How to link your brand to your audience

Here’s the new brand, now go and sell it

First, let’s look at how to communicate it internally.

All too often, business leaders just hand a branding document to the marketing and sales teams and effectively say: “here it is, use it”.

Unfortunately, we’ve all come across that attitude and it doesn’t work.

So, how do we do this well?

In the B2B arena, where the focus is less on generalisations and more on details, product specifics and tangible evidence, the practical roll out of a new brand can be an acute challenge.

If, for example, your brand guidelines tell you to use simple language to discuss complex issues, how will that land with a heavily technical audience? Will they appreciate the fresh take on fairly heavy subject matter or query your depth of understanding of their challenges?

Think of your new brand as a feature of all your products and services. How does it add to your existing offer?

Launched well, your new brand will excite your colleagues who will drive its adoption.

It’s important to listen to listen to the feedback from your wider team and to be pragmatic in the application of brand directives rather than attempting to control their actions.

Communicating a new brand

With your new brand, an enthusiastic team and a plan in place, it’s time to go external.

You have to communicate your brand to the right people in the right way so they buy into it and hopefully want to buy your products. The link between you and impactful communication with your stakeholders is targeted content - so you need to develop a detailed content plan.

To make sure this is really effective, you need to use your research well. You’ll know who your stakeholder groups are and the personas within those groups you need to target. However, the more granular you can be about these people, their work challenges, their preferred communication channels, the messages that will impact them etc the better your chances of connecting with them.

Repurposing existing content creates an opportunity to focus on the brand as a feature. Where might elements of the new brand messaging add power to the content you already have?

From the audit, brand elements that aren’t well covered by existing or repurposed content should be a priority in your content plan.

The benefits of new branding

The practical communication of a new brand can’t be left to chance. Work doesn’t stop with the approval of the brand, guidelines and directives. Everybody in your organisation has to fully get it and your external facing people need to know how to discuss it with your stakeholders in a relatable way.

For your brand to mean something outside your boardroom it has to be understandable to your customers. That requires a detailed content strategy to create a link between what you want to say and how you want your stakeholders to feel and react.

With these fundamentals in place, a successful brand launch from initial creation, well managed internal alignment, and external implementation throughout all activities can create a strong link between you with your audience.