We had another brilliant BBB this week with some amazing attendees. The below are a few tips from the really great conversations that were discussed over smoked salmon, scrambled eggs and OJ.
How to get stakeholders to buy-in to brand
When they can’t track impact or results of brand, stakeholders typically find it harder to justify parting with budget. And this is often the biggest challenge brand marketers face in the debate of performance vs brand.
A really great recommendation on how to win buy-in from one of our marketers was to interrogate the ‘unknown’ sources in Google Analytics. If your stakeholders agree that it’s not unreasonable to assume leads driven from this source are from brand activity, you can start to build up a picture of the quantity and quality of leads/conversions created from these campaigns vs your performance ads.
She admitted that although this trial is a couple of months old, however, it should help to justify spend for future brand-focused campaigns.
Be smart with how you measure sentiment
If surveys are part of how you’re collecting that data, one of the tips shared was to really interrogate the questions you were asking people. Often surveys are unreliable because what people say isn’t necessarily how they feel.
For example - most surveys people are asked “how do you feel about our product?” whereas a better way to get the truth out could be asking “how would you feel if our product didn’t exist?” This measures sentiment as a justification for the effectiveness of brand building on business growth.
Simple things like this can trigger much richer insights that help brand marketers justify campaigns or projects that would otherwise be ignored.
Know the platforms that you’re on
An interesting insight was that many marketers at our roundtable supported moving away from having accounts on every social media platforms. There is plenty of pressure put on brand and social media managers to be “everywhere”, but if your most engaged audiences aren’t on Facebook, it’s a drag on resource to focus energies on it.
In that same vein, if you’re going to focus on the platforms where your audiences are on, make sure you know how to use them best to your advantage. One brand told of how they had great community success on their Instagram channel by hiring an ex-influencer to become their social media manager, growing their community from 2K to 10K in a quarter.
Another brand marketer pointed out that while choosing the right channel is the first step, the second is to pay attention to what is being created on each platform. They explained that for them, Youtube shouldn’t just be a space for brands to create their own content, but to co-create with relevant Youtubers with relevant audiences.
Bigger brands shouldn’t lose touch with hyper-local stories
One topic we discussed was the challenge of global brands creating effective localised campaigns. Often there’s tension between global teams (who have the broader vision for where the brand needs to be) and the local teams (who have an ear to the ground and ultimately know more about what their local markets tastes are). So how can you fix this and ultimately create more effective work?
There’s no easy fix here but the key is global teams can’t dictate the nuances of particular pieces of content, hence the importance of local sign-off. We recently lived the benefits of this sign-off for localised content within our global campaign with Grant’s Whisky and by pulling together as a team, we created an inclusive, socially diverse campaign that went against the status quo of advertising in the whiskey world.
As one of our attendees put it, why should you trust middle-aged white guys to dictate the content narrative for a place they’ve never been to?
Learnt something new? Want to share your own thoughts on building brands that matter? Then why don’t you book a seat to our next Brand, Bitch & Brekkie roundtable, at Riding House Cafe, Fitzrovia.
Email sunnii@mattr.media or give her a ring on 07772343952 for any q’s!
