Why You Need a Brand Presence Before You Need a Brand Presence
If your leadership team is like ours, you spend a day together every quarter planning. You’re looking ahead and tracking goals, talking about your vulnerabilities, threats and opportunities. You’re putting new ideas on the table to think about how you can grow and what that growth looks like. What resources do you need – time, money, people, equipment, space – to bring those ideas to life?
Is there a communications or marketing leader in that room at your organization? If not, there should be.
To make meaningful change for your organization, you need a critical mass of people: employees, customers, partners, influencers… and communication is your tool to activate those people for change. By the time you’re ready to “go live” with your next initiative, it’s too late to start the conversation.
Building Brand Readiness Takes Time and Patience
It’s never too early to invest in building a brand following. It takes time – and a lot of repetition – to first capture the attention of audiences. People have limited attention spans and bandwidth for new ideas, and there is a lot of competition for that brainspace.
You or your marketing team might have to test different concepts and styles before you find something that resonates. You might have to publish the same message, packaged differently, over and over again before it catches the right person’s eye… and then you have to keep offering content that is relevant, insightful, actionable and inspiring to establish loyalty. It’s worth it! For businesses, loyalty is a priceless commodity and feeds growth.
How Your Following Propels Growth
On a “normal” day, loyalty keeps you moving along smoothly. But in times of change, loyalty can propel you. When you’re ready to push sales or hiring, launch a new product or enter a new market, your active, established community will start buying more quickly. They may generate ideas for expansion or refer job applicants. They will almost certainly give you invaluable feedback to improve, and they will want to celebrate your success.
There are so many tools to build this kind of community: social media, email marketing, events, web forms… Effective communication is two-way, and that takes maintenance.
How Your Following Protects You
We’ll be the one to say it: every business encounters crisis at some point in its lifecycle. A crisis could be small or disastrous, but it always threatens or disrupts your business reputation or operations – and if a crisis strikes before you’ve built a loyal following, it will take much longer to recover and rebuild lost trust.
So don’t wait until you need an active, engaged community: the time to build it is now. Contact us to learn how we can help you with your next branding strategy.
