March Event Recap: Brand Storytelling in a Digital World

Conveying a brand story to our audience in a relatable way is something us marketers strive to achieve every day. Alix Hart, acting CMO at Symantec, takes this a step above and beyond with what she calls “momentum marketing.” For our March event, we had the opportunity to learn from Alix as she presented best practices and real examples of momentum marketing to a full crowd of eager MIMA attendees.

Here are a few key points of what we learned.

• Be agile and flexible – think like a newsroom. People are having conversations whether you’re a part of them or not. If you miss the conversation (even within a matter of hours), you miss the opportunity to engage with customers and provide your brand message. Work off a marketing plan, but be flexible enough to change to join the conversation at the right time. For a newsroom to work well, they have to be responsive, agile and real-time within a 24 hour cycle. Be ready to respond and act.
• Have clear brand guidelines. Brand guidelines allow anyone on your team to write relevant content across channels that’s molded to the right message in real time. These guidelines should list out the things you can say and those that are off topic. Examples and visuals help.
• Identify your brand story. Think about how you can make every moment you’re talking to customers useful. Determine what you want to be known for and what you don’t. For example, Symantec realized they no longer wanted to be about fear and are instead focusing on messages about security.
• Listen to create. Use social and search insights to support your content decisions. Have a communications loop with customers and your marketing team to provide even more insight. Then, use that information to create and deliver a relevant brand message.

• Curate content. Content curation is just as important as content creation. Sharing other people’s content is a great way to show what you believe. Follow and share content from other like minded brands or individuals to keep your messages relevant.
• Empower your team. It’s not just about producing the right content, but also about getting it to the right people to distribute it. Encourage your team to work off your strategy and guidelines to create messages on their own. They need to try it out and see how they can succeed within this momentum framework. Consider having a content vault that everyone on the team can access, which in turn allows them to tap past relevant content to quickly create new content in a timely manner and take advantage of current conversations.
• Create your own momentum:

1. Define where your brand can have relevant moments of intersection
2. Leverage social insights (search too) to understand customer conversations
3. Create a communications process map
4. Empower your teams to try, test, and measure
5. Utilize all paid-owned-earned media channels

Catch the Twitter conversation at #mimatweet, or check out the slides on Slideshare as well as the live recording.