To ad agencies, digital marketing experts, SEO specialists and content marketers, brand promotion is as important as it ever was.
It’s also more complex. Building a brand through advertising and marketing used to be confined to a narrow set of venues — billboards, television, print ads.
Today’s marketplace includes all those things and more: social media, websites, and digital marketing to smartphones and tablets.
But, according to James O’Connor, a marketing professional at Fusion 360, the most important place to start marketing is right at home. Sometimes the publicly advertised face of a company doesn’t match what employees see and do. Such was the case with UPS.
“UPS recently launched an internal brand overhaul for this reason,” O’Connor writes. “They realized their internal operations and procedures scarcely mirrored their customers’ experiences. Their brand was slipping from the inside out.”
O’Connor says the improved customer service — created not by advertising to customers, but by marketing internally, made UPS one of the top global brands in 2012.
“UPS demonstrated how a brand is not a gimmick, but rather a promise meant to be kept at every level of interaction the consumer has with their logo,” O’Connor explains. “Although their avowed internal brand statement is much different than its external statement, “what can Brown do for you” is supported by what the employees see as important every day: “One brand, one company, one vision.”
Do your employees believe in your branding concept? In other words, do the people you employ carry out the marketing plan when it comes down to the nitty gritty of product or service quality and exemplary customer care?
“Forbes reports that only 50 percent of employees believe their company’s branding concept, and that an even smaller percent are equipped to carry out the brand’s message,” notes O’Connor. “Marketing no longer starts with the customer, it begins with the inside of an organization. Businesses understand that digital marketing helps them, but in-store experiences count as well — whether they be online or in real life.”
To read more from the Utah SEO specialists at Fusion 360, click here.
