Is the implementation plan for your brand strategy as robust as your new workout program?

Yo ’ve started to huff and puff as you climb the stairs and your waist has definitely thickened. It’s time to get back in shape! After conducting the usual research, you sign up for a gym that’s located close to work. For a while, you manage to work out 3-4 times a week and then… nothing. Once you attain a minimally good physical condition, you simply lose the motivation to keep training on a regular basis. Your good intentions and discipline give way in the face of other urgent priorities. Interestingly, we’ve noticed a similar pattern with the marketing activities of many companies—especially B2Bs. You decide to review your positioning, proceed to adjust your brand strategy and even devote significant effort to building a new website. Once launched, you just sit back and wait for results, as if it were 10-20 years ago. But this situation is the equivalent of renovating a boutique, but forgetting to put a sign up outside that will get clients through your door.

The key to good ROI: having an implementation plan!

In order to enjoy the bounty of your investment, it’s crucial to create a plan that supports deployment and regular maintenance activities. Think of your brand and your company as chapters in a book: Positioning is chapter 1, brand expression and the website are chapter 2. The writing of your company “book”, comprising many chapters and volumes, is an ongoing process. Curiously, when I ask companies why they don’t have a plan, more than one president has told me that their competition doesn’t engage in marketing, so they feel no pressure to engage in that kind of activity. My answer is always one of the following:

• “So you’re not interested in differentiating your brand?”
• “So you’re not interested in winning market shares from those careless companies?”
• “So you’re not interested in building a strong brand that becomes a market leader?”

Act on a regular basis to give your marketing some muscle

To prevent the inevitable dip in your sales department, you must build, as well as maintain, solid communications activities. A brand that doesn’t communicate is a brand that cannot sustain a consistent presence in the one place where it needs one: in the minds of clients and prospects. Your marketing and brand strategy is not unlike that new workout program: let it drop for a few weeks and you’ll soon feel the difference in your relationship with your market—and it will happen faster than you think. Should your competition take advantages of this gap to launch a marketing push, you’ll find yourself lagging behind, weighed down by ineffective tools, such as that inactive website. In choosing to work with marketing professionals like Solocom, you’ll be guided, step-by-step, through the process of creating and maintaining a strong and outstanding brand.