Attending a Brand Innovators Summit early in the year is a wonderful way add some ponder-worthy points to your day-to-day marketing strategy.
I’ve been a huge fan of their events ever since I learned about them while I was living in Austin, TX. The very first event I went to was one of their SXSW programs and was instantly hooked. I am always in awe of the incredible talent they line up and the personal connections that people can make.
Brand Innovators recently hosted an event in San Francisco called Challenger Brands. This day-long summit focused on what it means to be a challenger brand across a broad range of industries.
If you couldn’t make the event, never fear! Here are some of my key takeaways from the sessions.
Key Takeaways from the Brand Innovators - Challenger Brands 2020 Summit
Brand marketing and performance marketing shouldn’t be looked at as two separate entities.
They are two pieces of the same goal: to get people to react to your brand. Brand marketing creates empathy and emotional connection while performance marketing makes it easier for customers to take your desired action once the connection has been made.
Data is still first, content is still king. But how we’re looking at both are changing.
There is so much data out there, so whether you’re making sense of it with your in-house team or a third-party tool, use it dictate your understanding of your customers.
Put your content where your customers already are. Don’t make them go out of their way to hear about you.
Test your content before committing. Use platforms to try out messaging and concepts and report back with data from those tests.
Your customers are multi-dimensional.
They have other interests and hobbies than just whatever key identifiers your team has assigned them. Leverage those interests in your marketing plans.
Session by Session Takeaways
Session 1: Panel Discussion: The Challenger Mentality
There is a resurgence of traditional media being built into current media mixes. But it’s not necessarily “traditional”
I.e. direct mail, podcasts, streaming TV, out of home
When looking at media reports, just looking at the metrics doesn’t tell the entire story.
Example: tv ads can have a lift on all of the business, but you cannot track those in detail.
“Brand love” metric - this can be an influencer or viral moment. They may not be exactly attributed towards a specific metric, but you’re noticing the overall lift.
Session 2: Fireside Chat
What is the graduation point from a challenger brand to a more established brand?
It depends on how you define your category. You can look at it via your niche or in a broader sense.
Authentic ads from your customers have performed better with the audience than the celebrity-driven ads.
Session 3: Client Success Story
Trend to a market force…
They are very timely
Didn’t let your marketing team get caught in the red tape. Empower them to get everything done that needs to be a market force to get to market first
Find what your customers care about and care about the same thing.
Customers are submitting content even when it’s not tied to a contest.
Companies that go the extra mile get remembered forever.
Think less of a specific client, but more about the values to connect with as you build your marketing plans.
Session 4: Fireside Chat
State of market, state of mind, state of success.
You can be first in the category and still have a challenger mindset.
Theory behind content: simply put: is it compelling to watch?
People like to be around people like them.
Start with the audience. Make the experience better for them and get people to consider it a community.
Don’t pigeon hold your customers - they have interests beyond the key characteristics that you may have identified around their interests.
Session 5: Panel Discussion: Creating Compelling Content & Personalization at Scale
We want to have the right message at the right customer at the right time and personalized. This concept can be very overwhelming when it comes from a creative perspective.
One way to combat this is to foster more of a test and learn mentality when approaching this.
Personal one to one connections is entirely based on understanding the type of data you have and the ability to act on the data.
Data personalization or content creation trends - consumers are getting stronger and have more power than ever. Consumers don’t want to download your app, or go to your website. They want to do business in the areas that they are already spending time.
Consumers aren’t interested in doing business with brands that they have to go out of their way to get stuff done.
People are still willing to share their data if things are transparent about how the data is being used.
You can leverage the power of word of mouth and stories versus using traditional stories.
Don’t be afraid to experiment and let people try out new platforms. Don’t let sales be the only driving factor for these experiments - it’s the exposure and engagement that is still really valuable.
The future of marketing is dependent on AI and machine learning. Make sure you’re partnering with those concepts to get out your marketing messages.
When putting content on multiple platforms, you may not use the same content on each platform, but you can leverage the same messaging
For example, leveraging Facebook to see what performs the best and then expanding it to other platforms and other content types
Session 6: Fireside Chat
Job Mentality - go where you can build on yourself.
Being able to be your authentic self at your work helps you keep from burning out too much.
How do you get a successful team up and running?
Know who you are as a leader and be transparent about it so your team knows what to expect from you
Being consistent about you as a leader taking the parts of the projects that allow your reports to do the work that they need to do
Session 7: Sourcing/Procurement’s Collaboration with Marketing
Adding value by educating the CFO of how engaging with different brands and businesses has actually brings benefits to the brands.
Session 8: Women in Marketing Leadership – Ancestry
Personalization is an on-going process, so you probably won’t get it perfect every time. And that’s okay!
Creating best practices and case studies from the marketing and product efforts that everyone on every team can leverage.
Test and learn is really important mindset to have in order to be able to see if the new shiny things work well for your brand and what is actually worth scaling quickly within your brand.
Session 9: Keynote from True Data
A presentation of data capabilities
Session 10: Panel Discussion: Innovation in Partnerships
Partnerships shouldn’t just be something that is very short term, but rather they can also be something this is more ongoing and evergreen.
Influencers - what can we do to connect with them to make sure there is an opportunity for a long term relationship rather than just a fling. You need to be able to respect their voice and try not to overproduce their content.
How can we take the content that people can find on the business website and turn them into pieces of content that can live on the platforms that they are already currently active on?
If you depend on these other teams, it’s important to bridge the gaps and make it all work and are reviewing the same sources of everything.
Partnerships…
High touch - partnerships take a lot of effort. You have to execute across a lot of points
High impact - with relatively low cost to a challenger brand. It’s really about the labor of the team as the investment
Session 11: Keynote from Cora
As a company starts to grow, you can see that there will be a shift in the focus of the brand growth in the benefit of the business, rather than the benefit of the customer.
Attraction - the experience someone has when they interact with your business - is caught up in the empathic design. It is a 360 experience from every moment with your product.
If any part of your experience is not thoughtful, they will apply that to all of your work/product
Shared values and purpose - what you and the customer believe and hold value in. It’s about working together to achieve something.
These give people something to remember - people are 22% more likely to remember a story
Trust - rooted in honesty. Without this, your brand lacks integrity.
Session 12: Fireside Chat
What do you think about content ROI?
As you’re at the forefront of making cultural changes, one of the most important things that needs to happen is the why, the education.
Set aside a small budget to test it and see if people pick up on the notion of it. The ROI is a longer game, not something that happens immediately.
Listening to the customers and seeing how you can adopt products through their lifestyle.
Session 13: Panel Discussion: Digital Marketing 2020 Outlook: Trends, Tactics, & Tools
You can build out a really engaging plan, but it can take a lot longer to get every department up to speed on it all.
The definition of strategy is choice.
At its core, marketing is still the same. It is still informing a consumer of the goods.
But now, it’s the technology that has changed in how we’re getting stuff and data consumption has gone up.
Marketing is to create a frictionless experience for them to be around the product.
Insights about your consumers - similar to before, don’t just bucket them into a singular trait. You can look to see what are common things that link together the different audiences when you start to think about expanding your offerings.
Unblock the ability to explain the marketing funnel. Let people ask questions without feeling dumb.
Make sure that you’re actually able to test things with your markets and customers.
Session 14: Keynote from Simulmedia
Ways in which tv is becoming like digital
Software manages planning
Used for both acquisition and awareness
Custom audiences based on 1st-party data
Automated execution accelerates buying
Rapid, precise measurement that supports multi-touch attribution
Session 15: Fireside Chat
Leading with the story when talking about your brand, rather than just talking about your product right off the bat.
Think about Gen Z - they, more so than ever, are changing the way that they interact with brands.
Consumers want things right away - they don’t want to wait for anything.
Brand drives overall performance.
People are willing to spend more or visit more frequently due to a brand and an emotional connection, not just because of performance marketing.
Best thing that can happen to any company or any environment is the introduction of competition. It helps you understand the best ways to spend money and helps you understand how to tell your story and where to spend that time.
Understand that you may not be your audience, so don’t let that influence your decision on marketing tactics.
Session 16: Panel Discussion: The Evolution of the “Challenger Brand” and What’s to Come in 2020
It is so important to train your creative teams on how to create content that is actually optimized for each channel - you can’t just take a tv ad and cut it into a social ad.
How to develop a lifetime customer? Especially if they are younger?
First step here is to segment out your different audiences and understand how they are engaging with your product.
Social media is a great starting point for a lot of these consumers.
Iterate really quickly. This is a huge tech model that you can leverage in other industries. You don’t have to be perfect when you put things out every time.
Rethinking how you use paid search as an avenue. It’s about long-tail key terms.
