What goes into a starter toolkit for marketing?

There’s often confusion and resistance when deciding what tools make up the bare minimum for an organisation to start their branding and marketing efforts. We share a list of 6 tools that should be in the bag when launching a brand or entering a market or space.

There are many digital resources available, advising brands and marketers on how to create campaigns, the variety of channels available, and the assets required. Many organisations lean on the same set of tactics that are available to their partners and competitors, while lamenting that these activities do not work.

We argue that there is no lack of ideas, just a general shortage of budget, time and manpower resources to optimise all the available tools. The challenge here is selecting which tactics to leave out and not whether you can activate all of them.

The thinking should be hyper-focused on what the comprehensive theme of the organisation – at that specific lifecycle and milestone – is. This can be coupled with a strategic communications framework and approach that layers tactics upon one another to support a specific objective and achieve a clear outcome.

Consider and adapt the following approach. All assets must be supported by consistent positioning and key messages. They should be saying and repeating the same thing across different formats and details levels throughout all activities.

The goal is to establish your organisation as a leader or subject matter specialist in your field, with a clear point of view, and a means to trigger action in support of your perspective.

Instead of doing everything or too many things, organisations should filter and narrow down options to what is critical and what will have the most impact.

In order to achieve this goal, it is also important that management understands what baseline support is required to initiate or use as a foundation for marketing. There's no free ride, and the peanuts for monkeys analogy comes to mind when brands try to get away spending as little as possible on marketing while setting big expectations on the function.

Here’s our take on the marketing starter toolkit.

· Website/landing page: This needs to be a simple asset that serves as the foundation of your marketing outreach. It needs to share the how, what and why; and your value proposition to the customer. In this era, it’s also important to use videos to simplify and convey technical or hard-to-grasp concepts.

· Asset guide that covers the brand definition, mission, vision and identity; as well as guidelines on how to activate/use the images and assets.

· Hero/key presentation: This is a presentation that provides an overview of the organisation, key customer offerings, research and insights on the customer and mission/targets over time. It can be approached both as a shorter, highly visual format for audience presentation and a longer, more copy-heavy version that can help a key person understand the organisation in more detail.

· Anchor visual that provides a visual summary and overview of your solution/offering. This is usually done in an infographic format.

· An article that can be shared on your website’s blog, or pitched/placed in a media publication or shared on social media. This is a 500 – 1,500 word summary of the presentation.

· White paper, research paper or e-book: This is an asset that allows for commentary, cite research, provide case studies or testimonials in order to provide your organisation with credibility regarding your customer offering and solution.

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We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, retail, travel and technology spaces.

We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion and market entry – for our clients.

Areas of support include:

· Strategic communications: Approach to market, brand concept and map, positioning, messaging, story and narrative, thought leadership

· Marketing: Campaign/programme planning, story-based marketing execution, digital marketing, community amplification, content planning and production, go-to-market execution

· Lead generation: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce

· Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a seconded marketing and/or PR lead for your brand

Discover more about our services at our website or book an exploratory consultation through this link.

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