The Ideal Engagement: Marketing Your Entire Brand

By Jennifer Reed

When developing your marketing strategy, the best place to start is always the beginning.

While it is important to meet every brand where they are, we believe all can benefit from what we call the “ideal engagement”—a comprehensive and integrated approach that considers the brand as a whole and tailors the marketing strategy accordingly from start to finish.

Branding from Scratch

When you focus on specific marketing activities or tactics, it can be easy to get brand tunnel vision. Taking a broader approach allows you to ensure your strategies are not only producing a return on investment, but also align with your brand’s overall messaging and goals.

Think about this: If you started running ads with the content on your website today, would they be relevant to your target audience? Would they accurately reflect who you are as a brand and align with your values?

The ideal engagement shows the value of each step in the process and ensures all the moving parts of your brand are working together to drive you toward your goals.

Of course, this is not the only approach, and many brands have run successful campaigns without going back to the drawing board. However, these companies are usually very well versed in their brand identity, and have likely already undergone a review or two.

If you don’t have your brand, mission, values, or culture nailed down, they’ve changed over time, or they simply don’t reflect who you are today, the ideal engagement is the right place to start.

Step 1: Discovery

Many brands make the mistake of starting from a deficit, meaning they jump straight into tactics without taking stock of what’s already working for them—and what’s not.

The discovery phase is a deep dive into every aspect of your brand, including your mission, products and services, differentiators, audiences, and messaging. During the review, we look at everything from your logo to your metrics to determine strengths and growth areas, and provide a competitive landscape review to help you not only understand the competition, but more importantly, how your brand stands apart.

This step will provide the baseline information you need to determine your brand’s ideal positioning, narrow down target audiences, optimize your content, and track the right results.

Step 2: Strategy

You can’t reach your goals if you aren’t sure what they are. Once the brand review is complete, it’s time to summarize the findings and create a detailed plan that aligns your marketing goals with the tactics you’ll use to achieve them.

We start by identifying key takeaways from the discovery phase and creating a list of clear, attainable, and measurable goals that tie directly to the organization’s overall objectives. Then, we outline the best way to measure each tactic and map it back to those goals to reveal an accurate ROI.

From traditional print media to social ad funnels to live events, there is no shortage of marketing tactics out there. While a varied approach can work, it’s best to narrow down the options and focus on the efforts most likely to drive your return through the roof. Knowing which metrics to look at before you begin will also help you evaluate your campaign and optimize it for even greater success.

Step 3: Execution

You’ve got a great plan in place. Now it’s time to put it into action. During the initial execution phase, we will implement the strategy using the tactics outlined in Step 2 and report on their performance.

It may be tempting to switch gears if you’re not seeing the desired outcome right away, but be patient. We recommend sticking with your initial strategy and execution for at least 3–6 months to provide enough time to measure and accurately evaluate results.

That said, it is important to keep a finger on the pulse and note any improvements that may optimize performance as the execution phase goes on.

Step 4: Target, test, and tweak

The key to successful marketing is remembering that it is a fluid process. Once the initial results are in, it’s not enough to measure, evaluate, and report on performance—you need to listen to what the metrics and market are telling you, modify the approach, and adjust future efforts to the most successful areas. After that, it’s rinse and repeat.

Interested in learning more about the ideal engagement? It starts with a phone call.