Guide to Brand Positioning.

Gaining a deep understanding of the issues buyer's face, their struggles, their goals and their daily grind will enable you to create unique and powerful content from their point of view.

Make the customer the hero by creating content that demonstrates an understanding of the tasks they need to accomplish and the ideal path they need to take to complete them.

Use your stories to establish your brand as a reliable guide – a trusted companion on their journey. Highlight the troubles they will face and explain and demonstrate how you can lead them through to a better place – a better solution. Extol the benefits of taking the journey and explain the rewards that come from a successful conclusion.

Most of all, be clear about what you do, how you can help, and the benefits to them. Finally, remember it's a story – it needs to be engaging, entertaining even. Your tone of voice should be appropriate, welcoming, friendly, motivating and characterful. Your story needs to capture the imagination of your audience and transport them to a world of possibilities.

Here are the stages of the ideal story:

Differentiating your brand has never been more important – whether that be in your content, your offer, your culture, your brand's personality or the way you present that brand – being different is a proven way to stand out from your competitors.

Brand identity is a vital element of that approach. Not only by making sure that your brand design is distinctive – but also by establishing authority and credence through quality design. And it's important because the way your brand looks is the very first impression you give – visual imagery is processed by the eye and brain way before written content. The design has a significant impact on brand perception – how well your prospects and customers receive your brand.

The look and feel of your website, your social media posts, your packaging, your publications – even your business cards – communicates a wealth of signals to your audience about your brand identity and either add value to your brand equity or damage it. They all help create a brand. It is vital that those signals are intentional – that they back up the brand narrative and the messages you wish to convey.

Naturally, it's important to get the basics right – clean, clear, uncluttered design helps with legibility and ensures the message shines through. Making sure the typographic hierarchy is obvious, and layouts easy to follow are simple things that cannot be ignored. Never underestimate the fundamental importance of getting those basics right. But beyond the basics is where you express your character, authority, culture, approach and point of difference through your design. This brand development is an incredibly fine balancing act and needs a deftly nuanced touch to avoid giving the wrong message or alienating your audience.

Imagine arriving at a meeting and talking in an accent no-one can understand, or being overly familiar with everyone, or rude, or perhaps even worse, not being noticed. Just as the way you present yourself in a meeting is one of the critical factors that help you achieve your goals in that meeting, so the way you present your offering through your brand design, is one of the vital elements that help you attract and convert customers.

So, design is crucial and needs thoughtful implementation across every piece of content. Getting this wrong risks giving a false impression or even not being attractive enough to get a chance to present your proposition.

We live in a world of rapidly accelerating change. More than ever, that pace of change is making more and more demands on people's time, and their time is a finite resource – there are only so many hours in a day.

And so it is that any modern business is always competing for people's time. But you are not just competing against your competitors. You are competing against the demands of your customer's daily job. What you produce will be judged against the standards and value of all media – television, radio, podcasts, blogs, Facebook, Instagram and other social media. Your content needs to stand out against that background.

Your potential audience is immersed in a multitude of media, and they could be actively engaged in any one of them, or, even more likely, a number of them, at different times, in different ways and for various reasons.

It would be best if you could understand and publish in different media, allowing you to reach your audience where they are, at that moment, with a suitable, media-friendly, media-appropriate, message. Having a media mindset is about creating content that your audience will want to consume with the same excitement and enjoyment as their favourite paid-for magazine, radio show or video channel.

Repurposing content for different media and publishing additional content for different stages of the buyer's journey will ensure you are relevant and read.

Think like a media company and build a media brand around your business. With a media mindset, you will always think about customers interests and needs first and develop ways to educate and inform them.

Building a media brand might sound far-fetched until you think inch-wide, mile-deep. You specialise, right? You have insights, stories, knowledge and expertise that set you apart. Now repurpose across channels that work for your audience.

Good media is well designed, multi-channel, with a 'human' voice. Develop your obvious brand assets such as your website, newsletter, social media, blog and eBooks, but also think video, podcasts, pillar pages, webinars, magazines and reports too. Think like a media company, and you will start to plan events, publish research and even consider awards in your market.

It is equally important to think about where these assets turn up in your buyer's journey and with what messages? The information prospects are searching for will vary according to where they are in the buying cycle. Content to generate awareness will be different from content to convert leads to customers. Broadly speaking the three types of content that match the stages of the buyer's journey are as follows:

1. Awareness - What do I need?

2. Consideration - What are my options?

3. Decision - Why should I buy now – from you?

By considering your content matrix – whilst being aware of buyer persona and lifecycle stage – you can create cornerstone content that will resonate and help move prospects through the buying process. And by identifying the most pressing questions they have at each stage and planning to answer those across multiple channels, you will build trust.

Any work you do with social media has to be informed by the knowledge you have of your customers' habits and preferences, the most important of which is knowing what social media platforms they are likely to be engaged with.

There is no point in spending time and effort developing content for channels where your audience is not present. The first step is, therefore, to identify where you will find your audience.

Your brand content should be all about appealing to your customers and potential customers. Base everything on the buyer personas you have developed - what interests them, what they respond to, and what makes them sit up and pay attention.

It's also important to recognise that prospects may be at different stages in the buyer's journey – so developing social content that reflects that stage is another critical capability to master.

Finally, your social content should deliver on-point messages that will help you to achieve your overall brand strategy.

In social media, your brand's personality is a vital element of getting your audience to engage, as well as differentiating you from the crowd. Your tone of voice and character should be an expression of your brand's culture and values – and is all part of building the brand. Ideally, you should have brand guidelines that layout clearly what type of posts you should be creating and with what attitude.

Being helpful and informative should also be a natural part of your brand, but the way you go about that should again be tailored to your brand's personality.

Don't forget that imagery and design are as crucial in social posts as the words you write – maybe more so. Choose your images and graphics with care.

Ensuring your social media is a good fit with your brand is an essential part of brand management and should not be treated lightly or done without thought.

Finally, and most importantly, don't forget to benchmark, measure results and refine your efforts. Only by measuring your social impact against key performance indicators will you know what works and what doesn't. A constant iterative process of experimenting, measuring and refining will allow you to align your social content and its results with your brand strategy and overall aims.

For the sake of brand consistency, sales, and marketing should be working from the same brand strategy. To avoid sales and marketing working at cross-purposes or worse, working against each other, you need to create a culture of alignment from the very beginning.

Anytime your customers interact with your company – at whatever level – with whatever department, their experience should be consistent – the brand messaging should be the same – the personality should be the same. This should be a given and implies that all areas of the business, including sales and marketing should be on the same page, they should all be aware of the company's agreed strategy at all levels: business, marketing and brand.

Having them, both focussed on a common brand strategy – a common plan – will deliver way more value to the business than if they work independently.

When you start the brand development process, involve them both. Working with sales and marketing to define strategy creates a more informed buyer persona and a better, more robust approach.

Whilst marketing may know more about what potential customers you want to attract and what they are interested in, sales are likely to learn more about existing customers and what attracted them to buy from you (and hopefully, what makes them stick with you).

Whilst most of the information and data about prospects and customers now flows into marketing from online interactions, it is still sales who have to close the deal. Sales need all the appropriate and timely information to enable them to do their job.

This is all part of Sales Enablement - the iterative process of providing your business's sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers. (Hubspot)

Sales Enablement is a collaborative process – owned by both sales and marketing. Marketing provides the content and intelligence, and sales pass back details of their real-world interactions with the customer. And their observations and feedback on how the content and campaigns are received.

Working together, pooling the knowledge gained from both sales and marketing – will provide more comprehensive market and customer intelligence that can feed into strategy.

The day-to-day data from multiple customer touchpoints with both sales and marketing, as they traverse the buyer's journey, can be channelled back to the CRM to deliver more targeted prospect interactions and better results.

Aligning sales and marketing will also enable powerful account-based marketing (ABM) – where the two areas work as one to identify major prospect companies. Together they create precisely targeted, unique content, along with strategic real-world interactions, that bring in big accounts that boost the company's revenue. It is where a strong Sales Enablement strategy and implementation can pay off – proving the sum is more than the parts.