Your company branding is not something that stops with when business cards are printed. It’s about how everyone and everything within your organisation connects with prospects and customers, at every touchpoint.
This is most important at the key decision-making moments, when people are choosing you or your competition. We encourage clients, once they have created content brand guidelines, to apply them first to their key sales assets:
Proposal documents
Creds decks
Pitch presentations
These key sales documents are where you have to be at your most succinct, which makes content prioritisation a little easier to grapple with. Once you have a really effective precis of your offering and its benefits, it often makes it easier to review longer-form content, such as a website, and be more critical of secondary content. It helps develop the analytical skills to say: “Do we really need to say that? Why?”
Expanding on your core content in your digital marketing
Working backwards from your key sales documents to then revise the role of messaging in the earlier parts of your sales funnel brings useful perspective. But you will want to elaborate with more information and storytelling to reinforce both emotional connections and brand crediblity.
Sufu can help with consultancy and training for your staff, or resource the implementation of messaging with your marketing assets such as:
Website sitemap planning and copywriting
Storyboarding and scripting for video or audio material
Planning and writing blog content or educational downloads
The power sales and marketing teams speaking with a single, unified voice
Sufu can help your sales people as well as prepare your sales assets. Our content brand guidelines always contain a sense of how your brand should make people feel. That is just as applicable to soft skills as it is to formal messaging. We’ve seen many times how sales people sometimes feel the need to interpret brand into their own language and terminology, in order to feel comfortable in describing it. Sometimes that provides useful insight into how the brand should be developed, but the important thing is that your brand language doesn’t drift in tone or purpose.
The larger your team, the more important this unity becomes. Having someone with an independent view can help ensure cohesion, without it becoming an “us vs them” battle between sales teams and a central marketing department. Sales people are often not listened to enough, but they spend the most time with clients, they hear what’s important to them. Any review of your brand should begin with that insight.