I’m a big believer in simplifying your marketing and scaling 1 – 2 channels until you get to $30m+ in revenue. After that you can expand to additional channels including spending money on brand marketing.
The one thing all businesses should have is a brand book.
Most businesses either don’t know what a brand book is, or include too much unnecessary information while forgetting the important points.
Here are the ingredients for a great brand book:
- Vision statement. This is your vision for a better tomorrow. It should be tangible, understandable and clear. Tesla’s vision is to create a world powered by solar and sustainable energy.
- Mission statement. This is your main high level objective for why you’re in business. Using same example as above, Elon Musk’s mission statement with Tesla is: To accelerate the world toward sustainable energy. SpaceX’s mission statement is to enable multi-planetary living. Salesforce’s mission statement is to empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.
- Customer insights – you should know your current customer, lapsed customer and target customer. Things you should know about them are their psychographics and demographics.
- Voice and tone – just a few lines about the personality of your brand.
- Creative – no need to spend a lot of money on this but have a few basic things that represent your visuals and photography.
- Brand pyramid – this is like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs but for your brand. Starting at the bottom of the triangle with “Features & attributes”, then “Functional benefits”, then “Emotional benefits”, then “Brand persona”, and at the very top “brand idea” which is the essence of your brand and what drives your positioning.
Your brand book can be 5 – 10 slides… no more than that. It can be used to create your marketing toolkit which leads to all your performance marketing campaigns and it can become a tool shared with 3rd parties as you embark on partnerships, press and affiliates.
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