Building Branded Ecosystems to Perform
Anyone who has built a brand knows it can be an overwhelming endeavor. Brand isn’t just the message your business puts out into the world, it’s the culmination of your consumers’ experiences across all of your touchpoints, and ultimately in a cultural marketing-driven world, the consumer’s voice itself becomes a central part of your brand. To further complicate matters, brands are expected to operate across an ever-expanding array of channels and platforms to capture attention for fear of missing out on opportunity. So how do you manage your ecosystem to position your brand for growth in the long-term while driving performance goals?
Each touchpoint is an experience
The most important thing to understand about modern consumption is that the traditional view of the linear consumer journey is null and void. The diversification and democratization of media consumption along with social platform-native content creation has created an environment where shopping and entertainment fuse (marketers somehow haven’t been able to come up with a more compelling term than retail-tainment). The journey is getting much longer because consumers want to explore (pre-tail) and there is a desire across demographics for more engaging, in-depth branded content regardless of where they are in the funnel. This results in a journey marked by a constant state of consideration, near infinite entry points, and fickle conversion.
Managing this requires a concerted effort to create and integrate cultural connections to your consumer, and content generation that prioritizes partnerships, brand-aligned content creators, and product RTBs. Doing this ensures consumers have a direct and relevant connection to the brand while also creating avenues to discover and purchase product.
Your customer is your biggest asset
It’s no secret that word-of-mouth is the strongest asset any brand can have. It’s advocacy that creates loyalty, not coupons or promotions. As content creation and consumer passion points have become more targeted and niche, it’s easier than ever to find organic content around any category and/or brand. This presents brands with a unique opportunity to leverage that content as an arm of their content ecosystem. By aligning branded comms (paid/owned media, product RTBs, philanthropy, PR) to cultural connectors driving content, you build bonds with key consumer groups and give them more reasons to buy, advocate, and thereby return for more.
Channel Integration is key to mastering the modern landscape
One of the biggest mistakes I see in modern marketing orgs is the neat and tidy separation of channel workstreams, each with their own KPIs, laddering up to the CMO. While this seems like an intuitive org structure, it’s actually counterproductive in terms of how to efficiently extract all the value from your marketing spend. The key issue is that each channel represents a thread in the web of your brand that consumers need to fluidly move across, and each one affects the other. By integrating them under a singular strategic imperative, you can more effectively manage the role of each channel for different comms goals by campaign, allowing for more cohesive experiences across your entire ecosystem at a brand level and a deeper level of nuance with lower-funnel efforts.
Additionally, integrated marketing connects brand and performance KPIs giving you a more holistic understanding of performance across the funnel, allowing you to adjust budgets dynamically. For instance, it is typical for organic engagement to rise when putting a brand campaign into market. This earned awareness can negate the need for short-term search investment. Another benefit to connected brand and performance measurement is being able to measure the effectiveness of tactics from both perspectives (i.e. what is the latency between campaigning, perception change, and sales lift).
Brand IS performance, we’re just living in a contradictory world where the two are disconnected by antiquated KPIs and siloed thinking. The sooner brands connect them and understand how to leverage the consumer voice on their own terms, the more powerful and streamlined their efforts will become.
