By: Tal Harel
Recently I saw a Google AdsOnAir podcast with the Brand Manager for Next Insurance talked about quantifying the effectiveness of branding. Next took out the big guns – the Google and Facebook brand lift features. These tools, however, are for large campaigns with vast audiences, running advertising budgets in the tens of thousands of dollars (and a dedicated data analyst for each campaign). Since we are in the startup business, we’ll teach you how to test your brand’s effectiveness at no cost whatsover.
Once you’ve completed your brand frame, as we talked about in the last post, it’s time to test its effectiveness. But we’ll do it with qualitative, not quantitative. Let’s see how we test each brand deliverable.
Testing the Elevator Pitch
Run the pitch through people you meet, in the elevator, of course, at the Friday dinner tables, or with other startups in your rental office. They should, as a result, understand what you are doing, maybe with one or two clarifications. In addition, they should find it interesting, like in “ah, that’s a good idea.”
You can – and should – run the elevator pitch by people in your industry, but not exclusively. You need the nonprofessional’s point of view because your end customers, future partners, and co-workers will lack your technical and industrial background.
Testing the Vision and Mission Statements
It’s more or less the same here, except that now you should extend your test group to potential employees and hear from your HR guy about their input. Again, the vision and mission statement need to capture their imagination, at least to the point where they ask additional questions such as the company’s goals, where and why they originate, and how we plan to get to their goals.
Testing Your Market Analysis
When you hire that first Sales Manager/Sales Development Representatives/Success Manager – this is a working tool for them, so listen carefully to what they have to say. If they are seasoned professionals, they should tell you straight away if your market analysis makes sense.
If they do not have a lot of experience, within two weeks of contacting and speaking to potential customers, they will provide much-valued input on whether you got the buying persona right.
Determining whether more macro-level assumptions are correct (such as your target market segment) could take a quarter or two, but no more than that. Your sales arm is your ongoing litmus test on whether your market assumptions are correct or need to change.
Testing Your Unique Selling Proposition
This is one of the most important pieces of feedback you can get from your sales team: Is our messaging, based on our perceived USPs, working? Are we providing the great benefit that we thought we do? Too often, the CEO will often think it’s the messenger that is getting it wrong, and the product fits perfectly to its market. Don’t be one of those CEOs.
One Final Note
Once your brand, including your visual brand, is out there – through social media and outbound and inbound marketing efforts, you could listen to social media chatter to see what people are saying.
You can do it rudimentarily through tools like Hootsuite, which gathers responses and mentions from all social media platforms. You can also use online tracking tools. But in the early stages of a B2B startup, it might not be worth the effort and cost. In any case, you’ll be running on data sets that are too small to be statistically significant.
Going back to the Google AdsOnAir podcast with Next Insurance, one of the telling things the Next brand manager said was that you cannot measure a brand’s performance in real-time.
That’s one of the reasons that many startups don’t invest in branding (if I can’t see an immediate ROI, then why spend the money?). However, according to her, Next Insurance realized that branding is a long-term investment that is absolutely necessary if they want to get their company to the next stage – an A-level insurance company.