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Category: Verbal Branding

2019 Marketing Budget Planning: Questions to Help You Get Started

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

It’s That Time: 2019 Marketing Budget Planning

Developing your 2019 marketing budget is nobody’s favorite time of year. But it’s inevitable. Like clockwork each year, it’s here. As an agency immersed in helping businesses deliver the results they need to thrive, we understand first-hand that marketing budget planning can be overwhelming and taxing. Knowing what to include to deliver the results needed seems nearly impossible for many VPs of Marketing looking to drive growth, build brand, drive lead gen, and fuel revenue.

We know CFOs can be tough audiences. In fact, many VPs of Marketing that we know or work with express trepidation about the need to clearly articulate and validate a budget for the next year. It’s a daunting challenge. And even those who have significant growth and ROI to show from this year’s marketing spend still dread it.

As you develop your 2019 marketing budget, we’ve outlined a few questions to consider.

Positioning and Messaging

Confident that your positioning and messaging is tight, but still unable to deliver the growth you’re on the hook for? Have you considered building a brand campaign to drive awareness, spark engagement, and ultimately, foster loyalty? A brand campaign can grow your brand and business in meaningful and impactful ways by bringing your positioning and messaging to life. Learn more about why and how.

Differentiated Messaging

Struggling to articulate differentiated messaging that can support a complex technology that is difficult to understand? Disruptive technologies require a different approach to messaging and positioning. And in order to be truly disruptive, you need to change the perception of what is possible. Consider how you might approach messaging differently.

Aligning Leadership Team

Having trouble moving forward on any decision because your Leadership Team is misaligned and you can’t get everyone to agree on the right strategy? Sometimes, it takes a deep dive and full immersion into your most pressing business and brand challenges to get everyone focused on the right priorities. Learn more about our Fast Forward workshop.

Positioning and Category Creation

Feel the need to reposition? Or, are you considering a new category to help you stand out and enable a stronger valuable to raise your next round? We believe a strong positioning strategy can help your business thrive, your brand become more meaningful, your team hire and retain top talent, and your business realize their full purpose and vision. Here’s why to consider adding a Positioning Strategy to next year’s marketing budget.

Customer Journey Mapping

Having trouble delivering on the experience you promise your customers? Think your company could benefit from research-based customer journey mapping to better understand the people who matter to your business? Customer journey mapping is proven to help businesses market better, sell easier, build better products, and deliver a better brand experience. Here’s how to do it right.

Strategic Marketing Budget

At the end of the day, every business has unique challenges and struggles. That’s why our approach is always tailored to our clients. Discussing specific challenges with someone outside the walls of your business can help ignite new thinking around how to address projects and problems you want to tackle next year.

If you would like to understand how we can augment your internal team or discuss specific projects you have coming up in 2018 so you can get a better idea of our approach, timing, and fees, please give us a call.  Now is the right time for you to evaluate the options and costs associated with working with an agency so you have what you need to develop your marketing budget for 2018.

Emotive Brand is a B2B San Francisco brand strategy and design agency.

Checking In: One Month of Strategic Writing at Emotive Brand

Posted on by Chris Ames

Chris Ames has now officially been with Emotive Brand for one month – who knew he’d make it this long?– and as a new writer in the branding world, we wanted to see what he’s learned thus far. In this post, Chris talks about the importance of strategic writing and shares some advice that he’d give to other young creatives looking to break through in marketing and branding.

What has been your biggest surprise so far?

The sheer amount of strategy, planning, and forethought that takes place before even a single external word is written has been impressive and humbling. As a writer, I tend to create a giant block of content and slowly chip away until it’s refined, but it’s fascinating to see the inverse process: creating target audiences, customer journeys, language guidelines, mood boards, manifestos, rallying cries, narratives…and then beginning to write.

Until I worked here, I never realized the importance and power of internal documents for brands. Most of the work I’ve created so far is inward-facing. And though the initial audience might be small, it has the potential to act as a microphone for how brands not only articulate themselves in the marketplace but how employees communicate with each other on a personal level.

Any challenges?

I think an early decision writers must make with clients is choosing what your biggest strength is going to be: voice or versatility. When you hire me, is it because you want your copy to sound like me, or because I can sound like whatever you need? Especially when you’re working with tech companies or startups that have a jargon-heavy lexicon, it can be a game of linguistic tug-of-war. In a perfect world, you can meet the tone of the client and still retain that undercurrent of charm. Knowing when to mute your own voice is a good life skill in general, and I’m sure I still have a long way to go.

How does this writing differ from your previous job at a creative studio?

At my previous job, it was a volume game: how much content can I possibly create for you in the shortest amount of time? I worked very much in a silo, and the only real editor was the deadline. Here, everything is much more deliberate, collaborative, and there is an economy of words. Instead of chasing word counts, it’s more like: can you create one perfect, muscular sentence that’s strong enough to carry an entire campaign? Which, at first, seems easier. But it’s totally that Mark Twain– “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”– kind of thing. Simple is hard. Short takes a long time.

What advice would you give to young creatives entering the field of branding and marketing?

Reading books, especially written by people from a different background or perspective than your own, makes you a more empathetic person, and empathy is probably the strongest tool to wield in the workplace. Yes, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another will make you a better brander, but it will also just make you a better human being.

I’d also add, don’t waste your time in toxic work environments. There are tons of businesses looking for young creatives to drive into the ground because they don’t know any better. You might think that because you don’t have a ton of experience, you need to put yourself through hell as a rite of passage. The truth is your fresh eyes are actually a huge advantage. The whole reason brands hire outside agencies in the first place is because they’re seeking an outside perspective. Find an agency that’s excited about your new ideas and willing to embrace a fresh perspective, instead of looking to punish you for not having 10 years of experience under your belt.

Emotive Brand is a brand strategy and design agency.

How Client-Side Experience Informs Agency-Side Strategy: Interview with Emotive Brand Creative Director

Posted on by Saja Chodosh

Interview with Skott Bennett, Creative Director

As Creative Director of Emotive Brand, Skott puts his client-side experience to work. An expert at creating meaningful solutions that meet the unique needs of both our customers and clients, Skott offers thoughts on how his years inside companies much like many of our clients inform his work agency-side today.

What drew you to agency work?

I always tried to bring an agency approach to my client-side experiences. And where I found this approach really worked was with brand-related projects. Identifying and defining the true purpose behind an organization, and then developing and implementing those solutions across the organization – that’s where I was most fulfilled. And I’m thrilled that it’s now my focus – helping brands better articulate what makes them special and unique.

How do you think working on in-house creative teams prepared you for your current role?

Working on the inside of technology brands – like many of Emotive Brand’s clients – made me fully aware of the challenges these kind of organizations face. These companies are founded and fueled by smart, determined people who come from high-performance engineering cultures. They have incredible vision, but oftentimes something breaks down when they try to present that vision to the outside world.

Articulating a brand’s purpose isn’t easy. You spend years building complex technology that solves tough problems and then you take it to market by making it simple? I have nothing but empathy for founders or leaders who get stuck on that. It’s a contradiction, but ultimately “look how hard this was to do!” isn’t the story that’s going to delight a customer or grow a business.

That’s why there’s so much value in ensuring that key stakeholders – those people who labored over their solutions and products – play a part in the creative/idea process. Even at the early stages, it’s critical. It has to be a team effort.

Having experienced the frustrations inside many companies today first-hand, what do you think some agencies are missing about what their clients really need?

The best agencies don’t just help you come up with a brand strategy or throw a visual identity at you. They actually educate you and help you sell that strategy inside the brand – from top to bottom. Most agencies will get hyper-focused and worried about selling to the person who’s always at the table. But there’s a lot more people who need to get on board for the roll-out to be successful. The agencies who stand out to me are the ones that have helped craft the plan and sell the plan throughout the entire organization.

Working client-side, you also realize how hard internal change really is. You can’t throw people into a new planet without a spacesuit. You have to bring them on the journey. And that’s where the value of having an outside perspective really kicks in.

Can you speak more to the value of bringing an outside perspective in?

What happens a lot inside a company is that people figure out how to get things done inside the building. “I know how to get Sales to agree to X. I know how to get Product to sign off on Y.” Just focused on the inside, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important people: your customers. The audience isn’t just your department head or your CEO, but it’s easy to get stuck in an echo chamber where those people become the only people who matter. And outside perspectives – the really good ones that are based on sound strategy – can smash these type of echo chambers.

Does your in-house experience allow you to build more trust with clients?

The best thing about in-house creative teams – something that even the best agencies can forget – is that no one is going to know the brand as well as them. That’s why you have to make them part of the process. When an in-house team feels like they’re being dictated to and not partnered with, trust is impossible. And no one’s happy.

Respect is key. In-house creative teams must be brought to the table. Maybe they’ve already tried to solve the problem the agency is trying to solve. Maybe no one thought to ask them and they’re sitting on a great idea. Ignoring them is a big mistake. Their talent, insights, and knowledge are integral to getting to the best solution possible.

We talk a lot these days about agile strategy. What’s the importance of agility for clients today?

Tech companies move fast. We all know that. And in-house creative teams move even faster. It’s a go, go, go mentality. Creative brief? Please. Like that ever happens. You have to go straight from idea to execution in most cases. Working on the agency side, you get the chance to take a deeper dive and really explore solutions and methods. But you also have to be agile. Companies are trusting your ability to both deep dive and also to stay quick-footed, flex, and move in pace with their business. As a result, I make it my operating principal to combine the deeper dive into strategy and research with the insane speed of a high-performing in-house team. That’s what clients today need.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco strategy and design agency.