Establishing a strong brand identity is crucial for fintech businesses to stand out and connect with their target audience. However, many businesses struggle with developing and implementing effective branding strategies. This is where Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (FCMO) support can make a significant difference. In this blog post, we’ll explore the ways in which a Fractional CMO can support businesses in their branding and identity efforts, helping them achieve their marketing goals.

Creating a brand strategy

A brand is not just a logo; it’s the meaning associated with an entity, earned through a combination of reputation (past), experience (present), and expectation (future). Brands can encompass products, services, organisations, places, or even people.

An effective brand strategy outlines an action plan designed to achieve a beneficial long-term goal, that answers the fundamental questions of who, what, when, where, and why. Building a powerful brand requires an ongoing commitment to excellence and an understanding of the qualities that define the brand. The successful strategy fosters a consistent attitude and a carefully managed experience that meets or exceeds consumer expectations.

A brand strategy also provides metrics for brand management, enabling the measurement of whether the brand is effectively realising its intended goals. An FCMO will recognise the importance of understanding target audience demographics, preferences, and behaviour to tailor branding strategies effectively. The benefits of an effective brand strategy include:

• Differentiation – branding highlights and amplifies the practical differences that make an organisation, product, or service a better proposition than its competitors.
• Emotional Bond – branding creates a bond between the brand and the consumer, building emotional ties and positive memories, and increasing the likelihood of repeat purchases and brand loyalty.
• Value boost – branding increases value by adding emotional significance that exceeds the rational value of the product or service. A brand that resonates with stakeholders’ personal values can justify a premium monetary value.
• Communication – branding is an effective way to convey information such as building a community platform, introducing new offerings, rebuilding reputation, uniting or consolidating groups, announcing new ownership or positioning, and attracting and retaining staff, investors, and customers.

What does a good brand strategy look like? 

Here is a summary of some of the key elements that a Fractional CMO will consider when crafting a brand strategy for your business.

STRATEGIC BRAND POSITIONING

A Fractional CMO can assist businesses in defining their value proposition and positioning within the market. The value proposition is the unique selling point (USP) that differentiates your brand from its competitors. It’s the special quality that is hardest to emulate and provides a compelling reason to believe in the brand. The proposition is not restricted to the physical attributes of the product or service and may be conveyed through a unique attitude and culture.

Positioning involves the creation of a market map. This is where you define the location of your brand according to two vectors that are crucial in the market (one horizontal and one vertical) e.g. price/functionality or price/ease of deployment. You then plot the location of your competitors on the same grid. It may be that you realise that there is a better space for your brand to be positioned that will enable you to encounter less competition or charge a higher price. This is repositioning.

ESTABLISH YOUR BRAND VALUES

A key step is to establish your brand values, to make sure your firm really stands for something. Values guide how an organisation behaves and provide a strategy for dealing with challenges.

At a simple level there are four types of brand value.

• Core value – the raison d’etre for your firm.
• Corporate values – what your company stands for (how it treats its staff, customers, suppliers).
• Product values – what your product or service stands for.
• Tonal value – the personality of an organisation, product, or service. Often referred to as a ‘brand personality’, this can be the hardest quality for competitors to emulate as it’s an intangible asset.

BRAND DEVELOPMENT AND REFRESH

A Fractional CMO can oversee the development or refresh of a brand’s visual identity, including logo design, colour palette, typography, and brand guidelines. Increase your chances of success with an identity that reflects the brand strategy and culture of the organisation.

A Fractional CMO will emphasise the role of consistent branding across all touchpoints to reinforce brand recognition and credibility. The creation of some Brand Guidelines will help keep everyone in the business on track, whether it be websites, collateral, PowerPoint or Word templates, exhibition stands, adverts, videos, business cards.

CONTENT STRATEGY AND MESSAGING

Helping businesses craft compelling brand messaging that resonates with their target audience is the next step. How will you meet your client’s needs?

Messaging may be subdivided into the various audiences and influencers within the buying cycle – business decision-makers, operations decision-makers, technology decision-makers and so on. Think about the motives for each type of decision-maker – what makes them ‘tick’? They are usually different.

Your Fractional CMO will also consider the market segments that you are selling into e.g. hedge funds, asset managers, wealth managers, asset owners, third party administrators. Each segment may require slightly different messaging. For example, hedge funds don’t like being lumped in with asset managers, despite their similarities!

You should then consider the importance of a cohesive content strategy aligned with brand values and objectives, covering various channels such as website, social media, email marketing, and advertising. This content strategy needs to tie back to the messaging. Don’t produce content that doesn’t address client’s needs or problems. And remember to monitor what your competitors are saying.

BRAND EXPERIENCE OPTIMISATION

A Fractional CMO can analyse customer touchpoints and optimise the brand experience to ensure consistency and positive engagement. Examine the customer journey to identify weaknesses and opportunities, initiate innovative thinking, new products, and levels of customer service.

A brand is only as strong as its weakest link. By examining the customer journey you will identify weaknesses and opportunities. Account managers, sales staff and support teams all form part of the equation.

The objective is monitoring customer feedback and sentiment to continuously improve brand perception and loyalty.

MARKET RESEARCH AND COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

A Fractional CMO can conduct market research and competitive analysis to identify market trends, customer preferences, and competitors’ strategies. This is key to keeping your brand strategy relevant.

Always consider the role of data-driven insights in guiding branding decisions and staying ahead of the competition. It has never been easier to gain external insights about your brand by observing and monitoring social media. Qualitative and quantitative audience analysis is advisable to profile, understand and segment your audience, and is then used to create customer personas to help you visualise them.

In conclusion, a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer can play a vital role in supporting businesses in their branding and identity endeavours. By offering strategic guidance, creative expertise, and data-driven insights, a Fractional CMO can drive ROI for businesses. Curious about how a fractional CMO resource could help you to reposition your business with bespoke branding support – get in touch with us today to schedule a discovery call.