Investing in Your Brand as an Asset

Are you measuring the value of your brand as an asset? Find out more about “goodwill value” and how you can market yours.

Play the audio clip below to listen to Don Hart, President of MOVE communications, as he gives you an overview on “Investing in your brand as an asset”.

read the full blog…

Many times, we find ourselves immersed in the day-to-day activity of getting work done – satisfying the customer – attending to the needs of our teams, and it’s a challenge to step back and take a look at the “big picture” of who you are as a firm.

Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s somewhat easier to measure our hours on a project, our quality scores, our revenue, but are we measuring the value of our brand as an asset?

In determining the value of our brand, there are two key ways to develop a measure. The first, of course, is your financials. They tell a clear story about your current status in terms of cash reserves, debt ratios, revenue, EBIT (Earnings Before Interest and Taxes).

An area that is sometimes overlooked is what is known as “goodwill value” – the value of your brand based on the image your brand has in the market. And that image – that mental picture the consumer has of you – is significantly based on the brand experience you deliver. Both the “what” that you provide but perhaps even more importantly, the “How” you provide it.

In identifying that image for your brand, simplicity is key. What do you do distinctively well? How can you add to that with further focus? For example, at MOVE Communications, our core brand benefit is generating MOMENTUM – marketing movement that helps the firms we serve MOVE ahead. Our core competency is storytelling – communicating the authentic narrative of “who you are” and “the results you bring” in a fashion that has emotional impact with your audience and motivates them to take action.

So, recently, in order to strengthen our brand asset, we’ve been focusing on being able to measure, more effectively and quickly, the results of our marketing efforts. We call it “Doing the Numbers.” We’re working to get the metrics on both the Inbound and Outbound work we’re doing more quickly to our clients so that they can see their activity dashboard. Inbound includes things like website analytics; conversions where someone fills in a form and asks for information; and downloads of value-added material where in the process they provide their contact information. For our Outbound work, Numbers include who opens an email we send out and who actually clicks through to online content. By getting our Inbound and our Outbound Numbers to our customers more quickly, we can make assessments about the success of the efforts and decide what should be done going forward.

We’re also looking at how we can improve the application of our core competency by finding ways to tell stories about client success that can involve group interaction. Webinars offer that format. So we are working with our customers to do more webinars and have that be a monthly “touch point” for their customers – to join in the conversation about issues they are facing, so that there can be shared dialogue; and, through this shared knowledge, advance the individual efforts of the specific firms.

So … pull out your phone now and make an appointment with yourself. The agenda for this meeting is to think about who you are as a brand and the goodwill value that you already have. Then, see what you can do to enhance that by improving part of the customer experience you deliver. As you focus on this element, leverage the power of marketing to tell others about what you’re doing and invite them into the conversation. Rest assured, everyone loves to hear “Tidings of Goodwill.”

Be in touch with us, if you’d like to advance the dialog together.