We live in a digital age where everyone is chronically online with a wealth of information about products and services at their fingertips. On the bright side, it opens up more channels to communicate with your key audiences. The first, second, fortieth, and final touchpoints with a company happen across various channels, from blog posts to various social media channels to traditional media.
The challenge is that fractured attention means attracting and retaining audiences’ attention and trust is harder than ever before—but not impossible. Take a page out of the playbooks of some of the biggest, most innovative brands in the world—Nike and Apple became household names because they took the time to build brand loyalty, nurture trust, and establish authority.
Investing time and resources in creating brand awareness, authority, and trust leads to a smoother, more efficient journey through prospective customers’ or clients’ lifecycles. It also makes financial sense, as 46% of consumers would pay more for products from a brand they trust, according to Salsify.
How do you capture attention, establish authority, and build trust, especially if you want your product or service to be considered a disruptor? It starts with how well you tell your company story across channels.
The ways we consume information continue to evolve with new technology and algorithmic updates, and marketing and PR strategies must keep pace. Regardless of industry, successful companies are those that master building trust and brand authority among target audiences.
How to Build Authority
Brand authority, or online authority, is gauged by how well your company is perceived online. An authoritative brand is a trusted brand.
Building brand authority is a lesson in psychology. Brand perception is a somewhat subconscious process. That’s why it’s important to reach your audience across various channels with a consistent message while staying transparent and authentic.
Whether a company is B2B or B2C, marketing and PR strategy should start with a compelling story that clearly articulates what the company does and why it matters. From there, tailoring the centralized story to speak to each audience and optimizing for each channel will create a better customer journey and stickier brand awareness. In combination, we look at awareness, favorability, engagement, and credibility – and their associated metrics – as determinants of authority.
Breaking Down Silos
Communicating across the funnel once operated like a relay race, with each department passing the baton to the next. PR focused solely on awareness-level messaging and strategy, while marketing focused more on consideration, and sales teams closed deals through product messaging.
Today, it’s more important than ever to break down these silos and view communicating with your audience as a team sport with multiple touchpoints that create a consistent brand experience and strong story that builds trust and authority and contributes to word-of-mouth recommendation.
Insights-Driven Strategy
Data guides the entire effort, and from the outset, data and strategy go hand in hand. Data is important not only when executing and evaluating performance (as I’ll talk more about in a minute), but it also plays a critical role in the planning phase to produce insights that drive strategy. We use a three-part analysis called SWOT+PEST+PESO as a helpful starting point.
SWOT is a good baseline for assessing the current state of how your company is showing up in the world. What’s working well? What isn’t? What could you do differently or better? What might not make that possible? The SWOT is inwardly focused, yet strategic communications doesn’t happen in a vacuum, so we pair it with a PEST analysis. PEST (political, economic, social, and technological) looks at the context of the real world you’re showing up in and how it affects the stories you tell. It identifies outside obstacles and potential opportunities to add to the conversation. We combine these two with analyzing your PESO strategies (of paid, earned shared & owned media), which look at how your brand shows up on key marketing channels.
Content Plays an Important Role
With data guiding our decision-making, we use content to bring a brand’s story to life in ways that resonate, build trust, and inspire action. Content is central to authority-building efforts. We focus on two types: owned and earned.
Owned content is what it sounds like: content housed on a channel that your brand directly owns and manages such as the content of your website, blog, or newsletter. Though you may not strictly own social media platforms, it’s often considered part of an owned content marketing strategy. You can control the messaging here and are responsible for distribution. Owned content is where a brand starts to build authority and carve out consistent storytelling.
Earned content, on the other hand, is essential to creating trust between a brand and its ultimate customer or client. PR efforts, including articles, interviews, editorials, referrals, reviews, and more third-party content, add to a brand’s trustworthiness and authority.
If earned media is from a high-quality source, it can also contribute to a 360-degree strong brand strategy. While you can’t control the messaging or final product as tightly, a well-trained spokesperson can help ensure media placements contribute to a consistent brand story.
Quantifying Impact
When integrated efforts are done right, marketing, PR, and sales work in tandem to tell a compelling story through media strategy and coinciding content with quantifiable results tied to business outcomes.
It’s important to have a firm understanding of performance in real-time against goals, and the know-how to pivot quickly to stay on track. So how do you measure brand awareness? Data.
Collecting data across key channels and researching each industry to understand the terrain ensures that each plan, post, and pitch is timely and tailored to engage audiences from their first interaction with a brand to a sale or closed deal. Tracking search engine results (SEO), website traffic, share of voice, engagement, and how customers move from a marketing quality lead to a sale is key.
Marketing and PR successes map to key sales pipeline milestones and contribute to overall business success. Attribution reporting is part art, part science, and it’s vital to understand if tactics inspire appropriate action at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Winning Together
I recently chatted with Meg Ryan, head of special projects at Cornerstone OnDemand and former chief of staff and VP of global revenue operations at Inkhouse client OneSpan. We connected about our partnership and the key components of a fully integrated approach—combining earned, owned, paid, and shared channel strategies to support business growth and build customer trust.
OneSpan is a global leader in providing high-assurance identity and authentication security as well as enterprise eSignature solutions. It operates in a saturated market, so the brand required a surround-sound effect with its messaging that resonated across marketing channels, both earned and owned. Watch the full conversation below
