Creating and Maintaining Brand Consistency

Speaker 1: 0:00

But I think, more so as marketers. It feels easy to us and sometimes we take that for granted and we don't always realize that what a brand that feel, that look and how we wanna be perceived out there in the industry. That doesn't come as easily to others. So I think it's not because people are intentionally going rogue. It's just that no one has educated them or coached them. You are listening to.

Speaker 2: 0:25

The Marketer a podcast for modern day marketing professionals.

Speaker 3: 0:32

Welcome everybody to the Marketer. I'm really excited to have you on the show today. Today, we are going to be discussing creating brand consistency across all channels. You guys are all experts. I'm excited about the conversation. It's going to be great. I want to start it off by asking, just in your experience, what's a common mistake that brands make in their messaging that disrupts consistency across channel?

Speaker 1: 1:02

So, allison, would you mind starting us off with that Sure happy to Thank you for having me, and I think one of the challenges with brand and brand consistency is first, even though it sounds simplistic is actually identifying the brand and communicating that throughout the organization. So often I find that different business units or different departments depending on the size of your organization really do not have an understanding of what that is and what that should look like. And I think that starts with onboarding right as the first piece of it, and then the other big disconnect is the journey and understanding. We talk a lot about customer journey and I think that goes for external customers as well as internal customers, and sometimes that ladder is often forgotten.

Speaker 3: 1:46

You make a great point about internal customers. I you know, when we work with companies it's always external. We're never working with internal. So hearing your guys' perspective on the internal would be really fascinating. Can you walk us through the difference between the two and kind of what you have to do within that?

Speaker 1: 2:06

Sure, and everyone else can jump in here. You know, as marketers. I think that's one of the challenges is keeping track of both sides of that, and I very simply put external customers, those are the folks that are buying our products, our solutions, our services. And then internally, those are the stakeholders that we're working with every day, whether it's other marketers, it's our executive team, product team, etc. That's how I define if you're within the walls although we're not today inside any four walls but if you're within the organization, it's an internal customer.

Speaker 3: 2:39

So and yes, please, everybody, jump in if you'd like on this particular question, and I'd love to hear from all of you. But when you're dealing with brand consistency within your internal customers, Alison from the different divisions, are they creating their own messaging and stuff that they're putting out Sometimes?

Speaker 1: 3:02

yes, and I'm sure that there are horror stories that all of my esteemed colleagues here can share. But they're creating kind of running with it and they go rogue from time to time. But I think more so as marketers, it feels easy to us and sometimes we take that for granted and we don't always realize that what a brand, that feel, that look and how we want to be perceived, you know out there in the industry that doesn't come as easily to others. So I think it's it's not because people are intentionally going rogue, it's just that no one has educated them or coached them. So I'd love to hear from others. Yeah, it's. Do you have the same experience?

Speaker 4: 3:42

Yeah, I feel that, especially you know, when it comes to tech marketing, you have a lot of different departments that need to kind of be responsible for the messaging right. So you're going to have your solutions engineers, you're going to have the sales teams, you're going to have marketers. A lot of times there's a common mistake that the whole brunt of positioning the brand and getting the messaging out there is solely based on marketers and we're not conducting those interviews, let's say, from the sales team. We're actually talking to customers or pre-sales, who are actually involved in that process or even customer experience.

Speaker 4: 4:20

So I think like one of the reasons for inconsistencies to arise also is that if we're giving a brand directly only to marketers and not involving the rest of the company, we're not going to, you're not going to have a strong brand. You're just going to have a brand that a marketer thinks is valuable to the customer, right, and then like the same thing with going rogue too, like I've seen that so many times in my career, like it's, like you know, here's the guidelines, but can I make this post and be absolutely crass in this post? And like you know it's, it's just crazy nowadays, right, and it's like you look at it and then who has to do the damage control? It's always marketing or it's always communication. So totally get it, but, like I think generally in this day and age, like branding and positioning, back in the day was solely like a marketing focused thing. But as we've become like a more digitally and like more involved economy, I feel, and you know, like startups especially, it's very important to involve, like every department, to get their pitch in.

Speaker 5: 5:30

Yeah, I think you're 100% right. I think that, yeah, I think that goes toward like community building internally as well. I think you can really build your own brand advocates internally if you involve them in the process of building that brand from you know the ground up, and in the process of building that brand from you know the ground up, and having everyone involved in building that. I think that's huge.

Speaker 3: 5:50

Yeah, for sure, neil. Do you guys have any kind of brand guidelines? If you would, that deals with your internal communications with teams, what they can do, what they can't can not.

Speaker 2: 6:01

Currently, where I'm at today I'm actually building our brand guidelines as we speak of color fonts, things like that, how to use the logos. But you know I am giving them the tools or sales of. You know, feel free to post on yourself on your behalf, but know that if you have to think about it, obviously it probably is not going to be the right message or the right. If it's a social post, if you have to think about it, delete it, then I wouldn't post it. But in my previous experiences we kind of gave, especially from my position.

Speaker 2: 6:37

I was working more with the America's sales team where I provided them with kind of guidelines or even a month's worth of posts of saying these are approved by marketing and go ahead and use this messaging and use these graphics to send out. But yeah, kind of you know to allude to the rogue topic there that you know sometimes it works for the sales benefit. But yeah, if something does go awry, obviously we're the ones that are going to have to fight that fire wherever it's at, whether it's an email or, you know, spam or anything like that where we can be hellacious to the entire organization. So yeah, in the past I've provided some guidelines of kind of here are the do's and don'ts and saying you can't, but I would be kind of cautious of what you're doing, or at least run it by the marketing team, just to make sure that hey, yeah, go ahead and do this, but you can't continue to like, if you're going to do it every month, then that may need a few other eyes.

Speaker 3: 7:37

I know that you know certain industries have more controls than others. You know the finance industry. They're very, very limited and controlled, if you would, on what they can do outside of the company-defined not only guidelines but posts even and stuff that they can actually even put out there. So I don't think you guys in your industries are that constricted. But how constricted do you feel companies should be with their teams and Allison? Is it to the point that you say, okay, you can only say these specific things and you can't say these other things or just simply run it by? How should companies approach this?

Speaker 1: 8:22

I think we do ourselves a disservice if we make it that constricted, because one of the things about brand and I know in the B2B world versus the B2C world, we're a lot more formal and buttoned up but brand does come with emotion and emotion has to be a piece of that brand and you want to evoke an emotional response. I mean even I've been in healthcare or cybersecurity or tech my entire career. Obviously, within the cyberspace, it's the feeling safe and feeling is very an intentional word there. It's you want to feel something. So if we get too tight on our restrictions of, you know, employees, we're going to lose that and it's going to come across as very robotic.

Speaker 1: 9:10

So I think you know Neil was talking about the guidelines and I think that's very common for marketers we create brand guidelines, right, which is what can you, can't you use from a very tactical perspective. But Christine was mentioning, you know, the advocates and I love that because you need internal advocates. I've used the term brand ambassadors in the past and it's more getting into the why. Why are we doing this? Why do we want our brand to be X, y, z and then, you know, go from there with the more tactical execution.

Speaker 2: 9:45

Yeah, that's fantastic. I was going to say on top of that, you know, I was thinking last night about like some of maybe some talking points and you know the why. You know it always goes back to Simon Sinek and how he kind of introduces the golden rule. And that was one thing that kind of connected from my past of marketing and sales, of having those brand ambassadors. They have all, like, if it's social, they have all their followers, they know how to talk the lingo and all that we can provide them with, like you were mentioning, or how I mentioned, with the brand guidelines of here are kind of the things you need to follow in terms of graphics and logos and things like that. But feel free to kind of open that up, because at that point if it's us kind of constricting that, then they're just selling the product, they're not selling how it's going to help that individual and that kind of just defeats the whole purpose of a sales and marketing collaboration.

Speaker 3: 10:37

Yeah, I also think it needs to be. I mean, you can't be so restricted that your team as a whole doesn't want to engage, you know, because they feel like I mean, you want people to be able to be spontaneous on things, to be able to take the copy or the content that you're posting to LinkedIn or whatever channel it is and then share it their own and then add their perspective or thoughts to it around it. Right, and the more freedom I know that you can give people, the more they will enjoy doing that and engage. But you also don't want to create problems out there. So when problems do arise, like when you have something that's off-brand, off-target, or they say something that makes the company look bad, or they say something that makes the company look bad, what do you guys feel you should do at that point and how do you address it, not only with the person that was responsible for it, but then how do you address it on the platform or wherever it was? Divya, you want to start with that, yeah.

Speaker 4: 11:40

So actually I was going to bring this up previously too I've started noticing there's a lot of patterns, especially amongst journalists, where they kind of make a blanket statement that opinions are my own and are not reflective of the company Right. So I think that has become more and more evident in today's day and age, especially when, like you know, there's literally a war going on and people want to speak up on that Right. When, like you know, there's literally a war going on and people want to speak up on that right, it might not necessarily reflect what the company is doing as a whole, but it might be their personal opinion. So I think, like, blanketing those statements is like the first step. If you know that you want to be involved and you want to have, like, all right, I work at X, y and Z and you want that on your LinkedIn post to show up, then you want to make sure that you blanket your statements in some capacity. And then you know, I think, when, when things go rogue, my, my biggest pet peeve honestly, is like content wise, I'm like go ahead, you know, go create, be creative with it. My biggest pet peeve is the design aspect of it.

Speaker 4: 12:44

Whenever somebody takes the brand and like doesn't.

Speaker 4: 12:48

Like if Nike came up with like an upside down logo and it was just like a rogue person he's like, oh, you know like, just don't do it today, I'd be so pissed.

Speaker 4: 12:55

But but I think, like you know when, when those those kinds of incidents happen, it is like a learning opportunity, right, us marketers were trained our entire life to understand, to uphold, to create these brands, and not necessarily it's not an important topic for other teams.

Speaker 4: 13:17

They don't really think of it as like this is what it means to be a brand. But when you kind of like relate it to them and you know like if you're, let's say, like you're using Apple laptops and then you kind of give them an example of listen, this is a brand that you trust and you value and you use. And you use this because of these reasons, because it's the marketing is done this way, the branding is done this way and you still love it. When you don't do that, from our company's perspective, this is what it looks like and this is what it kind of like you know it tarnishes the brand like it's easy it's really hard to build a brand but it's very easy to ruin it. So once you put it in that perspective. I think they start connecting the dots.

Speaker 1: 14:04

And sometimes you have to show that right. You have to show the opposite piece of it, Like look what can happen when the brand is tore apart. I mean, look at, you know, some of the large like data breaches or the other things that have hit the news, those over the last decade. It takes time to rebound. We remember TJX, we remember Toyota when they had their challenges. It does come back. The boomerang will return. But if you can avoid and not have to do the damage control, that's huge. And I agree with Divya, Sometimes you just have to show them the outcome of what could be so that you don't end up going down that path.

Speaker 3: 14:44

Totally. And you know, christine, I'd love to bring you into this conversation and I'm going to go here because it's current. But we have now all experienced cancel culture, right, and that you can say something that you don't mean to offend people. And now that you're now you got all these people that are now all of a sudden offended by you. Know what you've said and simply about your brand.

Speaker 3: 15:09

I mean, we've seen a lot of things like with Bud Light obviously that's kind of the main one that we have seen that has done this, that some, you know they they get away from their traditional messaging and their traditional target market and they've gone into a totally different direction and then all of a sudden it creates this huge backlash against your brand.

Speaker 3: 15:30

So even as marketers, we might think that we're doing something edgy or creative, or you know that we think will just get us attention in a positive way and it crashes and burns hard. We think will just get us attention in a positive way and it crashes and burns hard. So, christine, in those moments let's talk about how you address that as a brand. And it doesn't obviously it doesn't have to be associated to Bud Light or anything that big. In terms of crashing? It might be, it might be meant minor, but how long does something last be minor, but how long does something last? What do you do with the leadership team internally and how you start to communicate to turn that ship? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Speaker 5: 16:13

Yeah. So I think this is where your crisis communications plan comes into play, right? So all organizations should have some sort of plan. That it obviously depends on what your organization is, right. So, for example, I worked for a medical organization and every year, this medical organization would host an event where they would give out free services, which was wonderful, right, people needed these services, they helped a lot, they were free.

Speaker 5: 16:42

But, as you can imagine, a lot of things could go wrong with that, and so we had a really extensive crisis communication plan. So we outlined that, if you know, something went wrong on the floor, what would we say and what would the next steps be? If a patient left and something went wrong with them after they left, what would we do then and, primarily, what the next steps were to? We had a place on our website that we would direct media and anyone in the public to that would talk about. Here was the incident, here's what happened and here's our response.

Speaker 5: 17:20

So we always had this centralized place for a message so that we knew what we wanted to say was getting out in the way that we wanted to say it and in the place that we wanted to say it. And at that point you can kind of just push play, you automate like here's what happened, here's how we handled it, here's what happened, here's how we handled it. And so I just think making sure that your crisis communications plan is up to date is always a helpful thing, and just outline what could go wrong and how you would handle it when, when tensions aren't high, when you know you're not in the moment and you can truly think out what that's going to mean for your brand.

Speaker 3: 17:53

I think that's absolutely excellent. How many, Neil, how many companies you feel have a crisis management plan?

Speaker 2: 18:00

I hope at least all of them, but at least the ones that I've worked with. You know I've kind of been involved with that. You know, and you know thinking about that where, whether it's an unruly customer putting on a comment on all different channels, you know how do you combat that. You know, is it should you just leave it alone and just let it go away, or do you comment? What do you comment? So, yeah, I think you know what I've been involved with.

Speaker 2: 18:28

There's always been that crisis management and I was even thinking too, as we were all kind of going over this where and it's not a plug by any means, but having, you know, the HootSuite, the Sprout, socials, like all these listening tools for especially for social you know you're able to see and hear, are other people talking bad about my brand or my company, and then you can then go, I wouldn't say in crisis management mode, but you can at least alleviate that issue that that one person has or a couple people have, and you can almost bite it in the butt before it, before it expands. But to answer your, that's obviously a long-winded answer, but yeah, I would hope all companies do, but at least the ones that I've been involved with. We've always had some sort of. It wouldn't be a committee, but it would at least be a plan, because, as we all know, what can go wrong will go wrong. So, as long as you have something and that, when that will goes wrong, you at least have a plan in action.

Speaker 1: 19:25

I like that, being proactive with the reactive right, because that's what we're talking about here. When you have to be reactive, that you've thought about it, and I would shift it to the complete other end of that as well how do you be proactive in the truest sense, which is to get ahead of something, and that's the feedback loop, and having part of your brand is also having that feedback loop. Like you know, monty, the example that you gave right with Bud Light, I mean, did anybody have a focus group? Was there a conversation with prospective customers about how this would be perceived? And that's where, in marketing, having like customer advocacy is so critical and being able to have a pool of customers that you can go to for just this sort of thing, because I am willing to bet they didn't, because at least someone in that group would have said maybe not.

Speaker 1: 20:21

I find that you know offensive, or maybe if you did something another way, and that's why I think a lot of organizations they to Neil's point. We have a crisis plan for how to deal with something when it goes wrong. How many of us have the true feedback loop and listening mechanisms in place before we decide that we want to? You know, rock and roll with some great marketing idea that maybe wasn't so great.

Speaker 2: 20:48

And I guess, to add to that too as well, as we're all human, we see a negative thing, we want to react in a way that, OK, on our own end, is that going to affect our brand and like we can to to key a term that's kind of been new is we can be keyboard warriors and be very aggressive at it, but that's also going to hurt us as much as whatever just happened with an ad or whatever we're putting out there. So it's just also like how do we kind of combat that as well?

Speaker 3: 21:18

I think the biggest mistake that I see brands making and this is maybe, you know, smaller companies and stuff is that the worst response is no response at all. You know, I mean, if you're not, if you're not responding to people who, as customer service, you can't please everybody. No brand is going to please everybody all the time. So you're going to experience some backlash from people from time to time. You're going to experience some backlash from people from time to time. There's a good way to respond to that. The worst way is don't respond at all, because then it's just openly putting it out there.

Speaker 3: 21:54

So this has absolutely been a phenomenal conversation. I want to move on from it into do you guys have any creative ways that you've adapted your brand's language to fit various platforms without losing that core message? I know these days there's so many different channels, there's so many different things that you can do All the social channels. Now you can do podcasts or blogging YouTube videos all over the place. How do you create some consistency in that and can you provide me with some examples that you guys have used and I'll open it to the floor. Anybody can start.

Speaker 4: 22:33

So I kind of want to go back to what Allison mentioned. When it comes to like cybersecurity per se, right, feeling safe is the important part. That's what everybody wants to feel. They want to feel safe and secure. Once you have that core value, or you have that core word or keyword for your message, you can use that and actually kind of apply it into different platforms and run with it. You can use feeling secure as, like your basis for your website, for LinkedIn, for even TikTok, if you wanted to, for Instagram, for Facebook, you name it.

Speaker 4: 23:18

I think the important thing is like knowing what that keyword is, what exactly you're trying to evoke, and then going from there, right. So it's like I've been able to do that. For us, we're in the space of, like data breaches and threat intelligence and you know, like cybersecurity is a very, very, very fragmented, saturated industry and there's so little buyers and so many sellers, right, and you have to learn how to differentiate between that. And for us, we realize that it's like bite-sized threat intelligence and real-time threat intelligence. It's like every 20 minutes, whatever's happening in the dark web intelligence and real-time threat intelligence. It's like every 20 minutes, whatever's happening in the dark web. You have it in your hands and we know nobody else can do that. So I think like being able to identify that particular niche for us and then being able to sprinkle it in our copy, sprinkle it in our email marketing, sprinkle it in website copy or LinkedIn posts or advertisements. That's how it works for us.

Speaker 1: 24:21

I couldn't agree more with that, because what is your brand? That's your personality, that's your identity, and your personality is traits that make you who you are. So it's really with brand. It's just simply who do you want to be as an organization and who do you want to be to your customers? Right, you know, we can turn that on ourselves, like as a friend, as a mother, as a daughter. Who do I want to be for those people in my life? If the same is true, I ask myself well, what do we want to be for our customers? There's like a fun exercise.

Speaker 1: 24:57

It's back from I'm sorry, I'm an English major, so I'm a dork when it comes to this kind of stuff, but like your archetype, which is essentially it's a very old like term for what's your mask or what's your you know and you can Google it and there's all kinds of quizzes out there, but that's what it is. To Divya's point, who do you want to be? And distill that down Like here's three to five bullets, statements, traits, whatever that we want to be, and if then you don't have to be so tight with your restrictions to what we were saying earlier, like, hey, product team, I know you guys are very technical and very black and white, but keep these five bullet points in mind and as long as you go forth with that, you're going to deliver our brand. So I think that that's critical.

Speaker 2: 25:43

Yeah, to add on to that, where I'm kind of seeing that too, is keeping that consistency there. But in our end of the business, obviously, or in our industry with them I guess you could say trucking logistics and all that you're going to have different viewers on different media channels and all that. So you know, your C-suite levels are probably going to be on LinkedIn and more on the emails, where some of the guys that are out there on the road by themselves they may be Instagram text messages and all that. But it's, you know, to Divya's point of you know finding those words or that one word, but for us it is secure, but it's also community and things like that and just dropping them in there. But knowing that that's going to be the same all across the board, no matter who you're talking to. It's just a different talking point to those different individuals.

Speaker 5: 26:32

I mean, yeah, I agree, I. I. The way that I like to approach this is I have we've kind of talked about this. You have like bullets of here's what our brand is, and you distill it down as much as possible and then you just have that whole array of different types of messaging available for anyone who who wants it or needs to look at it, because then you just you can go to any of your channels, any of your platforms, and say, oh, I have this many words, I have this many words in this distilled version or in this written out version. I like to make it really formulaic like that, so that you don't have to think about it. You have it, it's all done and ready for you and you can put it all together that way. So, yeah, yep, I totally brought up.

Speaker 1: 27:12

A good point to also just about the personas. Right, we use that term in marketing as our buzz term, like who are we marketing to? But to go back to the security, because we're kind of using that as a theme, what does that mean? Right, to the drivers that you mentioned, neil, versus what that means to somebody in the C-suite means totally different things and I think as marketers we do our internal customers a favor by kind of creating that guide. Not only who do we want to be, but then, when you're talking to these different personas, here's ways that you can speak to it and why they're different from each other.

Speaker 3: 27:50

Divya and Allison, you both raised two really good points that I want to touch on and discuss and draw out a little bit more. Divya, you were saying that you had a key term and, from my perspective, that safety is associated with a. If you would that you're putting into everything that you guys are doing, because it creates an emotional response. As a business owner, I have to be safe, I have to be protected and that's what I want. So it makes sense that, from a marketing standpoint, you're kind of driving that home.

Speaker 3: 28:32

And then, allison, you said that brands have personalities, all of our brands. You know, as you create these or as we're creating this messaging and things, I kind of live in the B2B space. I don't do a lot with B2C, if you would, but I tell everybody when I'm talking to them. You know, people do business with people, they don't do business with brands. Yet, allison, you make an excellent point because, as marketers, what we are doing is crafting a personality and an emotion that people own and resonate with as we communicate that out there. So, allison, can you walk us back through what was when you are creating content and you're trying to create that personality around your brand using the safety aspect. How did you come to that and then, how does that then drive, if you would call to actions and responses from yeah, so there's.

Speaker 1: 29:36

there's a reason that I stepped into customer experience. My entire career has been in marketing up until very recently and it felt like the natural next step. The reason is because we do so much as marketers and then it falls. Do you know what I mean? That experience then falls when it goes to the next place. So I'm trying to do my my small part in looking at it you know, holistically. And what does that experience like across the continuum? And there's that whole element of you know the emotion, and I think you know you're asking Monty, like how do I, if I understood correctly, how do you have that messaging kind of carry throughout? Did I get that right, okay?

Speaker 1: 30:21

So, it's all the things we were talking about, right, like who are we talking to? And it's really understanding your audience. And then, when are you talking to that audience? Right, the pre-sales motion is going to be a completely different message than it is when you're coming up on renewal, or there's nothing in between which I can't even. It's a whole other conversation about why we only touch customers at signature and renewal.

Speaker 1: 30:48

But you have to chart out your customer journey, and part of that customer journey is where are the communication touch points? And part of that customer journey is where are the communication touch points? So I'm actually doing that right now and we're mapping out what is our sales team using for communication. And I mean, I have the dream job. My customers are marketers, but that also means there's a BS factor there, like they can sniff it out a mile away.

Speaker 1: 31:11

So I have to be very genuine in my approach, right, and the pre-sales motion is not a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's really what's your business challenge and how do we solve that? Then there's the in-between Don't you dare come to me three weeks before renewal and have not talked to me for the rest of the year? How are we engaging the customers. What are we doing for them through engagement activities, thought leadership, content that's where that comes in, and you have to secure your place as a thought leader so they know who you are and that you're adding value even beyond the product and the technology that you're selling. So that has to be so tightly aligned and I'm kind of obsessed with it right now the communications matching the customer journey.

Speaker 3: 31:55

Yeah, I love that and I apologize. I said Allison when I was asking that. I meant Divya, but Allison, your response was phenomenal. But, Divya, I want to go back to you because I want to hear you know, in terms of you using safety and stuff like that, how have you crafted and woven that? And feel free to use what Allison was saying about the customer journey, because I was going to go there next in terms of how do you establish that customer journey and invoke those responses through call to actions and stuff like that through your content?

Speaker 4: 32:31

So I've come to realize, like you know, when I was like a little bit younger, everything was like oh yeah, we got to do flashy marketing, I use flashy words and you know, let's be cool with it. And I've come to realize that the more technical the sale, the simpler your language needs to be. And you know, we used to have all these call to actions like oh yeah, buy now for less and do this for this and do this for that. None of that works. All you got to have to do is OK, learn more demo. And like, one thing we did differently for us, for example, is we know that our audience is a very technical audience and we don't gatekeep our demo Like we give them like a full glimpse of like three minutes. Here's a video you can check out so you know what you're stepping into. And then we have a call to action that says technical demo and that, in my opinion, has produced more demo requests as opposed to like what we used to have previously. And, additionally, like one thing about marketing in general, especially when it comes to, like an industry where the buyers are so little in number, if you, if your content does not provide them value, right, they're not they like. There's a very intense challenge of FUD marketing because we work in the space of like breaches and notifications and alerting and monitoring. Right, we like there's people who would go out there and say, oh yeah, you've been ransomed, you need our service. That's never going to work. Never going to work.

Speaker 4: 34:20

And I just think that, like, when you have a clear understanding of like okay, I know what kind of words can make my customers take action right, your call to actions and your copy and everything is just going to be so aligned. And on top of that, like, I have a very radical idea about this. I truly think that it's time to you know how we have product marketing managers and PM. Like product marketing as a field of its own. There needs to be a hybrid sales marketing role to like somebody who is a marketer who can literally start reaching out to people and say, hey, this is the product, maybe you're interested. I would love to take you on this journey with me.

Speaker 4: 34:59

Instead of just like warming up the lead and then handing it over to sales and then sales comes back saying this is not qualified when it's the you know VP of security, let's say in like a big company, that's. That's just like I think we need to come to terms that if we can have a product marketer, we need to have a sales marketer too. But yeah, that's my opinion on those things. Like, I think crafting, like call to actions, they need to be simple, they need to be close to what they're used to, you know. So, like, request a demo is something that every security company has as a call to action, but the demo is the key operative word there. You can be creative around the demo. You can say it's a technical, you can say it's a 20 minute, you can say it's a 59 minute demo or something like that, but you need to have those operative words.

Speaker 3: 35:51

I totally agree with you basically about that position. By the way, I think that would be a phenomenal position for companies because I think it's needed. You know, we always, you know we salespeople need to be marketers at times and marketers need to be salespeople and a lot of times there's like this, these two siloed departments. If you would, you would, and there's a lot of, you know, miscommunication or no communication going on between the two about how we can collectively, you know, move people along through their buyer journey that Allison was talking about. Allison and, I'm sorry, neil, I'd love to hear from you how do you ensure that your brand narrative stays authoritative yet reliable to different audience segments?

Speaker 2: 36:38

and, christine, I'd love to hear from you yeah, I think that kind of goes back to the whole persona aspect there too, of you know you can draft one message and then kind of piggyback that to some of the different personas that you're building um. Or at least you know that's what I have had at least connection with in my previous companies of kind of being able to do that. But then also, you know, going through the thought leadership aspect of it all, not just giving them here's my product, here's what it's going to do for you. But you know, we all know everybody has a pain point. They're coming to our website, we're talking to them for a reason it's finding out what that pain point is and how we can, how our product or our service can address that specific pain that they're going through. So I think having that in within our messaging you know whether that's right up front of saying you know, we know you have an issue, we happen to have a solution for that.

Speaker 2: 37:43

Maybe not in that term, but you know kind of going through that whole perspective of you know we know, obviously, as the either the manufacturer or the seller of the solution solution or product, we know what it can do, we know how it's going to help them, but they don't necessarily know that as of yet.

Speaker 2: 38:02

Maybe looking at the website, seeing that they've been on our, on our web pages and all that, maybe we do know, but they don't know that we know. So it's kind of tailoring that message of of you know what, who we are and why we've been in this space and I'm thinking of a company from my past, of being the leader for 80 plus years, whether they know the brand or not but kind of putting that forth of why things have become how they were and how we became that leader and knowing the specific products that we're manufacturing and selling, and then again kind of going into that of maybe not so much, here are your pain points and here's just how this is going to answer that kind of using that to our advantage. So I think that's a good way, or at least a way that I've been involved with.

Speaker 3: 38:51

So it's kind of a global top-down approach, if you would, from what it sounds like, christine, what's your input there?

Speaker 5: 38:58

I think you have to always provide a ton of value consistently. You have to constantly be talking about the things that you're seeing, the things that you're solving and how you're solving it. I think sometimes as marketers we get a little too focused on gatekeeping and not wanting to share our secrets. But I think that if you you know, in the era that we're in now, we have to gatekeep less and talk more about what we're doing and why we're doing it and what we're seeing, and position ourselves as experts in that field, because then people can see that and they're automatically moved down the funnel right Because we're proving that we know what we're talking about to them in our content right away. So I think, just always having a voice being authentic, being genuine and providing value, truly providing value and answering questions that you know our buyer, other people in the industry, are wondering.

Speaker 1: 39:54

I just want to give Christine like a big hug through the screen right now, because can we please stop gating everything I mean that is Divya was talking about? Like here's your CTA, buy now. It's shiny and wonderful. That was 20 years ago. Marketing Gating all your assets was a long time ago. And how about we just put content out that doesn't talk about our product at all? What if it's truly thought leadership content which has nothing to do? If you want, we're talking about brand today, not product. So if you want your brand to evoke a positive response, the fastest way to do that is to help somebody do their job better, solve a problem, look like a rock star in front of their boss. I mean all of that and for the love of all that is good, please start using more voice of customer in your content and your thought leadership. And with that, thank you. I will get off my soapbox, but yeah.

Speaker 3: 40:55

I was about ready to break into a gospel song because you're singing it. I had to go there. I cut Neil off.

Speaker 1: 41:01

I'm sorry.

Speaker 2: 41:02

Sorry, Neil, I was going to say I'm going to jump on that soapbox with you, because I'm exactly with you and that's the biggest thing and that's where I've had one really good experience with that, where we let other people talk about the brand and who we are in the product, where we kind of took a sideline. We would jump in and saying, oh, you know, thanks for sharing and all that, but we let them do it, not us. I mean, that's the biggest thing is letting them kind of speak about it, because if they're not, then obviously there's a problem. Not, and obviously we're there's a problem.

Speaker 2: 41:38

But we also involve in some of the messaging in kind of the creation of products. We involve customers and that's kind of how products evolve is, if you're not talking to your customer, you're just putting new, new developments, new, new, this, new that, and don't know if it's going to actually correlate with who you're selling it to. So, working with the customers as well and letting the people that you want to reach and saying, hey, this was made for you by us, but including those in your industry, so we know this is going to be a benefit to you, kind of kind of message does not again, not that.

Speaker 1: 42:09

but you'll get the hug. You'll get the hug.

Speaker 4: 42:13

I know this is about brand but I love that the customers are being involved here in the discussion oh, they have to be yeah yeah, and like you know, like we, it's on top of that, we, we gotta stop treating our leads or our you know our personas as if they're idiots. Like they're not stupid, they, they know what they know and you don't have to spell out everything for them, you know, and one of the ways, like you, you can be innovative when you're starting to build a relationship with somebody, you don't always have to be selling to them, right? You can always start with like hey, I have a piece of content and I would love to have your feedback on this. Uh, what do you think Be genuine People want an experience now, people don't just solely want to be sold to and then, once the sale doesn't go through, you completely cut off all communication with them.

Speaker 4: 43:07

If you really want to build a brand and you want people to have a good experience with your brand, even if your sale doesn't go through, you got to reach out to them and be like hey, how's you know? Like it's been a while, let's, let's keep in touch, and I would still like to be, I would still like to be updated a bit, what you're doing. And guess what, if they decide to leave that company and they decide to go somewhere else, and they need a vendor who does exactly what you do guess who they're going to come to else and they need a vendor who does exactly what you do guess who they're going to come to.

Speaker 3: 43:41

You know it's all about building relationships. This is the show that I wanted. I knew you guys are going to be fantastic. Thank you, yes, so you've all made such wonderful, amazing points. I want to come back to what Allison was talking about with buyer journey or customer journey, right? So can you walk us through your process for mapping that customer journey to enhance your messaging consistency? And, by the way, I love that you guys are all on the same page about gated content. I hate gated content. I'm sick and tired of seeing companies do that and there's so many companies that are still doing it. I think it really disrupts customer journey. But, allison, since you brought it up, why don't we start with you, walk us through how you define that customer journey and then create the consistency from start to finish?

Speaker 1: 44:29

So the first thing that I will say is you do not have to spend tens of thousands of dollars. You don't have to work with 29 different consultants to map out your customer journey. If you can, awesome, because I've worked with some tremendous people in that space and they're fantastic, but we don't all have that luxury. So, a couple of things that are mission critical and I'm knee deep in it right now have the right stakeholders at the table for the discussion, and that means you need to have someone from senior leadership senior leadership at the table for each of the business units within your organization. You have to agree that you're going on this journey, to do the journey together. You need to set a cadence for how long is this going to take and how much time is it going you know is needed, and then you need to put those on the calendar and, yes, it's going to take probably a minimum of four to six one-hour sessions to sit down and you know and chart it out, and then it can be as simplistic as you want.

Speaker 1: 45:32

The most important things are simply look from pre-sale to post-sale and then document those steps. There's about five main ones, right From pre-sale sale, implementation, launch. You can Google it and find out the basic six. But then where does everyone fall and where do they think they fall? Cause that's where the conversations get really interesting, because product will be like ah, I don't have anything to do with presale, wrong, everyone has a role within that. And then once you bucket that out, then you can start looking at and what are our communication vehicles? And then you dig a layer deeper, so it's really going through that exercise. And then towards the end of that mission, critical is prioritization and ownership. Who's going to own it? And then you have to keep that group accountable. They're not off the hook. It's not one and done. Set the cadence for how you're going to continue to revisit that. That's where I've had the most success Accountability, documentation and making sure that you have the right people at the table.

Speaker 3: 46:34

I love it. How about the rest of you? Have you had any experience with that and how you create consistency through those processes?

Speaker 2: 46:41

Yeah, I completely agree with Allison there, and one thing that came to mind was you know, everybody's a marketer For some way or another. One point they're a marker, but when it comes down to it, oh no, I'm not like they're hands off. So I know exactly what you're, what you're saying there, but yeah, and I think too many cooks at the in the kitchen, that disrupts it a lot too. So having the the right amount of people and at the right level is very critical to that, because you can have so many different things and so many people on at the same time and it just kind of I don't want to say it ruins the whole mapping process, but it definitely draws it out a little bit longer than it should be.

Speaker 2: 47:22

But I think the outside of that, the one thing that came to mind was you know, we can have our own mapping, but then it's also I know it's not mapping, but bringing in kind of a sequence from a sales end of things too as well where we're hitting them in email, social, paid ads, videos, things like that and at different levels, or where they're at, if they're viewing our page, if they've viewed a form but they haven't filled it out. So, kind of wise. We all know where to hit them in those specific parts of their their journey. But you know sales too, where, okay, if they've made a call, they've left a voicemail, send us an sms message or send an email and kind of, while you're doing it from a marketing perspective, you can also kind of bring that into from a sales sequence.

Speaker 2: 48:09

Um, and I and I mean the only reason why I say that, because I'm like alice and I'm we're starting to build some journey, uh, some some customer journey maps now but then also how we can develop this sales sequence too and the tool that we're using can combine those both, or at least we can, on this topic, be consistent within our branding as well. Sounds good, it's HubSpot, so it's nothing too crazy. But this is this is the first time that I've been using from a sales and marketing perspective, where before it's all been just marketing automation. But sure, yeah, it's been, it's been very good from both ends, and and they're growing, so it's nice to see you.

Speaker 3: 48:52

bet Divya, how about you? I know you guys probably have a pretty well-defined customer journey. I imagine How'd you go about it.

Speaker 4: 49:01

So I think for us it was just, you know, we do have like two separate platforms. So, like sales probably uses Salesforce, we use HubSpot and kind of like syncing them together and who got what message at what time is a little bit tricky to navigate. Success with. You know, setting up meetings with, like the sales and customer experience teams and kind of like really chalking through and going through like okay, this is something that a customer brought up to our attention and this is how we're handling right now. What can we do to make this process better? Right, I think asking that question in like over and over what can we do to make this process better is going to give you like the clearest map. And one thing we also implemented and I would I would a hundred percent recommend everybody to try this. It's a really good exercise, uh, but it is like getting an NPS score on your marketing, sales and customer experience teams Once you kind of, because, like, the NPS framework is a very rigid and constructed like, it's very rigid, right, and you can't really step out of the questions to make your own questions out, because that defeats the purpose. But I would strongly recommend go through that exercise and kind of like, figure out what your NPS score is, and you will find some areas where everyone's like well, you only reach out to us during renewal and we don't really appreciate that. We're only continuing this relationship, not because of the people, but because of the product itself, because it's so powerful.

Speaker 4: 50:42

Once you have that and you should do one for product, you should do one for marketing, you should do one for sales and customer experience Then you can also get like a broader understanding of where are the areas of improvement.

Speaker 4: 50:59

So we implemented that and we got like a really clear understanding of like product versus experience and we were like oh, this is not kind of like working out. So it was easy to like kind of bridge the gap between those, those two elements. And then you know we, you got to go to like these platforms and see what are people really saying about you anonymously, because that's where the gold is, because you know some people like I mean you, you have like burner Twitter accounts and you have burner Instagram accounts to like make those customer complaints. But go to Reddit, find out what people are saying. It's fully anonymous and you, you, and that way you don't also have a bias at that point, right, you're not like oh, this company is like talking about me, so I need to be like, I need to have this bias in my head to like treat them a certain way. So those have been some, some tools that we've used and some exercises we've done to kind of like help us map that out.

Speaker 3: 52:11

I love it. Christine, I want to get you in here too. Would you have anything that you'd, any gold you'd like to drop on us again?

Speaker 5: 52:19

I don't know. I feel like we have a lot of gold going on right now. I think the only other thing I could add is just I love watching the numbers. The numbers don't lie, right. So just make sure you're really familiar with your analytics, you are keeping up with them, you're checking those metrics, because you can see problems just by looking at the numbers, right? So data-driven.

Speaker 3: 52:44

Awesome. Okay, you guys have been so fantastic. We just have a few minutes left. Okay, you guys have been so fantastic, we just have a few minutes left. I want to close this out with how do you measure the effectiveness of your brand consistency efforts, and what metrics do you guys find most valuable within that? Feel free to share a story or your processes, however you'd like. Neil. Why don't we start with you? Like Neil? Why?

Speaker 2: 53:06

don't we start with you? Yeah, I mean outside of like the vanity kind of numbers of followers and network and all that I think it really goes on to. You know some of the points that we've made, and I'm thinking again more in our system of you know who are our evangelists, who are going to be out there, who are going to be pumping our brand name to their community, because that's really where it's going to spiderweb. So you know, you can say probably evangelists or referrals, if you're looking at it from that way of you know that's probably the pretty big number of okay, yeah, we've gotten X amount of referrals or this person not maybe not singling out for one person, but we've received this amount of people coming in that may not have in the past or they're not Google searching us or going to our website or anything like that.

Speaker 2: 54:00

So I think, in terms of you know, really trying to look at our overall goals, I think that would be a pretty big one, because at that point you know your brand is one thing you can have. You know you can have that brand awareness and everything, but it's are you bringing in the people and are they bringing in extra people that are going to keep the lights?

Speaker 3: 54:24

on at the end of the day Sounds good, allison.

Speaker 1: 54:27

I think that you know to Christine's point, she was talking about the data and we don't get the luxury of not creating true metrics and numbers anymore. But I also am a firm believer in the qualitative as well as the quantitative. So when numbers and narrative come together, that's the magic for me. So I think NPS Divya was talking about NPS. I love it for all the reasons she already mentioned, but I think you need to do something opposite that. I think you also have to have a more qualitative survey so that you have a finger on the pulse. And what I usually do is I run it opposite and I've done it in the last two organizations and we run it opposite NPS so that we kind of are getting a true picture, because NPS is another topic.

Speaker 1: 55:14

I won't get into that, that's coming with its own challenges these days. But then also surveying just in general as part of the customer experience. Very few organizations do off-boarding properly. If a customer decides to leave you, off-boarding properly. If a customer decides to leave you, why? I will take those calls now in my new role myself personally and have the conversation, because we can learn an awful lot from that and it's very rare that someone won't share whether they're happy or they weren't.

Speaker 1: 55:46

They're willing to raise their voice and usually offer it in a very constructive way, and I think that all feeds then into both the things I care about the brand and the experience with that brand.

Speaker 3: 55:56

Excellent, excellent, christine.

Speaker 5: 56:00

Man, just everyone on this call. You're all so incredible and smart and I'm loving this conversation, the way that I kind of like measure brand and the way that I look at it, and I loved Allison. When numbers and voices come together, that's amazing. That's incredible, and so what I'm about to say doesn't follow that. So I'm feeling like I need more qualitative in this, in what I'm about to say. But the way that I look at it is I take the entire funnel, I assign a KPI to each stage and then I just watch. I just continuously measure those KPIs because I believe in lift-based metrics. If one goes up, it's likely that they'll all kind of go up or down, and so that's kind of how I measure our brand across the entire funnel is watching those lift-based metrics and see what they do.

Speaker 3: 56:48

I love that Divya.

Speaker 4: 56:51

Last but not least, yeah, no, I think everybody pretty much covered it totally with Allison on the qualitative and quantitative aspects of measuring your brand.

Speaker 4: 57:01

You can implement a bunch of things you know, like, for example, if you go to your website and one of the most clicked buttons on your website is the login button, that tells you that, like, okay, people are returning and they're actually wanting to sign into the platform and they're engaging with the platform in that form or function.

Speaker 4: 57:19

Daily engagement, referrals, mentions, signups, those are all like metrics that we can track. And I think what's important is, as marketers as, like you know, when layoffs happen, when the economy kind of like shifts down and everything, marketing is usually our C-suite that this is what a brand is doing for the product in these terms and kind of like assigning the value in a numeric way or even assigning the value of the brand and like a way of like social love that people are giving you is going to be really key because they need to understand where the money is being spent and how it's being spent and what's the ROI on that Right. So I think, like, having those metrics are going to be handy and really identify like everyone's like brand is hard to hard to track, but you can create your own metrics if you know what you're doing, and then translating that to like people is going to be important. So yeah, that's the only thing I would add.

Speaker 3: 58:30

I love it. You guys are all rock stars. Thank you so much. I have one last question. We talked about Bud Light In the Super Bowl. I read that they're charging $7 million for a 30-second clip. Okay, okay. How much money will Bud Light spend on the Super Bowl this year? What's your best guess? Take a shot, neil.

Speaker 2: 58:59

Let's say 21 or 28 million. So they're going to have a couple of 30 seconds.

Speaker 3: 59:05

Okay, and then the follow-up will it work? Will they repair their brand through spending?

Speaker 1: 59:11

not if the message is off they can spend all the money in the world on their spots, but if they I hope they did a focus group.

Speaker 4: 59:19

That's all I'm gonna say I feel like honestly they might have, because, like the recent one was with uh peyton and they were like throwing Bud Light across the bar and I was like if that?

Speaker 1: 59:32

was me.

Speaker 4: 59:32

I would gladly skip. I would let it hit me in the head instead of, like I don't like Bud Light, but I'm just saying I feel like they might have gone in some sort of direction, but I feel like they didn't have to really spend 21 to 28 million dollars. But I'm with you, neil, like that was my exact guess too.

Speaker 3: 59:56

Well, christine, allison, any, any guesses?

Speaker 1: 1:00:00

I'm saying they're spending whatever the max limit of spaces were that they were given. I don't know if the Super Bowl cuts you off, but I'm with you.

Speaker 3: 1:00:09

I'm with you, yeah, so I you know it's gonna. It's gonna be a really interesting case study, I think, for marketers in the future. You know, when you literally nosedive the plane into the ground, is there anything that you can do to keep from burning the entire thing up? So it'll be fun to watch.

Speaker 4: 1:00:32

We can get Taylor Swift to do an ad for them.

Speaker 1: 1:00:37

What's that they can get Taylor Swift to do an ad for them.

Speaker 5: 1:00:39

Oh yeah, all you have to do, yeah.

Speaker 4: 1:00:41

Yeah, thank you.