How to choose the best sales and marketing support to get the most from your branding investment

Now your branding process is complete and your new website is live, surely, it’s time to pop the champagne and celebrate? 

Before you get too excited, let’s review your journey so far and what you’ve achieved. If you’ve been following along with our end-to-end branding process, you should be on top of:

• organisational goals and business alignment

• market position, audience and narrative

• visual identity, brand personality and story

• responsive and customer-centric website.

It’s definitely time to pat yourself on the back for a job well done. But, while you might have all the pieces of the puzzle in place, there is one last step to climb - and if you miss this one, it could risk all the work you’ve put into the entire branding process.

It all comes down to one, deceptively simple, question.

How will people discover your business?

It’s a question as old as time (or as old as modern commerce and economics anyway!) 

How do you get people to take notice? How do you build a profile? How do you stand out in your market?

Let’s face it, if no one knows you exist, you risk all that effort going to waste. 

This is why you can’t forget to include “go to market” support in your branding process. Without a plan for sales and marketing support, your new strategy, branding, and messaging have no chance of reaching your target audience. 

To maximise your investment, you need a clear plan for marketing your brand. More importantly, you also need a direct link to your customers to understand their needs, gain feedback on your offerings and drive product/service improvements.

How sales and marketing support boosts your brand

Step 1: Business alignment - understanding your organisational goals, your current messaging and what you need from the brand/website redesign process.

Step 2: Brand strategy - harnessing data and research to identify your market position and your ideal audience to craft an effective customer-centric narrative.

Step 3: Brand design - discovering your visual identity and creating brand elements to capture the essence of your business and communicate your value to customers.

Step 4: Website creation - developing a modern responsive website which educates and demonstrates your solution to drive traffic and conversions.

Step 5: Go-to-market support - providing ongoing targeted support to maintain your website, leverage your updated assets and create additional resources.

Go-to-market support in action

The final step of the branding journey can make or break your business. Effective sales and marketing support has the power to deliver a whole host of benefits, including:

• raising your company profile 

• driving increased sales

• honing in on your audiences’ needs

• identifying new opportunities

• anticipating customer requests

• strengthening client relationships.

Ideally, the sales and marketing support you choose will create a feedback loop. With their ear to the ground, your sales and marketing team will know what’s resonating with your audience and be able to feed these insights up the line for your action.

Over time, you can harness these insights to better understand audience needs, identify gaps in your offering and develop improved products and services. This will further strengthen your brand and build your market share - over and over and over again.

What are your sales and marketing support options?

There are three main options you can choose to elevate your branding and website project:

• Done-for-you

• Do-it-yourself

• Hybrid

Whichever option you go with, it’s important that sales and marketing efforts harness the assets you’ve developed throughout the branding process - now’s not the time for people to go rogue.

This is where brand guidelines come into their own - especially if you decide to work with an outside provider or take a hybrid approach that involves several different marketing teams.

Done-for-you sales and marketing support

If your business doesn’t have an in-house marketing team, outsourcing sales and marketing support to a specialist agency or a freelancer is a good choice. You might decide to choose a single agency to handle everything for you - or hire different people specialising in specific areas, such as Facebook ads or organic marketing - to get the word out.

All-in-one approach

If you are new to outsourcing, an all-in-one agency that offers end-to-end sales and marketing support is your best bet. It certainly takes the pressure off, particularly if your organisation lacks the bandwidth and confidence to manage a team of contractors.

While a done-for-you sales and marketing approach is very easy, you may feel like you lose ownership of your brand or end up stuck with your agency. It’s important to have a positive relationship with your agency to keep the relationship on track.

Creating your own team

As you get bigger and manage larger marketing budgets, it may make economic sense to work with several agencies or freelancers. One agency might handle your design, another might run your website and a third could manage your ads. You might also have freelancers you call on to do specific tasks, like graphic design. 

Obviously, the more people you hire, the more internal management you're going to have. You need to weigh up the benefit of harnessing niche expertise over the hassle of managing multiple contractors and briefs. If this seems way too daunting, adding a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) could make things a whole lot easier for your business. 

Hiring a Fractional CMO

A fractional CMO can solve the problem of having to build (and manage) your own marketing team. Usually an experienced marketer in their own right, this is an outsourced position that sits within your business giving you greater control without blowing out your budget.

Fractional CMOs can come in for a set period of time to help establish your brand or take on a more ongoing role. They coordinate contractors and agencies, manage the strategy side of things and ensure you’re making the most of your branding investment.

Do-it-yourself sales and marketing support

You might decide to adopt an in-house approach to sales and marketing. This makes sense if you’re a larger organisation or if you already have an existing marketing team to call on. 

There are many benefits to this approach, including:

• shorter learning curve 

• opportunity to develop new skills in-house

• creating a direct line between sales and marketing

• tighter feedback loop (making it quicker and easier to adapt to changing demands).

While there are many benefits to building your own in-house marketing team, taking the DIY route requires a significant investment in skills and resources. 

People

First, you need to find the right people with the skills to market your brand. Building a marketing team from scratch can be pretty daunting. Getting the mix of skills right so the team grows with your brand adds another layer of complexity. 

If you don’t have someone you can trust from the beginning, it makes it almost impossible to build a successful in-house marketing team.

Resources

Second, you need robust brand guidelines, templates and resources to support your marketing team as well as all other staff across your organisation. Sales and marketing isn’t only the responsibility of your specialist teams. Everybody needs to be on the same page.

To get this right, you need to invest time and money into developing resources to support your internal sales and marketing capability.

Processes

Third, it’s important to have the right processes in place to support your staff and your customers. This means supporting staff to collect and act on customer feedback to help improve your product offerings and enhance the client experience.

You need the ability to access timely feedback from your sales team so you can adjust your branding and marketing assets to meet changing demand.

A hybrid approach - the best of both worlds?

The third approach is taking elements of DIY and done-for-you sales and marketing support to meet the unique needs of your business. This is where you combine internal resources with external help to scale your marketing investment up and down as needed. 

For many organisations, taking a hybrid approach gives you the best of both worlds. It allows you to benefit from outside expertise while building up your internal skills. It also makes economic sense - especially if you are not yet large enough to sustain a whole new department.

While there are many benefits, a hybrid approach does require a level of organisation and buy-in to be truly successful.

You need an internal champion

Appointing an internal champion is the key to managing resources both within and outside your organisation (plus the inevitable differences in outlook and worldview).  

Ideally, the internal champion will be your point person for everything branding and marketing both within and outside your business. With the knowledge, experience and authority to bring everyone together, they should:

• live and breathe your brand

• have been a part of the branding process

• promote your brand messaging

• act as a gatekeeper for your business

• have the authority to approve and implement changes.

As your sales and marketing support needs change, the internal champion can bridge the gap between the needs of the organisation and external drivers to keep your brand fresh and relevant.

Consider a fractional CMO

Depending on the needs of your business, a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) can also help you take advantage of a hybrid marketing approach. A fractional CMO maintains internal control of your branding while leaving the door open for external expertise.

You can hire someone from an agency to come in-house and implement your new branding, take on a freelancer or appoint someone in-house to fill this role. With an in-house hire, you have more control but they may not have the same level of skill or experience as a specialist.

Whichever way you go, a fractional CMO needs the skills to work with multiple stakeholders to:

• plan out your brand

• manage your marketing

• ensure specific activities take place to work towards your marketing goals 

• improve awareness of your business

• drive more sales.

How to make the right choice for your business?

It all comes back to where you are in your business journey.

Startups and small tech businesses usually get the most benefit from a done-for-you approach, especially if they choose a single agency who can meet all their sales and marketing support needs.

For medium to large tech businesses, a hybrid approach gives you the chance to scale your marketing without the expense of building your own team. It’s also a way to gain more control over your branding and marketing.

When it comes to large and enterprise scale organisations, developing your in-house marketing capabilities is often the most cost-effective approach (but it all hinges on getting the right people in with the right skill set).

If you’re not sure which sale and marketing support option will work best for you and your business, you can always seek advice from an experienced branding agency - like us! 

Sales and marketing support to elevate your brand

Multiverse offers a complete-end-to-end branding process for tech businesses of all shapes and sizes. From ongoing fractional CMO services to one-off campaigns, we provide customised sales and marketing support to suit your business. 

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