Creating a unified brand experience
Take, for instance MGM Resorts International; I don’t know about you, but I don’t think about jetting off to a resort every day. Yet MGM is communicating to its customer base through an app they call “MGM M Life”. This app gives the entertainment giant the ability to establish a presence in a customer's everyday life. Their hyper-tuned brand voice has allowed MGM to create value and expand their market-share by acquiring Atlantic City’s best performing casino, bringing their brand before a larger, more diverse audience.
If you can diversify your company to speak to a broader audience, through the platforms they already use and trust, you’ll be able to grow market-share and capture a stronger market position. To do this, you need to be able to operate within your organisation like a well-oiled machine. In the corporate world, the lubrication that greases the gears is communication.
To effectively communicate with your customer base, the team behind you needs to be on the same page. I have worked with companies in the past that bogged down their employees with so many emails, meetings, and phone calls that the fact anything was able to get done was astonishing. Time management in the office can be strained as new projects or campaigns are launched.
Fear not though, as many of the more “tech-savvy” companies out there have begun turning to technology to streamline the communications process in the office. Apps like Slack, Dropbox, and Google’s cloud-based productivity software have helped reduce the amount of meetings and emails needed to complete projects.
For companies with a mobile workforce, a list of the top smartphone apps, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal, offers a great starting point. With modern technology, it’s entirely possible to communicate in real-time from anywhere without conference rooms and scheduled meetings. Communication is now happening in tandem with task completion.
People are looking to the web more and more everyday as a way to get their message out. However, I don’t think we should discredit traditional advertising. Granted the web does allow a tad more flexibility when it comes to advertising for free, but that doesn’t mean we should focus on the web alone. Sometimes you have something to say that’s newsworthy, especially if you have a free resource that can help people better understand your product or service. Plus, some customers won’t be comfortably using the web to process transactions. If you want to reach customers with varying levels of technological competency, you’ll need to blend traditional and digital media strategies.
Case in point, Brett Kitchen was quoted by Fox News earlier this year: "The world is more volatile than ever before and people don’t know where to turn. Wall Street is no longer the safe solution it once was. My partner Ethan Kap and our companies Altivida Labs and Wealth Education Group help people better their lives and understand investments outside of Wall street." The beauty of this is that Kitchen earned free advertising by utilising a news agency with millions of viewers, and he didn’t spend a dime to do it. He’s using both fear and the offer of “free” information to build market-share, just like other companies do online with email subscription boxes designed to disseminate case studies and other valuable market insights.
Your brand voice does no good if the message lacks a certain buzz or excitement. Whether you’re trying to communicate with a million consumers or a ten person team you have to bring excitement and a sense of urgency to the conversation or your message falls flat. “Good communication is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
