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More than ever, CMOs are being looked to as the primary growth drivers of their companies. But what if you seem to be doing everything right and growth is still falling short? You have a strong brand strategy in place, a good sales team, and your marketing strategy is being executed on time and on budget. What then?

Chances are good that, if you’re experiencing a disconnect like this, the problem lies in the connection between your brand and your target audience. You may be reaching them. But how successfully are you really connecting with them?

How can you identify the problem? And what can you do to nurture your target audience while giving your sales team the support they need to drive growth?

Marketing Strategy That Drives Growth

At Emotive Brand, we find that the diagnosis for this condition virtually always comes from the outside.

The area where insiders typically have the least insight is the hearts and minds of their target audiences, which are so easily obscured behind the company’s own view of where its value lies. Companies often also find it challenging to stay on top of new developments in communications when their core competencies lie elsewhere.

Cue your agency. It’s the agency’s job to:

• Understand your brand, products, and services in a new and exciting way, through the eyes of the people who can make it grow.
• Use customer, marketplace, brand, and contextual insights to define strategic shifts that will win them over.
• Create the right message and present it creatively to get their attention and rekindle the connection.
• Identify existing and emerging channels that will best support your message and resonate with your audiences.
• Tie it all together in a marketing strategy that drives growth.

Rebooting Advertising and Marketing Strategy

We’ve been working with a Silicon Valley client whose technology is so smart it inspires us. This company has been in business 15 years. It has a crack product that’s unique in the market. The product should be selling itself.

But there’s a problem: the company has under-marketed both its brand and its product. Its sales are lackluster. We identified five primary marketing challenges:

• Marketplace perceptions hadn’t kept up with the company, so potential customers had outdated ideas that needed to be overcome before they would even pay attention.
• Its advertising and marketing communications were telling an old story that didn’t communicate the product differentiators and reinforced outdated perceptions.
• Its communications style was out of date and disconnected from both the brand truths and its audiences.
• The client was spending ad dollars against a broad target rather than an audience aligned to its sales target, wasting precious marketing dollars.

We dug into this project to understand the marketplace, the product, and the brand through the eyes of our client’s target audiences. And we transformed its marketing strategy with some fundamental shifts.

Aligning Marketing Strategy with Sales

First, we used creative and surprising ways to talk about the product in advertising. Solidly rooted in meaningful customer insights and up-to-date product truths, the creative is doing a great job at grabbing the attention of sales prospects. Fresh and resonant messaging and design are replacing apathy with interest and engagement.

We also employed account-based marketing (ABM), replacing the client’s broad advertising strategy with a personalized approach. We’re targeting the sales team’s hottest prospects, in the places where they are most likely to engage.

This more resonant, tailored messaging is reinvigorating the company’s sales as well as its brand, making it relevant again and helping nurture prospects who might have ignored a more general message.

If you need fresh ideas for connecting with your sales prospects instead of merely reaching them, Emotive Brand would like to connect with you.

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

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