An integrated marketing strategy is critical for establishing the identity of any brand and how customers perceive it. What your brand stands for in terms of values and offering is the entry point for building a loyal customer base that will keep coming back for more.
It is paramount to understand your brand’s position within its competitive landscape, your brand’s value proposition and attributes, and of course, your target audiences. These core inputs will help construct the mental model necessary for a Go-To-Market strategy.
BRAND HEALTH
Brand health studies and surveys are a good place to start deep diving into your brand scores. Analysing these data points and benchmarking your brand among both exposed and non-exposed groups to your competition will draw the bigger picture for you.
TOMA (Top of Mind Awareness), unaided awareness, consideration, perceptions scores, along with other metrics, will give you a good idea as to where your brand is over/under indexing, which should guide the overall brand objectives and communication thinking.
The findings from these studies will reveal your brand’s awareness levels, what customers think about your brand and what they know about its offering. The results should guide your communication framework on what to say and how to say it. It is also very important to run benchmarking competitive SOE/SOV in category (Share of Expenditures/Share of Voice) to study your competition.
What are they saying? Which media channels are they using? How are they spending their dollars? What’s their reach and share of voice across their media channels? This will further confirm/disconfirm your beliefs to further guide your playbooks.
COMMUNICATION AND MESSAGING CONSTRUCTS
Building communication constructs, adaptable creative templates and leveraging consistent set of messages with consistent tone-of-voice is crucial for any successful branding campaign. The recipe is straightforward;
Build simple core messages capable of longevity. This should be driven by your brand health insights and should be developed for a multimedia channel approach. If there is one takeaway you want to leave your customer with, what is it? A single-minded message always wins. Think of your favourite brands, and what they’re telling you.
Build attention-grabbing storyboards fit-for format for a very short attention span. For videos, deliver your core message and branding in the first 3 seconds. Before going to production, make sure to run your storyboards and concepts by focus groups, as well as your PR team and legal advisors.
Customers nowadays are very woke and accidentally committing brand suicide is a real danger. Build the correct messaging hierarchy and flow for legibility, and stay consistent with you branding for ease of brand recognition and association. Apply brand guidelines, ensuring fixed logo placement, and exclusive use of brand fonts and colours.
INTEGRATED MEDIA STRATEGY
The core tenets for any integrated media strategy include:
Identifying the right audience pool and its size will determine whether your media targeting approach should be broad or segmented.
Understand your customer nuances, go deep and granular to drive greater impact and win attention. Build your integrated reach curve and frequency with a multimedia reach optimiser. It is important to understand your reach decay (diminishing points) and effective frequency across platforms (traditional and digital) versus your audience size and segments.
This will also guide your sub-channel selection and reach penetration by platform. Prioritise your media channels selection backwards from your main reach builders, and supplement with channels that bring incremental reach beyond the traditional selection. Build a journey/funnel that aligns with your customer behaviour.
Think about how you will serve your brand message through-out a day of a customer. Think multiplicity and/or duplicity of messaging. Choose your ad formats backwards from your brand funnel and objectives. Impact media will help you drive big reach and quick awareness for your brand (TV integration, OOH hoardings, digital mastheads/max reach formats, broadcast sponsorships).
Reach and frequency formats will help you drive awareness, salience and consideration through optimal ad serving frequencies. This is just a playbook that covers only the fundamentals of building a brand strategy and is not a one-size-fits all. Each brand is unique with its lifecycle and customers.
Do your due diligence. Measuring, tracking performance and optimising are key elements in developing a successful long-term plot. Keep tweaking your strategy based on your learnings. At the end, your plan needs to be dynamic and adaptable.
