Standing out from the crowd with authentic marketing - How can your brand be authentic?

With advertising and branding under our noses everywhere we go, it is important for marketers to ensure that their brand stands out from the crowd.

Here in part three of this series on authentic marketing, Marketing Manager, Sophie Proctor, explains how brands can be authentic throughout their marketing strategies.

 

Brand authenticity should stay consistent across all touchpoints with your customers, right from the first advert they see on social media, through to the check out page on your website and everywhere in between.

A cohesive, authentic marketing strategy should be built with your overall business strategy in mind and be consistent with messaging throughout. It can be hard to know where to start with creating your strategy so here’s my five-step guide:

 

1. Understand your brand: outlining what your brand stands for and believes in within the overall business strategy means you can create genuine authenticity throughout your marketing strategy. It means you are not making up values that you want to appear to follow, but instead use the values your brand actually lives by.

2. Create a style guide: to ensure everyone who works across the business both internally and externally uses consistent messaging, you should have a style guide that is followed at all times. This can be used whether writing a newsletter or designing a billboard. Either way, it means everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet and nothing strays from your authentic self.

3. Focus on the customer: everything a brand does needs to be focused on a pull approach with the customer. What does the customer want from your brand? Gather feedback and statistics from your customers and actively listen to what they want from your brand. Do not go into your marketing strategy with a heavy-handed selling approach.

4. Know where to engage with your audience: understanding which platforms your audience will see your brand on is vital. Whether that’s on trains, a defined audience on Facebook or a particular radio station, with an audience that appreciates your authenticity you can be open about your mission and values to an audience that will receives it well.

5. Tell your story: create and share your content on the relevant platforms, making sure that each asset is recognisable as your brand. If your videos sound chatty and laid back, but your website is very corporate, your brand won’t feel authentic and your audience won’t understand who is selling to them. Provide that human touch and use storytelling to create emotional connections.

6. Practice what you preach:  this is probably the most important step of the process. To be authentic, it has to be real. If you say you value your employees, make sure you are valuing them and that your employees feel valued too. If you cannot practice what you preach, your whole marketing strategy could do more damage than good. Customers can spot an inauthentic brand and false or misconstrued advertising can have reputational consequences.

It’s important to remember that the key to brand authenticity is to be just that; authentic. Selective authenticity can be just as harmful as not investing time in authenticity at all and forgetting about what makes your brand human, you could end up looking fake.

If you would like support to build an authentic marketing strategy for your brand, email me today.

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