One of the primary ways customers interact with and form opinions about your brand is through price.

The most misunderstood aspect of price is that higher prices reduce demand. This is the pricing model that’s taught in Econ 101. However, this is wrong.

Well, mostly wrong.

The model may be accurate for commodities and products with near-perfect substitutes, but this is not true for differentiated brands. Well-defined brands can charge a premium, and customers will be happy to pay. This is especially true for luxury or experience products.

How do you position your brand in a way that allows you to charge more? Read more in the full article.

While I don't know the specifics of your industry, I do know the fundaments of good consumer marketing. This article will outline the common mistakes I see business owners make and how to fix them. Read on, and I'll guarantee you'll get something from this article.

Your marketing and content are random.

Do you have a plan for your marketing? What are you trying to achieve? Marketing should have a definite goal. In general, consumer marketing content should achieve one of three goals:

1. Introduce customers to your funnel.

2. Facilitate customers through your funnel.

3. Maximize customer lifetime value.

When content does this, it becomes a digital asset. The Insight Projects team has written a Marketing Minute about content versus digital assets, and you'll be able to find more in my marketing fundaments book coming out later this year.

Here are some tried and true techniques to achieve these goals:

· Define a problem and position yourself as the resolution.

· Post entertaining content. Engagement builds on itself.

· Provide value in every post. Teach, give, engage, and create. Establish expertise.

· Stay at the top of your customers' minds by engaging them on their preferred platform (your brand should be available on multiple content hosting platforms).

Your marketing is boring.

In this day and age, unless you're a musician, customers are first interacting with your marketing visually. This is especially true for digital marketing. No matter how good your writing is, stimulating visuals can only help. When posting, ask yourself, would you want to click on the post? Keep in mind, everything you post is a representation of your brand. As much effort as you have put into your product, you should try to make your content look like it took the same level of care.

If you struggle with amazing content, you should outsource to someone who can highlight your brand in a way you love.

Your marketing is not connected.

More than ever, customers expect brands to be available when and where they want. That means maintaining multiple content hosting platforms — social media sites, your website, a blog, guest blogs, etc. These platforms need to be connected and tried to a defined goal. Ads should direct customers to a specific point within your funnel. With tools like Linktree, it's never been easier to maintain a connection between platforms and tie the platform back to organizational marketing content goals. Additionally, with management tools like Hootsuite, posting and supporting multiple platforms does not need to be more complicated than the effort required for only one platform (although each platform can, and sometimes should, have its own strategy). With today's web analytics tools, it's so easy to monitor and judge marketing effectiveness.

You run your marketing.

It took you years to build enough skill and know-how to start your own business. Your time and effort are going into developing and delivering a fantastic product. Without more time in the day, you do not have enough time to keep up on marketing best practices. Hiring marketing experts will have an outsized ROI compared to your efforts. When your business becomes successful enough to keep you busy full-time operationally, you should seriously consider hiring marketing professionals. Whether this comes from in-sourcing or outsourcing comes down to budget, timelines, and personal expertise. Look out for our marketing fundamentals book later this year for more insight.

You don't truly understand your customers or your product.

This may be the hardest to hear.

All purchases are emotional purchases. Read that again. All purchases are emotional purchases.

Every consumer makes purchases based on the stories they tell themselves. These stories are emotionally formed. If you don't have a fundamental understanding of what makes your customers emotionally tick or what emotions your product applies to, then you will never achieve the sales you could otherwise. Once you understand your customers' emotional needs and how your brand appeals to those needs, you can maximize your revenue.

Marketing is hard.

Despite doing your best, marketing is just hard. There's so much to maintaining a successful marketing plan, and with the majority of your time being tied up in operational duties, it can be hard to stay on top of marketing. Don't stress your marketing. Hire the experts. If you need help with your marketing, reach out to me personally at brett.adams@InsightProjects.co. I love connecting with business owners. I will do everything I can to help you at zero cost. If you need more help, we can take the following steps to engage my whole team of experts to maximize your marketing impact.

I absolutely love Asana.

I cannot emphasize this enough — I love Asana. Asana is the only way I can do everything that I do.

I am on three corporate teams. The two I lead use Asana, and the team I don’t lead should. Using Asana allows me to individually track customer campaigns at the level of granularity that I want.

Here’s how my teams use the platform:

Clients are given their own Portfolios.

I believe it’s best to build from the bottom up to understand portfolios. The smallest item in Asana is a subtask. A subtask is an action to be taken to complete a task. A task is an effort to be completed in support of a project. A project is a group of connected efforts, like a campaign. A portfolio is composed of multiple projects.

Said another way, a client (portfolio) may have multiple campaigns (projects) composed of many efforts (tasks) that are comprised of various individual tasks (subtasks).

What’s important to realize is that this is not the only way to use Asana. This is the way my teams have chosen to use Asana. The platform allows for near-infinite customization — the only limitation may be your imagination.

Each campaign or large effort is given its own project within client portfolios.

For example, for one client who relies heavily on visual content, our team has a “Content Calendar” to manage the generation and posting of content. Included in the project are unique content creation opportunities. Once approved, these opportunities become “Currently in work,” where our content generators begin to develop a specific plan. After the content is generated and reviewed, it moves to our content backlog for posting. Once posted, it moves to the complete section.

Within the tasks, you can see custom fields like “Type of Content” — photo, video, blog, and “Channel” — Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Website/Blog/Newsletter. These are specific to this client. See below for the screenshot.

Also within tasks are start date/time and due date/time. Along with start and end dates, you can include dependencies. These combined allow users to take full advantage of Asana’s Timeline feature. In the photo, the lines in between tasks represent dependencies. The green squares with checkmarks are completed milestones.

Ultimate customization.

On other projects, I have included line items like “budget” and “actual spend” in tasks. Any custom field can be added. There are presets for Status (in general and percent), automation, and communication features within the platform, too.

Communication.

Within a portfolio, a project, and tasks/subtasks, teams are given the opportunity for various methods of communication. As the work gets more granular, team members have more control over comments. At a higher level, communication is about the team leader describing the portfolio/project and providing resources/guidance.

You shouldn’t take my word for it.

Asana offers a free trial. They don’t collect credit card info for the trial, so you genuinely have nothing to lose. I recommend giving it a shot for all your project management and marketing team needs!

Featured client: Dang Brother Pizza.

Introducing Marketing Minute, where we condense popular topics down into easy-to-understand marketing articles.

I’ve seen many conversations online about the difference between content and digital assets. It’s even created confusion within the industry, and there seems to be no shared definition. Insight Projects is here to help in the understanding.

Let’s begin by defining what an asset is. An asset is a resource with economic value that is owned with the expectation that it will provide future benefits. Without getting too deep into the weeds, an asset can reasonably be defined as something that will produce future cash flow. Companies buy property, plants, and equipment to generate cash flow. Intangible assets and intellectual property are valuable because they can produce cash flow.

Content does not produce cash flow by itself. Content becomes an asset when deployed strategically. Content should either introduce customers into your funnel, facilitate customers through your funnel, or keep customers returning. When your content is doing that, it is producing measurable cash flow, and it becomes an asset.

Do you need help turning your content into digital assets? Reach out to Insight Projects for help in turning your content backlog into cash flow.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

Current projects:

• Dang Brother Pizza
• Acento Coffee Roasters
• Lubembo Honey

Ready to start building your brand? You’re in the right spot.

Let’s face it; there are millions upon millions of brands out there (depending on how you define a brand), and though some are downright amazing, others, not so much. If your brand doesn’t stand out from the crowd, your business will never gain the traction it needs to succeed. Branding and creating brand value help brands stand out from the crowd and achieve an outsized ROI.

There is no one size fits all branding solution. That may seem daunting for the business owner looking for an easy fit, but it opens up a world of opportunities for creatives. Ultimately, your brand is the story you tell. Telling it right can increase your company’s value, make your employees happier, help achieve market penetration, and even make your inferior product worth more than the competition. In this blog, we’ll cover two extreme ends of the branding spectrum, along with some tips for you and your brand.

Let’s play two truths and a lie. 1) Customers only want the best value for their money. This trade-off is usually trying to find the highest quality for the lowest price. 2) A brand can be objectively lower quality and still charge higher amounts than the competition. 3) “Quality” has more to do with the stories customers tell themselves than actual performance.

What’s the lie?

If you guessed number 1, you’re right. While there is some truth to number 1, most consumers do not make purchases based on objective quality but rather fall prey to the emotional stories they tell themselves when making a purchase. Emotional purchasing is especially true for “savvy” consumers who are always hunting for the best deal. The deal itself is a story they buy into.

A great example of this is the Stradivarius brand. World-renowned for their quality craftsmanship and sound, experts agree that Stradivarius instruments can never be reproduced. The most expensive Stradivarius is valued at around $200 million, and others have sold in the low millions. These violins are so famous that they have inspired violence. Deceit, theft, murder follow these violins all because of their value. It’s curious to note that these stolen violins are nearly impossible to sell. Such is their reputation that selling it would almost certainly lead to being caught. Criminals are willing to steal these instruments solely to have one in their possession. Don’t you want that level of obsession over your brand?

You must be thinking, “These violins must sound amazing.” (Or maybe you’re on to me, and you know I’m setting you up). I thought that too until an objective study challenged my belief. The study conducted double-blind trials, and the outcome showed that enthusiasts and professionals alike preferred the sound of modern ( and much cheaper) violins. Let me restate that: even world-class professionals fell prey to the Stradivarius brand.

Undoubtedly, it would be amazing to hear a Stradivarius be played live. However, the idea that their sound quality is better has been objectively proven false. The power of a brand is such that it can convince people of quality.

Not all brands can be crafted by masters and survive history to become unique industry hallmarks like Stradivarius. However, every brand can employ techniques that add more value than the product alone provides. Coca-Cola is an excellent example of a brand that sells the brand more than the product. Don’t believe me? Check out their website. (I’m writing this just before Christmas, and their current slogan is “Bring Home Holiday Magic.” — I’m confident that checking their site during any part of the year will show a similar message because of their branding strategy.)

What’s not said on their website is anything about the superior flavor of their product. They do not try to sell their product. They sell Holiday Magic, happiness, family togetherness, and other ideals that are easy to buy into. Anchor these emotions into a consumer’s mind enough, and they will forever associate your brand with whatever emotions the brand appeals to.

I’m not telling you that your brand can be as successful as Coke’s. There are probably very few people in the world who have never seen a Coca-Cola label or bottle. That’s truly impressive. I’m not telling you that you can sell a lower-quality product for millions of dollars. Many other factors make Stradivariuses unique. What you can do, though, is employ similar messaging to your audience. Appeal to their emotions by telling stories. Speak to their fears, their desires — speak to their hearts.

A few tips when developing a brand:

• Tell a story: Humans love a story. It’s arguably how we can best remember things. If you don’t remember anything else from this blog, remember to tell a story.
• Develop a “customer persona”: It’s challenging to develop a brand for a nebulous concept. A customer persona is an archetypal buyer that you can use as a North Star when developing your brand.
• Follow the trends: Be careful here; I do not mean fads. Trends are well developed, identifiable patterns that can be spotted with detailed analysis. Sometimes you don’t need analysis to spot the most well-defined trends. Example: Coke targets human happiness. People want to be happy. Groundbreaking stuff, I know. An example of a more recent trend is convenience. Convenience is deeply rooted in our psychology and has been proven an important factor in decision making. It would be difficult for a brand to succeed today if it were not easy to access. An emerging trend is connectivity. There is some cultural pushback here, but, in general, we are moving towards a more connected world. APIs are taking advantage of this desire for connectivity.
• Use the right tools: Brand boards and brand wheels can be a great way to hone in on your brand. What exactly do you want your brand to look like, feel like? These tools can be great for brainstorming, creating brand campaigns, and gaining insight into your existing brand.
• Omnichannel awareness: Today, consumers have more ways than ever to interact with your brand. Do yourself a favor, and have a strategy from the start of how and where you want to interact with your brand’s audience. While you will have slightly different messaging per channel, messaging throughout the channels should be consistent with the brand’s core values.

Crafting and deploying a unique, thoughtful brand is very difficult. Done right, and you can see impressive ROI. Done wrong, and you will miss your audience entirely and put your brand at risk.

Insight Projects is here to help with our brand architecture and cultivation experts. We can build your brand from scratch, help you take your brand to the next level, and can even turn around struggling brands. Our small team of specialists handpicks projects that come to us only after a vetting process. Taking on only the brands we can fall in love with guarantees our quality of work. The exclusive nature of our client relationships means that you can be sure that your brand isn’t lost in the backlog of some corporate marketer. We make it our business to obsess over our clients’ brands.

Want to learn more about us? Visit us today at www.InsightProjects.co. We look forward to meeting you and learning about your brand!

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

Current projects:

• Dang Brother Pizza
• Acento Coffee Roasters
• Lubembo Honey