Authentic Branding

A new year means a new marketing plan. Maybe this is the year you finally work on that rebranding effort, launch that new service, change perceptions among a key market segment, get your collateral overhauled, figure out your social media strategy or (fill in the blank here).

For generation upon generation, the power of storytelling has been essential to how we communicate, how we pass along information, how we entertain, inform and record history.

It's also a key branding tool that many businesses overlook. In an age when everybody's got something to sell, harnessing the power of story can make all the difference in your marketing efforts. Stories aren't new to marketing. We've been telling them for years in many different ways. But today, stories spread more easily, more quickly and further than ever before.

The days of blatantly self-serving, even false, marketing are slipping away (I can hear my professional services firms clients cheering!). But there's still a lot of debate happening out there about what's taken its place, what works now, how to market a business in a way that feels good and gets results.

It's not really all that complicated.

Storytelling. Personality. Authenticity. Information.

Right now, businesses, especially professional service-based businesses, have an extraordinary opportunity.

Marketing is changing. In an environment of information overload, never-ending promotional messages and low trust, it's harder to establish a credible and attention-getting marketing presence using the old rules. Lucky for us, the new rules are about educating, consulting, guiding: the very skills and philosophies that have guided professional services-based businesses for years.

Over the past few weeks, I've been talking to some of those "old school" traditional media folks-- niche magazine editors. If you read the headlines, you might think these people are a dying breed, but in fact, they're alive, well and talking regularly to your customers and clients. If you're starting out with a new content marketing plan, or working content marketing principles into your existing plan, you can learn a lot from how these folks (and those who get paid to build relationships with them) operate.

B2B marketing fundamentals don't change. The tools change. The technologies change. The business climate changes. But marketing your business has always been about being visible, being remarkable, communicating what you do to the people who care and building those relationships. That's pretty much what it's about today, too.

Have you ever languished in one of those endless strategic planning meetings designed to hash out your organization's core values statement? Or the marketing pow-wows aimed at defining your key messages? You know the ones. Those meetings where you can just feel the life being sucked out of you.

Maybe it's just me? My experience is that many of these well-meaning marketing-focused efforts end up being a waste of valuable time, energy and brainpower.

Before you stop reading and click away, hear me out.

In the past week, the topic of writing case studies has come up in conversations with three different businesses. Must be something in the air.

As often happens, my own case study focus was reinforced almost immediately. What you focus on really does expand, no? I wasn't actually looking for this info, but I noticed that Casey Hibbard has written a great little piece on using case studies on the Marketing Profs web site. (Read it!) She begins:

Recently, I heard David Meerman Scott give an interesting keynote at the Marketing Profs digital conference. While all of his presentation was worth listening to, the part that had me cheering (and if you follow me on Twitter, you heard me) was the simple recognition that words like "cutting-edge" and "robust" are overused. Not necessary. Meaningless.