Adam’s Blog

Building Brand by Giving Value: 5 Tips

SUMMARY:

Television commercials, online banner ads, billboards; they’ve all been proven to help marketing. But how much value do these ads offer customers? Wouldn’t customers be happier with your brand if they engaged with it in a fun or useful way?
Dig into these tips for providing customers with a useful experience that will leave a longer lasting, positive impression. Includes examples of new tactics, such as widgets and iPhone apps, and offline tactics, such as cause marketing.
Getting your target audience to have a positive experience with your brand is, of course, beneficial. However, not enough marketers are providing real value to their audiences — creating a positive and useful experience for consumers in the context of their brands, says Steve Rubel, SVP and Director of Insights, Edelman Digital.
Rubel is responsible for keeping Edelman Digital and its clients “ahead of the curve” with the latest ways to effectively manage public relations and marketing. He also works closely with a select group of Edelman Digital’s clients. Edelman is the largest independent PR firm in the world, with 3,300 employees in 50 offices worldwide, Rubel says.
Rubel is also the author of the popular Micro Persuasion blog, where he writes about technology and its effect on marketing. He also manages a personal Twitter feed with more than 26,000 followers, and has interesting theories on Twitter’s future (see links).
Below, we’ve highlighted Rubel’s tips for creating marketing that provides real value to an audience. Pay close attention if you’ve considered building an iPhone app or a widget to promote your brand.

FIVE TIPS FOR PROVIDING VALUE VIA MARKETING

The key to getting consumers to use a branded online tool or widget is utility. Useful tools will be used. Buying TV ads during a professional football game does help the game be broadcast — but that is useful only in a loose sense.
A much more directly useful application would update consumers via their mobile phones on their favorite team’s scores as they happen.
-> Tip #1. Create something people would pay for
If you’ve created an app or widget and are wondering if it is truly useful, ask yourself, ‘How much would someone be willing to pay for this?’ If the answer is ‘nothing,’ you’re likely not providing enough value.
Some brands actually have been able to sell tools they’ve created, Rubel says. Kraft, for example, created the iFood Assistant that sells for $0.99 in Apple’s iPhone App Store. The tool has the following features:
• Recipe browsing
• Recipe of the day
• Shopping lists
• Directions to nearby markets
• How-to cooking videos
Other brands have created popular, useful iPhone apps that are free. Tylenol, for example, created the Tylenol PM Sleep Tracker app. Users can log their number of hours of sleep each day to see a prediction of their current mood and trends in their sleep habits over time.
-> Tip #2. Think outside apps and widgets
Apps and widgets are two of the latest ways to provide utility to audiences. Other options have been available for years.
Video, for example, is a useful channel to provide entertainment. A funny series of videos (that are more substantial than short commercials) could be branded. But remember: You will have to compete for attention.
“There’s more competition there, because you’re competing against the people who create content for a living really well,” Rubel says.
- Informative videos
Practical, how-to videos can provide value. And it can be easier to be informative than to be funny.
- Games
Games are another way to provide branded entertainment, or even practical information. IBM, for example, built a game called INNOV8 2.0 to teach current and prospective customers about service oriented architecture (SOA) technology.
-> Tip #3. Go easy on self-promotion
An app or a video that is overly promotional is not useful — it’s annoying. Remember to focus on providing value first, and branding second. Online apps should look less like banner ads and more like digital tools.
-> Tip #4. Follow your audience
The growing capability of applications for social networks and cell phones can be hypnotic. Don’t fall under their spell just yet. No matter how powerful and useful a tool is, it has to reach your audience to have a positive impact on marketing.
It does not make sense to create an iPhone app for an audience that does not own the phone, or a Facebook app for an audience that is not on the network.
-> Tip #5. Remember offline tactics
The Internet is not the only channel for providing value to an audience. Cause marketing, for instance, is an offline channel, says Rubel.
By making donations, partnering with, and sponsoring the events of charitable organizations, a brand can provide positive value to a community. This approach can have a much wider appeal, Rubel says.
“What you’re doing is creating some kind of value to society and contributing back to society in meaningful ways that are basically useful to people on a mass level, not a micro level,” he says.
Steve Rubel spoke at ad:tech San Francisco in April