While the terms “content strategy” and “brand strategy” are often used interchangeably, there are important distinctions between them — most importantly, brand strategy involves constructing a plan to achieve a big idea, and content marketing is the tool you use to execute that plan. And the two must work together.

How many of your company’s marketing projects — whether it’s your website, social media, PR, marketing, POS material, sales material, follow-up emails or newsletters — are dialed into the same focused strategy? A good marketing team will ensure that all of those projects are telling the same story and complementing each other.

Aligning your marketing strategies is critical to effectively selling your brand, but that’s only the start.

What Not To Do: The Decline of Dilly Dilly

According to Forbes, presenting a brand — and its story — consistently across all platforms can increase revenue by up to 23%. Our brains are hard-wired to look for personal connections and consistency, not to remember different stats, facts and selling points across different platforms.

Consider the case of Bud Light’s “Dilly Dilly” television marketing campaign.

As a result of the campaign, the phrase “Dilly Dilly” completely replaced “Cheers!” as the anthem for how you salute someone when you’re about to have a drink. But where Bud Light failed with their brand marketing was in consistent execution. Although there were 300,000 Google searches, and 66,000 hashtags for the phrase, a year after the campaign Bud Light sales were down by more than 6%.

When you looked at their social media, PR or website, they weren’t telling the “Dilly Dilly” story. Instead, they spent money in each of these categories, but they didn’t align the same message into each of those categories. Therefore, today, Dilly Dilly is mainly a forgotten campaign.

The bottom line: Make sure you integrate a consistent story into every single aspect of your brand marketing, or your “Dilly Dilly” will become a “Dilly Don’t.”

Make Sure Your Marketing Strategies Are Not Only Aligned, But Integrated

Now take a look at a marketing campaign done right: Dos Equis’ Most Interesting Man in the World, featuring a suave, Ernest Hemingway-esque man describing various feats of his past, always ending with him stating the signature sign-off: "Stay thirsty, my friends.”

Before the campaign, Dos Equis was a relatively unknown Mexican import beer that’s been around for a long time. The brand plastered The Most Interesting Man in the World and plastered him on every possible touchpoint  with their customer. 

The result? The Most Interesting Man in the World was a constant presence and message of the brand. The brand became a household name in the U.S., while sales skyrocketed 22% at a time when other imported beer brands were in a sales decline. Today, even though they’ve put those campaigns to sleep, The Most Interesting Man in the World is still part of today’s popular culture.

When you’re trying to integrate your brand marketing with your other strategies, look through all of the items that you’re already spending money on and you’ve already put energy into, and try to dial it all into one exact focused campaign. Now, you’re leveraging your budget to make sure it has the highest impact from a brand standpoint, and your marketing is far more strategic and consistent. 

Our most important marketing advice: Focus on making sure all of your materials connect, integrate and elevate what you’re trying to accomplish.

Checklist:

• Collect all the assets you are using to reach potential customers, from email to billboards to brick and mortar signage.
• Do these messages align with each other? Do they align with your brand’s?
• Every piece of marketing material needs to be focused on the same message - you need to get results.
• Using a strategy of Owned, Earned, Paid Search, you can create a brand strategy that allows you to tell and amplify your brand message.
• Measure and benchmark your efforts, and adjust accordingly.

Discover more about how to win at franchise development marketing by downloading our free white paper here.