14 Apr HOW AMBITIOUS BRANDS
USE VIDEO TO DRIVE SALES
Ambitious brands know exactly what motivates their customers and use video as a means of reaching them across every media platform.
There is a method to their madness and a strategy to their swagger. Ambition not only favours the brave, ambition rewards those who are relentless in their approach.
To follow are the 7 essential steps every brand wanting to win must follow.
First things first. Ambitious brands are crystal clear at ‘knowing’ and ‘naming’ the customer.
1. UNDERSTAND YOUR CUSTOMER
The first rule of marketing is that “you are not the customer”. If you market, manufacture or sell a product, by default, you are not the customer. Ambitious brands can’t afford to ‘think they know’ their customers, they must ‘know they know’. To achieve this they immerse themselves in their customer’s world. They observe, study, and read everything available about their demographics, their psychographics, their behaviours and their actions. A deep dive into qualitative research begins to reveal what it feels like to walk in their shoes.
Building on these valuable insights – quantitative research will provide perspective and scale. Extrapolating key drivers to identify ongoing patterns and trends starts to give another sense of the market dynamics. The impact of seasonal factors, or the role of sports results on purchase decisions, even the impact of rain on people’s reported satisfaction with a restaurant (reportedly, restaurants receive 2.7x more negative reviews when the weather is bad, than when the weather is good).
Segmenting the market into distinct types will prioritise who are the most valuable, and which segment represents the biggest opportunity for your business. Armed with this intelligence the job is now all about ‘targeting’. Deciding who you will market to, and who you will not. It’s about being choiceful. Marketing budgets are limited and are best deployed once key decisions have been made. Choosing who you will ‘go after’ and who you will ‘not’ provides significant focus to all further strategic decisions you will have to make.
Which segment will you target? Which will you derive the biggest gains – be that judged on volume, value, market share or simply product trial?
From this vantage point, the ‘positioning’ of your brand starts to become much clearer. The most competitive and compelling aspects of your brand which appeal the most to your target segment become a beacon for the brand.
2. DEFINE YOUR AMBITIOUS BRAND STORY
Having made the first big decision regarding which segment of the market you plan to target, now time to craft an ambitious sales story for your brand that will motivate your target customer in ways which leave the competition an afterthought.
An effective way of building your own sales story is to answer the following.
- Who are we talking to?
- Why are we relevant to their wants/needs?
- What about us catches their attention?
- Who are we competing with?
- Why are we superior?
- What common barriers or concerns can we solve?
- What are they REALLY striving for?
By answering these questions a story begins to emerge – packed with powerful motivations and proof points. This forms the bedrock of your marketing communications making sure every piece of the campaign works hard at gaining attention and building engagement.
3. FORGE A TEAM OF EXPERT PARTNERS
Having decided which segment is the most lucrative to target and determined the strongest proposition for your brand – time now to turn up the volume and create communications that amplify this to attract your desired customers.
Whether working with external experts, or in-house talent – it is essential that clear objectives are set so everyone that is charged with creating content understands the job at hand. Be that to build awareness, lift engagement, remove uncertainty, explain a new feature, or demonstrate how to get the best from the product. SMART objectives provide focus and direction to all involved in the process whilst at the same time setting actual measures to evaluate if the work does what it’s designed to do.
For an objective to be SMART, it needs to be Specific, Measured, Ambitious, Realistic and Timed. For example:
Come the end of the campaign we can measure with a high degree of certainty whether this objective was achieved. Or not.
4. LEAD. GROW. WIN.
Pave the way. Lead the charge. Set the direction. Then let go.
Yes. You must provide oversight and give clear and regular feedback – but let your team of experts take ownership, let them get stuck into the work so they can add real value to the process.
If you’ve achieved the previous steps successfully – you should have a laser-like focus on your target segment, be armed with enough insight to define your competitive advantage and have created a SMART objective that has enough ambition balanced with a good dose of reality so that everyone in the team is on the same page.
You are accountable and this brings a degree of fear. But to win you must let go and lead.
5. PACE PROVIDES PROGRESS
Ambitious brands recognise the process of creating stand out video is not a sprint, but a measured process that requires good planning and good pace.
They allow sufficient time to uncover an insight to drive their strategy, they put pressure on their creative team to crack a fresh expression, and cleverly, they do not rush. Nor do they hurry the final step of producing the work. Yes, there is always a fair degree of pressure but there is always enough time to expertly craft the work, polishing it so that it does justice to all the preceding efforts.
What successful brands achieve best is they avoid the reckless misallocation of time throughout the entire process. In other words they respect the importance of being strategically true, creatively brilliant whilst producing expertly crafted work. After all, it’s only the end piece of content that the consumer gets to experience – best to make sure that is as complete as possible.
6. WORK SMARTER & HARDER
At the heart of being able to stand out and command an ambitious share of the market is the ability to read the conditions and understand the context in which your message will be exposed.
Possibly the best example of reading the context and effectively placing a message to stand out was by COINBASE. A cryptocurrency exchange that placed a floating QR code in the 2022 Super Bowl Final. A placement which cost in the vicinity of US$7 million. A placement which is populated with all the big advertisers all vying to out smart, out shout, or out rap each other. Pepsi Halftime show anyone? What’s remarkable about Coinbase and their ad was the low-fi production values of a colourful QR code designed to elicit maximum intrigue, and importantly, provoke an action of engagement. In order to resolve the mystery of who was behind the QR, the audience had no choice but to scan and get involved.
When a challenger brand such as Coinbase wants to win mainstream awareness and position itself as the ‘next big thing’ – nothing quite beats a placement such as this.
7. SUCCESSFUL BRANDS ARE AMBITIOUS
Ambitious brands wanting to stand out and drive sales embrace video as an essential part of their marketing strategy. By following these steps they devise strategies that inform their marketing tactics.
A thorough understanding of the customers, carefully segmented, allows precise targeting of effort and resources. This provides all expert partners absolute clarity of purpose which enhances all layers in the campaign development process. Marketers that let go and lead their teams allow everyone to shine and excel. This is driven with an eye on pace and progress – providing sufficient time at each crucial stage in order to produce compelling communications that are contextually relevant.
P2 Content Creators
Video for Ambitious Brands