After more than a decade of creating brands, we find the same issue time and time again: Businesses often put too much emphasis on what a single piece of marketing can do.
Businesses can often see a brochure or a bus-stop as an all encompassing workhorse capable of selling their product or service, promoting a brand, driving web traffic, promoting their team, cementing your place in the community, making them breakfast in bed, and so on. While all marketing pieces are multifunctional, the truth is you need to prioritise what functions are crucial for each piece. Let’s use a case study example: A real estate agency’s signboard.
Signboards have three utility functions. For buyers, it lets them know they are at the right home. For agencies, it’s a low-cost outdoor ad to create awareness. And, for agents, it’s an opportunity to capture leads. These are the three functions that should be prioritised. If you’re doing more than that, you’re setting yourself up for failure. So outside of serving these functions, how do you work out what to include and what not to include?
Include relevant brand assets
Your most defining brand assets should be on the board. That might be a colour, a pattern, a slogan, a tagline, or a shape. If there is one asset consumers know you for it should be on your signboard. If you use a sub-brand (such as a premium version of your brand), consumers can’t make the mental leap between understanding that black signboards are for luxury properties and blue signboards are for standard properties. Make them all luxury! If you want an expensive option, make the board bigger.
Similarly, you want to make sure your colours are 100 percent correct – regardless of the marketing piece. Colours and printing is less of an art and more of science. Don’t use different printing suppliers. Spend time working with your printer upfront to get the colour right and ask them to visually match your brand colour each time they print a board, you’ll have the right colour for years to come.
Don’t include anything that distracts
Alright, so you’re up to speed on what to prioritise. Let’s look at what you can do without. In essence, you need to think like Marie Kondo and remove anything that doesn’t ‘spark joy’ – only in this case joy is making your marketing incredibly specific and deliberate.
Going back to our signboard example, elements such as QR codes, email addresses, and agent photos can easily be stripped away if you want to get specific about your functions. QR codes only solve the problem of someone typing the address into Google, email addresses are rarely used by potential buyers looking at boards, and while agents might argue a photo is good promotion – they themselves are more likely to spend money on social media ads rather than a bus-stop ad. While there is wriggle room, most of the time these are non-essentials.
Stand out from the competition
We’ve been told so many times that people want to look like X competitor in their industry. And it’s easy to understand why – they’re the top performers. The benchmark of success. But not once have we given them a look alike brand or marketing piece. Why? Because it doesn’t represent their brand or their values. Instead, we create something that is unique to them.
If you’re copying another brand, everyone in the industry will know. And it will hurt. It’ll hurt your brand’s integrity, your ability to recruit, and your ability to stand on your own feet. People want to work with the original – not the clone.
So how do you stand out? If you were using signboards, we’d recommend the following: Print off your board and your competitors’ boards. Now cover the logos. If they look too similar, that’s a problem because people are driving past these boards every day and the logos blend into the background. Refer back to your brand assets, what do you have that no one else does? That’s your leverage.