Is your marketing strategy focused on brand marketing? It definitely should be. It is one of the best marketing techniques in my mind, hands down. The key to its success is the way to get people to talk about you and start the buzz. These are called marketing triggers and brand marketing examples will be the focus of this article. The best ones we can all learn from.
We don’t have an information shortage, we have an attention shortage.
– Seth Godin
The first thing you need to know about brand marketing is this: generating consumers to talk about your business isn’t as random as you think. There’s a science to creating brand marketing buzz, and it’s something you can learn to do.
Related: 12 Lessons from Ben and Jerry’s Marketing Strategies
Remember, the main goal of your business is not just to create customers. It is to create customers who then will also create customers (that is, customer advocates). This is the perfect marketing solution for 99 % of all businesses and is why we believe brand marketing is one of your most important marketing campaign tools.
By being a little more clever and unpredictable, you challenge consumers who appreciate a little fun in their products and services.
Let’s examine some excellent ways others have created brand marketing interest. Many of these can be easily copied by your company.
The U.S. Department of the Interior has been using social media to show the world what they do. But instead of sharing content about policies and press releases, they share breathtaking landscape photos and videos of cute animals in the national parks they manage.
The department’s Senior Digital Strategist, Rebecca Matulka, says people often use their social posts to plan vacations or reminisce about past family trips to the parks. Their videos of bears alone get hundreds of retweets on Twitter.
If a governmental department can create content with cute animals and beautiful landscapes, you can connect to something people like to share, too.
Weird experiences
At Catbird Creamery in Maine, when you order a conventional flavor, they’ll insist that you sample something a little more adventurous. And even if you’re going to order vanilla anyway, they want you to at least try the strawberry balsamic or green tea ginger. Catbird knows that anyone can make good vanilla, but what makes them stand out is helping their customers see all of the other fantastic flavors the brand also make.
They’re giving their customers an experience to talk about. Even if the customer doesn’t order the hot pepper flavor they just sampled, they will likely tell others they tried it.
Delight customers
Headsets.com sells headsets and phone accessories, but they are most likely remembered for adding Tootsie Rolls to every order they ship. It’s a great word of mouth tactic and they like feedback. They use it to do something even more special. When customers thank their operator for the Tootsie Rolls received in order and mentioned their favorite flavor, you can guess that information is noted for the next time.
Little actions to surprise and delight your customers can easily be created all the time. Follow Headsets.com example and treat feedback like a well-oiled machine, carefully gathering the information and doing something about it every time.
Mobile Apps and Charmin
Think you can’t come up with a fun, creative, and practical way to sell toilet paper? Charmin did. Although it’s not exactly social media, their app does make that-thing-that-shall-not-be-named a little easier, with mapped out directions to all the restrooms in a given area. Not surprisingly, you can rate the public restrooms through the app as to whether they’re “Sit” (like) or “Squat” (dislike).
You don’t have to spend thousands of dollars on an iPhone programmer to create an app. Online template-based services like Seattle Clouds make it easy for anyone to point and click their way to a custom app using a variety of layouts and setups. The resulting app can be used on Amazon Kindle, Apple iPhone, and iPad, and Android devices, so you’ve covered no matter which device your target audience uses.
Mystery
Are you mysterious? Do you think you can be? We looked at how people delight in the puzzle-solving aspect of pattern recognition. Now, let’s go a bit deeper and explore what drives this pattern-seeking behavior: curiosity.
Great storytellers know how to turn an ordinary event—say, a trip to the grocer—into a suspenseful one by withholding information. In new relationships, flirtation often involves some element of playful teasing, whether through conversation or more sensual revelations.
And newsrooms have made a science out of crafting irresistible headlines: “Your PC might be infected!” or “Are you prepared for the tax law changes?”
We are captivated by unanswered questions. So try and put this mystery to good use
Target’s view
Target does a great job creating a Life and Entertainment-style online magazine with great tips on recipes, fashion, and tips on managing major life events like back-to-school and the holidays. They bring their bold brand and fashion on a budget approach to life with the stories they tell. With tips like 9 Ramen Hacks For Your College Dorm, how could they go wrong?
Be like Target and focus on serving your audience and bringing your brand to life in an authentic and engaging way.
Make people feel special
Comodo restaurant in New York encourages customers to snap pictures of their meals and contribute them to an “Instagram Menu” by adding #ComodoMenu to their posts. It’s a great way to collect all of their recommendations and photos in one place, but more importantly, it makes those contributors feel like a part of the restaurant.
Customers are often going to take Instagram photos of their fancy dinners. Why not make the most of that brand marketing by making those customers feel special? Meathead Movers is a Los Angeles moving company, and in addition to their standard moving business, they also help people in domestic abuse situations move out safely, quickly, and for no charge. Every time they open up a new location, they contact the nearest women’s shelter to tell them about the service they offer.
In fact, it’s a point of pride for their employees and has become a part of their mission statement. Now, they’ve also encouraged other businesses in their communities to help victims of domestic violence start over with services like rental locating, oil changes, security systems, haircuts, and counseling.
Charitable giving goes much further when you also create awareness for the cause. Instead of just writing a check, Meathead Movers makes their cause much more visible and community-oriented.
Make people smile
Fleur, a florist shop in Chicago, puts a bucket full of bright balloons by the door of their shop both inside and out, with a handwritten sign that says: “Take a balloon.” That’s all. No logos, no catch. It is just a small action to make people smile. Inside the store, it makes a pretty display, and outside the store, people are likely to ask where you got the balloon.
That’s a simple, fun way to get a conversation started without a marketing message, isn’t it? A bucket full of balloons is a bucket full of word of mouth memories waiting to happen. It doesn’t have to be branded or a part of a larger campaign — in fact, the simpler you make it, the better.
Personalization
Have you ever tried to create conversation starters? Consider this technique by Krochel Kids Intl. Every product they make has a tag that is signed by the person who made it. They are not the standard garment tag. They are large and prominently displayed on the outside of the clothing. It makes each product one of a kind that makes the clothing stand out.
With this kind of visual message, your customers don’t have to bring up the subject because their friends usually ask about it.
Demonstrate synergy
Synergy is a quality that often gets overlooked, isn’t it? But it can be a very valuable tool in many ways. You don’t have to be a genius to know that student housing is frequently in demand. Likewise, you’d guess that seniors in nursing homes like to have companionship.
So to solve both problems, one nursing home in the Netherlands provides a place to stay for college students, rent-free, in exchange for visiting with the elderly for 30 hours per month.
Not much in common, you say? At least they have similar needs. Perhaps your customers who seem very different may have more in common than you think.
Create surprise
Surely you have seen the tear-jerker commercials for abused or abandoned puppies or kittens. Not something you’ll often share with friends, is it? North Carolina’s Wake County SPCA tried a very different approach to this problem. They made a lip-synching music video to ABBA’s song “Take a Chance on Me”, with the entire shelter staff and most of the adoptable animals.
A success? It was watched on YouTube over 3.4 million times the last time we looked. Just because others do the standard tear-jerking videos doesn’t mean they are popular. Surprise your audience with original things that are fun and approachable like this SPCA did. It may even surprise you.
Unique value propositions
The typical thrift store or vintage shop isn’t all that glamorous. But they do have one thing on their side when it comes to fashion: lots of rare and one-of-a-kind clothes. Goodwill by revamping some of their stores to look like upscale boutiques instead of the place you drop off your oldest clothes.
Their new Rare by Goodwill stores are smaller, and they collect some of the more trendy vintage or antique stuff their regular stores have to offer.
Perhaps your business has more in common with your upscale competitors than you think, yes? What can you learn from them about attracting new customers?
Tell awesome stories
When several guys had to give up the 1957 Land Rover they bought together in college, they were disappointed. So when Land Rover saw the boys’ ad for the sale, they bought the car and restored it down to the smallest of details.
But before surprising the guys with the return as a gift, they created a video commercial. Each place in the commercial reflected a memory of a car adventure from the group.
Your customers will often surprise you with many more great memories than you can build yourself. Look for them and put them to good use.
The bottom line
The examples of brand marketing are all around us. All we have to do is be open-minded in how we look and how we apply the best lessons learned.
Now it’s your turn. What are the brand marketing ideas you have seen lately?
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help with word of mouth marketing campaigns?
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
More reading on marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Guinness Marketing Campaign Shows Their Creativity
20 Recipes to Make Every Marketing Campaign a Success
Remarkable Examples of Content Marketing
Secrets to Making You E-mail Marketing Work Effectively
Does your business put a priority on its business intelligence process? Does it monitor your competitive analysis, marketplace trends and its understanding of market change? And most importantly, does it put a priority on making changes as a result of insights from this analysis? This will be a four-part series. This third part will discuss how a business should conduct a competitive intelligence. Whoever tries the most stuff usually wins.
The Business Intelligence Process Part 4 SWOT Analysis
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What works best for competitive analysis in your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? It would be greatly appreciated by us and our readers.
The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy and focus only on the things that work.
Do you want to freshen up your business success abilities? Have you thought about looking at your competitors for inspiration as well as good ideas? Checking out what other companies are doing can often help you brainstorm your own business tactics.
In this article , you’ll discover how to analyze your competitors’ to inspire new ideas and improve your competitiveness.
Researching your competitors not only provides an overview of your industry, but it also gives insight into the current habits of the audiences you’re targeting.
By answering a few key questions, you’ll see what kinds of ideas are most effective for the customers you want to reach.
No business attribute is more important today as that of adaptability, as many, many businesses are on the brink of irrelevance unless they change as fast as change itself. Your strategies do run out of steam, get old and become ineffective … you need to keep refreshing them based on your anticipation of the next change.
A competitive analysis is critical in helping with your anticipation of market and customer change. Read on to understand why.
A vigorous competition watch kills two birds with a single stone – helps with better understanding of rival tactics and opens a window through which you can see your own problem areas. Further, I’m sure you’d agree that knowing where you stand is highly important.
Still looking for reasons to use competitive analysis in improving business success? Read through the following reasons and find out for yourself.
Identify opportunities to serve newly acquired and prospective customers.
Determine the size of the market – identify service gaps and areas for self-improvement where competition is exploiting at the moment.
Find the tested ways to cater target market.
Update and add unique value propositions.
Conclude if your marketing strategies are effective.
Obtain an understanding of what your competitors have done that has been successful without re-inventing the wheel.
Isolate trends that make a positive difference.
Competitive intelligence … who are your competitors?
Most companies believe they know who their competitors are. But when we do a little research on identifying them, they are usually surprised by the results. Here are the questions and facts you need to know and be asking yourselves:
Whether you work internally or were hired as an outside resource to help with your client’s SEO campaign, you probably have some idea of who the competition is in your space. Some companies may have good offline marketing but poor online marketing.
If you’re looking to be the best, it’s a good idea to do your own research and see who you’re up against.
In my experience, it’s always good to find and verify 5-10 competitorsin your space from a variety of sources. You can use tools for this or take the manual approach.
Make sure to capture the basic information for each competitor including their company name, location, and website. These tools will be useful at a later time. Record these in the “competitor research” tab of a spreadsheet.
Standard Google searches for competitors
This is pointing out the obvious, but if you have a set of keywords you want to rank for, you can look for trends and see who is already ranking where you want to be. Don’t limit this to just one or two keywords, instead get a broader list of the competitors out there.
To do this, simply come up with a list of several keywords you want to rank for and search for them in your geographic area. Make sure your Geographic preference is set correctly so you get accurate data.
Collect a list of keywords
Search Google to see which companies are ranking in the local pack
Record a list of the companies’ names and website URLs in the spreadsheet under the competitor research tab.
Outside of the basics, I always find it’s good to see who else is out there. Since organic and local rankings are more closely tied together than ever, it’s a good idea to use 3rd party tools to get some insight as to what else your website could be considered related to.
This can help provide hidden opportunities outside of the normal competition you likely look at most frequently.
What should you find about your competitor and where?
A local store is not your competitor online if they don’t offer their service via the internet. Your competitors based online could be entirely different. Examine new and emerging players in the market.
Evaluate the premise of your rivals – if you share similarities, look for areas where a certain edge can be established and nurtured.
Competitive intelligence – How to do it effectively
Taking a sneak peek at competitors requires a little undercover work from your office and occasionally doing walk around surveillance.
Look for rivals’ social media engagement – how frequently they respond to their clients, are their social media reps doing a decent job or not and subtle indicators of customer acquisition via self-promotion.
What to review: The Business Intelligence Process Part 4 SWOT Analysis
Unique value propositions
Learn how your rivals are playing the game, so you can beat them to the punch. The unique value proposition sheds light on the fraction of clients that your rival is fixated on.
On-line strategy
How many followers do they have? Are their posts mostly internal, external or a mix of both?
How on-brand are their photos? Do they show the product or service in each shot, or do they follow a more lifestyle-oriented content strategy?
What hashtags do they use?
Competition store walk through
Occasionally put your customer hat on and do a simple walk through of your key competitors’ store. From a customer’s point of view, what are the strengths and weaknesses? Which ones could you employ to make your business better?
Tap local business leaders for local intelligence / advice
Never hesitate to reach out and ask local business leaders their opinions on trends they are seeing and how they see your business in relation to its competitors.
Compare your website value versus your competition
Our research has shown customers will visit at least three websites before making a purchase. The larger the purchase, the more sites they’ll visit. Therefore, you need to look at your website in the context of your competition.
Seek to understand the customer journey as they move from one website to the next. Pay attention to the promotion incentives your competitors offer and how they compare to yours.
If the competition’s website is easier to use, offers more enticing incentives, and contains more compelling messaging, you will have a hard time generating online leads.
Be on the lookout for trends and shifts.
Trends and shifts
Watch for marketplace trends and shifts. Look at the fringe of the environment, for that is where trends first appear.
Anticipation
Work at developing anticipation of changes in your market.
Study how trends start to interact with each other as well as customers and businesses.
Useful tools
Rival IQ
Rival IQ is perfect for getting full intelligence coverage on what your market is about. You can setup landscapes (up to 30 sites in the pro version) in your category or content publishing niche, find the hottest and most engaged (hello conversion possibility) topics and channels.
You can spot gaps where your competition is not present and mine the top 100 SEO keywords for search volume, traffic share and search rank positions.
You can go deeper and map up the entire editorial flow for each channel and get topic ideas. You can also see what changes RivalIQ does to titles, Meta descriptions and social bios and even track web site changes (design and mostly home page).
Site Alerts
Site Alerts is another great tool for looking under the hood to see what your competitors are using technology-wise (which ecommerce platform, mail provider, plugins, tech enhancements). It’s great for seeing what social referrals work best for them and what percentage of traffic they represent.
Additionally, you can see what other traffic sources they get (and the share for each) and a list of referral sites, related sites, and organic keywords.
Google Alerts are great little inventions because they allow you to track virtually anything and have it delivered either to your email or RSS. What kinds of stuff should you be tracking? The name of our competitor’s company, their employee names, their CEO, product names, locations, mentions of new features, etc.
What kinds of media are you looking for? Their blogs, social profiles, photos, videos, Flickr accounts, Facebook pages, etc. ? Why? The more you know, the better off you are to make smart decisions.
Follow your competitors on Twitter. Follow their employees. Follow the people that engage most often with your competitors. Follow the people your competitors are following. Private lists are a goldmine for researching.
The bottom line
Continually rework all of your techniques, particularly your discrimination and value proposition. We recommend short revisits on these topics every 3-4 months.
The key to success here is realizing that this is a marathon and not a sprint. If you examine the competition in the top areas mentioned above and create a plan to overcome, you will win long term.
Monitoring your competition is a small, but important component of a successful digital marketing plan. No business exists in a vacuum, so you must be aware of your environment.
Will you be the one to stand out? Please join the competition below.
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy continually improving your continuous learning?
Do you have a lesson about making your learning better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on a business process from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
