In the digital marketing world, there are times when you’ll need to activate a brand. Activation is a full-scale, all-hands-on-deck situation that requires extensive planning, bold thinking, and tactful leadership. While older models of thinking tend to separate the activation of a brand from other marketing pursuits, the truth is that brand activation ties into everything else your company is doing. To successfully activate your brand takes the right amount of effort and action.
Activation Plan vs. Reality
Brand activation is, by its very nature, the act of connecting your brand to potential consumers in the marketplace. So it may come as no surprise that there will be a lot of unpredictability when it comes to how your activation strategy will be received.
For the brand you’re looking to activate, your plan will depend a lot on whether you have an established brand or a new brand. Both have their positives and negatives. Established brands benefit from name recognition, but they may also be saddled with outdated market perceptions or misconceptions. They are tasked with changing existing perceptions.
Conversely, new brands have no market awareness, which means they can operate from a blank slate and create their own identity for customers. But this also requires breaking through and actually getting noticed which can be incredibly difficult in a crowded marketplace. Knowing what terrain your brand stands on will dramatically impact your activation strategy.
Connect with VIPs
Alerting key people, especially customers with whom you’ve already done business, can be a very effective plan for activating your brand. You may even want to solicit feedback from these individuals on your brand, which will help them feel more invested in it. Then, when you go to activate, you will have powerful boosters who can speak on your behalf.
Getting significant customers or thought-leaders in your industry to be among the first to engage with your brand can go a long way in legitimizing it in the eyes of the marketplace.
Measure Results
Finally, consider what metrics you’ll plan to use to quantify the success of your activation. Activation can be a difficult campaign to track, as the process focuses more on awareness than sales. It is for this reason that setting specific and achievable goals is so valuable when it comes to comes to activating a brand. Ultimately, your brand should tell people a story and getting grasp on how well that story resonated in the marketplace will offer the verdict on whether or not you had a successful activation.