Brand Promise is the Heart and Soul of Your Enterprise (OPINION)

The first article of this series (“Four Pillars of Marketing For Profit-Minded CEOs,” June 20) described how to improve profitability through strategic marketing. I introduced four strategic marketing pillars of brand promise, analytics and automation, referrals and leadership. These are essential to gaining a competitive advantage, acquiring more customers and increasing market share.

The importance of your brand promise cannot be overstated. It is a statement that lets all your employees know what you stand for, why you’re in business and what your customers can expect from you. It becomes a strategic force when everyone on your team embraces it. The key is stating your values and principles in a memorable, understandable way.

Here are some questions to get you started thinking about your brand promise. They are not exhaustive, but will certainly get you on the right path.

• “What makes you unique and special?”

• “How you will improve the lives of your customers?”

• “How do you want your customers to feel when they do business with you?”

Use questions like these to focus your thoughts until you come up with what you want to deliver, how you want to deliver it and who you want to deliver it to. This will build a stronger, more differentiated brand.

Combined with a strong brand promise, analytics and automation can have an enormous impact on your bottom line.

It’s a given that a minority of your customers create the majority of your profitability. Who are these customers, and what should you know about them?

Knowing how to make this information actionable is critical, and that’s why it takes a strategic thinker rather than a technical expert to deliver the goods for your company.

To start, look at the information from a big picture level and summarize your findings about your most profitable customers. Then you want to do at least three things:

Retain your best customers, gain referrals from them and help them benefit from more of your services;

Determine which remaining customers have the potential to become like your top ones and focus your marketing resources on them;

Evaluate whether or not to realign your company and products around the profile of your best customers.

Good partners and systems can take the mystery out of your data and use it to transform your profitability.

A local bank used low cost analytics and technology to generate over 30,000 new accounts annually, and similar results are available to companies like yours at affordable pricing.

Executives who might be concerned by either the cost or complexity of strategic marketing analytics and automation can now have the same tools as the big companies at cost effective pricing.

This article has focused on two of the four pillars of strategic marketing: brand promise and analytics and automation. Brand promise is the heart and soul of your enterprise, and needs to be a main element of your communications, training, hiring, operations, and decisions.

Creating a significant, authentic brand promise to energize your employees is the first pillar of profitable strategic marketing.

The second pillar is developing analytics and automation capabilities that let you build and execute scalable endeavors around key customer segments. Good systems are essential, but they must improve the ability of your employees to deliver on your brand promise.

In an upcoming article, I will direct our strategic marketing focus on referrals and leadership. Until then, challenge your team to find ways to improve your brand promise and analytics and automation. 

Scott McClymonds is the founder of Fayetteville-based strategic consulting firm CEO Velocity. He can be reached at [email protected], 479-263-0774, or linkedin.com/in/scottmcclymonds.