And the issue with a lot of the ways in which we are marketing to our clients; potential or existing; is still too reliant on old methodologies – form fills, enquiries, “request a callback” – all with an element of delay added for the visitor.

Now don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t really apply to those at the top or middle end of the buyer behaviour cycle – those just setting out on information searches and deciding on the right solutions for them. Downloads from form fills or accessing content in this way will still work relatively well but wouldn’t it be great to start influencing when we begin having conversations with people?

Think of it like this:

As an agency we like to talk to our potential prospects straight away because it allows us to get a feel of you just as much as it allows you to get a feel of what we’re about. When someone visits our website, it’s usually from an Organic Search or Paid Search which has most likely began with the user searching for very high intent keywords “Branding agency Manchester” being one of the main topics when someone is looking for help with rebranding their business.

It’s not too far fetched to presume that by this point the visitor knows what they are looking for. They have done their due diligence on the problems that their business is facing, worked out that it is specifically a branding agency that they need so they go to the all powerful Google and have a look for what they can find.

This takes them to our website, they look around at some of our work… like what they see, are ready to get in touch and start a conversation about how we can begin working together…. and they hit a form fill.

How many times have you been onto a website and seen a form between you and your goal? It says that there will be a response within 24h but, how often do you really believe that? This is where we think businesses that streamline any process for their website visitors will begin to see a higher CVR% and therefore more business.

And all it takes is to put yourself in the mindset of the visitor and just make things simpler!

“But How??” I can hear you screaming.

Think of your website like a shop. And not just any shop, your favourite shop that you go to on a regular basis. The shopkeeper knows your name, greets you in a friendly manner, almost knows your order to a tee and shows you stock relevant to you; perhaps even suggesting other things you might be interested in.

What the shopkeeper doesn’t do is grunt at you as you walk in, expect you to struggle when you can’t find what you want and then tell you to wait 3-5 days for a response when you ask for help. But realistically; this is what most modern websites do nowadays and… it’s pretty frustrating, isn’t it?

Be welcoming of those you don’t know, personalised to those that you do

In the last month, 10% of all of our website traffic have been returning visitors. This means that there is a portion of our visitors that have come back to look at our site after finding it through Google, PPC, Social etc. If we can get details of people as they become more engaged then tailoring their experience is extremely important for building trust. If I visited a website and it greeted me with “Hi Lee!” then I would at first be a little freaked out but then i’d crack a smile.

I would also expect this number to be quite a bit higher for businesses that have e-commerce sites, memberships and newsletters that encourage return visits so it’s even more important for those businesses to ask themselves what they are doing to better engage their existing users.

We actually created a guide for this, read it here >

People don’t remember you, they remember how you made them feel and encouraging positive experiences go a long way in positioning your business as the trusted advisor. So even if the visitor doesn’t go on to buy something from you in the first instance (according to Episerver, 92% of first time visitors won’t), you’ll definitely be in their mind when they are further along in their buyer behaviour cycle.

The time to start streamlining the way that users interact with your site is now so to get started, you can click the little chat box at the bottom right to speak to Christian directly

When people initially talk about branding, their first thought is pointed toward logos and letterheads. While these particular elements are important parts of a good brand, it is important to realise that your organisation’s brand goes much deeper than some colours and imagery.

Another important thing to keep in mind is that Branding isn’t solely reserved for corporations and businesses

Here’s reasons why a strong brand for your NGO is vitally important:

1) Members see it as a beacon of representation for their industry

Members having an ability to be associated with a particular brand is important for both them and your organisation.For them it gives them a sense of belonging whenever they see the prominent branding of your organisation. On your part, it means that your members are more likely to become engaged with your NGO across all forms of media if your branding is clear and consistent.

According to The Drum, Funding Circle; lending platform for small businesses revealed their new brand and positioning identify in August 2017 which sought to embrace emotional positioning – placing their brand amongst the emotions of their stakeholders. They explained that Funding Circle didn’t just want people to buy from them, they wanted people to buy into the brand and become what they are representing. This is where becoming a “beacon of representation” comes in: the idea that strength in numbers is always better and a strong brand can encourage your members to become a unit where the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

2) It helps you to set the internal tone of voice for your organisation when communicating externally

Arguably the most important aspect of good branding is consistency. Having a consistent, recognisable message running through your entire organisations branding will ensure that your members don’t suffer a confusion and therefore a disconnect with your organisation. This consistency is what breeds a natural, unforced tone-of-voice throughout your staff and stakeholders to help push your key messaging across at all times.

“Just like the human voice, a brand voice carries a spectrum of emotions and it behaves differently depending on the context or scenario. The distinctiveness of your voice should come through in it’s consistency; no matter what the circumstances, it should always embody the agreed upon brand values” – Brand Quarterly. Like this example, do your employees have easy to access brand guidelines? Are they all using the correct fonts and emblazoning the brand flag in all of their internal and external communications? This is how to harness that spectrum of emotions to consistently enforce your brand message to members; existing and potential.

3) Guides all stakeholders along a common pathway with a common cause

The main reason for the existence of an NGO is the fact that they are setup with a purpose, a goal that binds all of the stakeholders together. Good, clear and succinct branding can envelope and solidify this sense of community.

If your branding is something that your members can identify with emotively they are far more likely to become more engaged with your cause and follow it on your journey. This will translate with increased member engagement and an improved likelihood of gaining new members when it is easy to see how well received your brand is amongst it’s existing stakeholders.

Looking at Unicef as an example of solid branding that guides stakeholders along a common pathway; there has been multiple examples where their logo has appeared in advertising and on products from brands such as IKEA, EE, Clarks and Football Clubs such as Manchester United and FC Barcelona. The solidity of the branding has meant that even across multiple different sponsor partnerships across different industries, they are encouraging a common cause that people can identify with no matter their personal interests.

4) Allows your members to feel a sense of community and belonging when they can use your brand

For members to be able to showcase your brand by displaying your logo and brand colours on badges, certificates, icons on social media or other tangible elements; this allows them to show an affiliation to you and the credibility and accolades that come with this. It also has the potential to generate referrals. If your branding is strong and can spark conversations, people will talk about it. For example, members of the World Institute for Nuclear Security can become certified Nuclear Security professionals which can cause their colleagues to ask about certificates that they may have either physically or on their social profiles.

This community feel also means that your members are more likely to feel a loyalty and proactiveness to engaging with you. This can come in the form of submitting ideas, advocating the NGO to their colleagues and also attend events or courses.

5) It allows you to develop a higher sense of trust and credibility among other organisations and your members

It’s vitally important for NGOs to be trusted and have a high level of credibility among both the industry that they operate in and amongst the members of the organisation itself. Without this credibility, there is potential for the hard work that they do to be undermined. It is vitally important for an NGO to have modern, updated branding to ensure that they are taken seriously within their industry and (if applicable) internationally in order to not miss out on the extra impact that having a recognisable, credible brand can have.

According to Forbes; “Nearly all customers first engage with a brand online and for many, the digital space is the only place they have the opportunity to engage with customers. Leaving the right impression with users on your website and offering a pleasant user-experience is critical to bolstering brand credibility.” This is just as relevant to an NGO with members, especially if you have many members and stakeholders in different countries – your website is often their first interaction with your organisation and having strong branding to encourage their involvement with you is critical.

Recently, craft beer brand Brewdog launched their offensive against gender pay discrimination with their “Pink IPA”; a satirical play on words of their flagship product “Punk IPA”. Leading with the bold, brazen statement:

“Punk’s for men and Pink’s for women, right? Wrong. Beer is for everyone and gender is not defined by colour.”

Even on the face of it, it appears a mess. Throw in for context that this was on the run up to International Women’s Day (which they say that this was in aid of) and things start to get eye-wateringly cringeworthy.

Their claims throughout all of this is that it is all for equality and they are going to be donating 20% of the profits for the next four weeks to Women’s equality charities. Their first tweet referenced that “This is not ‘beer for girls’. This is beer for equality” with an image showing a triumphant new Pink IPA bottle standing tall among the remains of one of their (blue) Punk IPA bottles, smashed in two. Powerful imagery indeed.

Issues were taken around this jovial nature for addressing gender equality. It has been labelled a PR disaster as they have been slated in the media, ridiculed for having to use #Sarcasm to indeed point out sarcasm with the argument being “if it needs a hashtag, you should probably realise it isn’t appropriate in the first place”.

For the slightly cynical among us (including this author) it throws up a huge question: Was this a PR nightmare or was it a slight bit of underhand marketing in order to gain much more traction for their brand’s awareness and get more exposure for their brand… particularly at a time where they are raising capital through the sale of equity shares.

So let’s take a quick look at the metrics for their social media.

Across their three tweets on Twitter talking about their new “Pink IPA” (at the time of writing) they had nearly 1,000 RTs, over 3,000 likes and nearly 2,000 replies.

Compare this to their previous posts and; for a company with over 120k followers on Twitter their engagement levels were leaving quite a bit to be desired – their regular posts only garnering an average of around 50 likes and even fewer retweets.

They did even better on Instagram with over 16,000 likes on their posts about the “Pink IPA” and just under 24,000 plays of their promotional video. They generally do well across the rest of their posts on Instagram but it is again lacking slightly in audience engagement considering that they have over 200,000 followers.

So, it seems, when boiled down to purely social media and reach metrics, this campaign appears to have increased the number of people interacting with the brand. And this leads us to the main question: Is there REALLY such thing as bad publicity?

A quick Google search shows 920,000 search results for “Brewdog” and 147,000 results for “Brewdog pink IPA”. That’s a lot of coverage. I mean, I am writing an article about what has happened and at the weekend I even stopped to take a look at the Brewdog beer selection in the supermarket out of curiosity; something which I wouldn’t have done without the media circus surrounding their “Pink IPA” – and I am sure I am not the only one.

Brewdog’s Global Head of Marketing, Sarah Warman told Huffpost UK that “We always anticipated that some people might not immediately appreciate the irony of Pink IPA but that did not deter us in our mission to spark a conversation about the Gender Pay Gap”. This apparently appears to highlight that Brewdog knew what they were doing and knew that some people “just wouldn’t get it” but continued anyway. The effects of their social media reach have been seen and I for one would be extremely interested to see sales figures for March 2018.

You can argue that brands will always have their critics and that every campaign will always attract some form of backlash in a time where it is easier than ever for someone to come into direct contact with your brand and launch their opinion at you. But using an issue such as gender equality as leverage for a campaign? That might be a step too far.

But then the proverbial can of worms is torn apart.

Are they genuinely trying to raise a spotlight on gender equality with this campaign? Or do they know that doing so will attempt to make them “look good” and make more people want to buy their products? Does any company engage in CSR activities because they genuinely want to do good or do all companies realise that making themselves look good translates to more sales?

It is no coincidence then that according to Reason Digital 77% of 16-24 year olds surveyed had bought a “fair trade” product and according to Basil & Weber, 2006; Nelson et al., 2006; Women are more likely to develop trust, empathy and to be seen as caring which perhaps makes them more likely to choose a product with a “good” CSR record.

Is this a bad thing?

On the face of it… not really. It basically boils down to your own ethical barometer and whether you believe that outcomes validate the motive of the inputs. If a company is “doing good things” to make more sales because they know that customers are more likely to buy a product from a company that “does good things” then.. good things get done.

Were Brewdog wrong in what was most likely a marketing oversight to use Gender Equality and International Women’s Day to launch an ultimately sexist product (unless you afford them the time to read their explanations)? Probably. But did it spark further conversation about the Gender Pay Gap in the workplace? Yes it did. Are charities who do nothing but good for the sake of the people that they affect going to benefit from this? Yes – 20% of Brewdog’s profits over the next 4 weeks will go to those charities.

Does that make the exercise ok? We will let you decide.

Header image from BrewDog, and BrewDog’s Twitter and Instagram

Why is There Such a Lack of Trust?
The survey reveals that the reason trust is lacking is because:

• Many clients feel that agencies are dated, fail to understand their clients’ businesses, and are slow to respond to changes in the marketplace. Agents, on the other hand, believe that clients are their own worst enemy, do no respect the skill and expertise of creative branding agencies.
• Need to have a shared definition of ‘creativity’ actually means in practice. Agencies were, perhaps unsurprisingly, more optimistic about the amount the best creative could impact upon a business- clients estimated the impact to be 26 percent compared to the agencies estimation of 48 percent.

The survey also provided reasons and solutions:

• The highest performing agencies revealed that they had a good understanding of how to drive sales on behalf of their clients and were prepared to speak openly and honestly to their clients.
• Agencies who admitted to producing average work were more likely to admit that they were more interested in their own portfolios than the clients’ work and selling to clients.
• Communication is the key to improving trust. Agencies require more transparency and less double-speak and clients require agencies to use they lauded communication skills to win them over.

Risk-taking Agencies Versus Conservative Clients?
Agencies overwhelmingly feel that their clients are too averse to taking risks, with 76 percent of agencies agreeing with the statement. Risk-taking agencies were also more likely to claim that they won more industry awards than their competitors and increase agency revenue at a higher and faster rate. Clients say that they are open to new ideas and are prepared to take risks, but that these risks need to be based on a clear strategic planning and not a leap into the unknown for the sake of it.

Troubled Times for Branding Agencies and Clients ?
The survey revealed a telling dichotomy between agencies and clients feeling towards an understanding of their business. 90 percent of agencies claimed to have a thorough understanding of their clients’ ROI, but clients questioned in the survey felt that 40 percent was a more accurate figure.
If all this wasn’t troubling enough, a 2015 report from Hall & Partners, commissioned by IPA entitled ‘From Mad Men to Sad Men‘ concludes that the relationship between client and agency is certainly experiencing troubled times and that the two worlds appear to be moving ever further apart. The survey concludes by suggesting four key points to improve the client/agency relationship. As Tim Leake, the SVP at RPA concludes ‘the better the relationship, the better the work.’

How Can the Relationship Between Clients and Agencies Improve?
Echoing the need for improved communication, Nikki Crumpton, a strategist at branding agency ‘Mother’ offers a creative planning perspective on the issue, arguing that understanding likeability is vital when marketing a brand. Understanding what makes something likeable is not as straightforward as it might appear. Crumpton describes how cultural memes differ during times of prosperity and times of hardship and it is vital to understand how we are attracted to things that are shaped by what is happening around us. Crumpton advocates playing the long game, remaining true to yourself and genuine to your beliefs to avoid seeming ‘disconcertingly unpredictable’, and consequently untrustworthy and unlikeable.
Crumpton talks about the impact of well-loved advertising campaigns that instinctively manage to tap into the collective public consciousness. Successful marketing is all about ‘the feels’; emotional layering is the most effective way of building a connection with consumers.

An Example of a Branding Agency Successfully Working Towards a Common Goal.
Frances Ralston-Good, the chief strategy and innovation officer at Omnicom Media Group UK, says that her job is to ensure that the brands message is liked by as many people as possible. In this context, it is better to be liked by the masses than loved by a few. To do this successfully, in the world of television, it is becoming increasingly necessary to enhance likeability by various physical
context enhancements, such as enticing the viewer to use the touchscreen. There are many options to increase the charm of your product. One recently tried-and-tested method is to remake it in Lego! Ralston-Good’s involvement in ITVs recent campaign at the time of ‘The Lego Movie’, resulted in the likeability of five brands increase by 19 percent.

What do Industry Leaders Think?
Marketer Jeremy Gidley, the director of CRM at CUI Group, believes that shared goals, insight, and focus are the tools of a successful relationship. Nicola Coronado from SCA Hygiene Products states that the client needs to have a good understanding of their own business and the tools to effectively communicate their aims and desires to the creative branding agency. Barnaby Dawes, the global CMO of JustEat, recommends keeping the briefing process concise and ensuring that the agency is kept in the loop by treating them as full members of the team.

The Cream Will Always Rise to the Top?
Successful and dynamic agencies have already anticipated and responded to the situation, which is inevitably driven in part by market forces. Agencies specialising in specific areas, like branding, who are passionate about what they do, will continue to thrive. Comprehending the client’s world, having the expertise to analyse and communicate ideas is the way forward.

Conclusion
The real difference in today’s world when it comes to choosing a branding agency is purely down to relationships. In the modern world, tool sets are readily available, people with lots of creativity abound – it’s a cut-throat market. As a successful creative branding agency in Manchester, ProjectSimply stands out from the crowd by being likable and developing strong relationships, through our thorough and thoughtful approach and by being inclusive – we believe in being very collaborative with our clients. Feedback from our clients reveals the truth of the two surveys – we are relaxed and friendly in our approach. To find out more about our work or how we work please see our branding process or drop us a line and lets talk.

But first, a little background on this typographic beauty, taken directly from the creator’s website.

“Brandon Text is the companion of the famous Brandon Grotesque type family. It has a higher x-height than the Grotesque version and is optimized for long texts, small sizes and screens. This sans serif type family of six weights plus matching italics was designed by Hannes von Döhren in 2012.

Influenced by the geometric-style sans serif faces that were popular during the 1920s and 30s, the fonts are based on geometric forms that have been optically corrected for better legibility. Brandon Text has a functional look with a warm touch and works perfectly together with Brandon Grotesque. It is manually hinted and optimized for screens, so it will be a good choice for Websites, eBooks or Apps”.

Visit the creator, Hannes von Döhren at – http://hvdfonts.com/brandontext/