing funnel guides marketers through the buyer stages of exploration, decision making, purchase, and advocacy. Smart Insights members are using our marketing solutions to drive boost their conversions and accelerate their ROI.