Giving Your Brand New Life: A Blueprint to Brand Strategy

Last week, I joined marketing and communications leaders from top venture capital firms around the country at BAM Communication’s annual VC Comms Con in San Diego. The goal was to parse out the top challenges and solutions of the niche role. But in the words of FemStreet’s Sarah Nockel “niche doesn’t mean small.” In this case, niche actually means pretty large. Conference attendees came from firms of all sizes — including bohemiths like GV, Battery Ventures and IVP — but one thing was pretty common: Many firms only have one marketing person.

Similarly, many early stage startups only have one marketing person or no marketing person at all (and has lumped the responsibility onto the founder/CEO or operations person). While I’ll be implementing many of the lessons learned into my own workflow as Head of Content here at Work-Bench, these are applicable across various roles, industries and sized companies in the midst of marketing their own brand.

At a high-level, this Tweet captures it all, but see below for my top learnings:

Be your most creative self.

In today’s market, it’s increasingly difficult to break through the noise. Startups are raising more money and easier than ever before, valuations are ballooning and enterprise tech is “cool” again. It’s become a necessity to differentiate yourself in the market in new and creative ways.

GV’s Jodi Olson recommends to block off time to think. It may sound simple, but block off ten minutes everyday (ideally in the middle of the day) to reset your priorities and turn off your daily autopilot. We often get stuck in a “do” mentality, not realizing we’re leaving our creativity behind. Use this time to get those creative juices flowing again.

Upfront Ventures’ Kerry Bennett later doubled down on the importance of “shaking it up” and ensuring you’re not just recreating the wheel. Ask yourself, how can I approach it differently than before or than my competitors? Are there any new insights I can bring to the table? Is there a new speaker or a new venue to consider for this event?

Choose your battles.

Marketing encompasses a variety of projects — overarching branding, website design, public relations, content creation, social media, advertising and more, so there are a lot of projects to be completed. On top of that, we come from an incredibly data driven industry and like to see a specific ROI for every program. So how do you structure your priorities and measure your results? Lerer Hippeau’s Natalie Sportelli gave some insight:

• Step 1: Marketing Audit: Map out all of your current communications and marketing initiatives by work input vs. value output.

• Step 2: Pick Two Initiatives: Choose two initiatives to prioritize above all else. These should generally be in the green bucket with high value and low work, and will be the initiatives most likely to move the needle for your company.

• Step 3: Track Anecdotes: When there is no data able to be extracted from a program, anecdotes are the best method to measure success. Was a key hire made? Was a customer introduction made or contact signed? However, anecdotes are not a quick-measure approach, so continue to track them throughout the year and be realistic with your team on a timeline.

Be true to your brand, the right way.

Consistency is key.

The first step to reaching brand consistency is to define who your audience is and speak directly to them. For example, Work-Bench is laser focused on enterprise technology investing, meaning we speak to enterprise tech founders and executives, developers, engineers as well as other VCs and LPs. Ask yourself, what makes them want to connect with you? What value do you bring these audiences that no one else can? For us, our value derives from tapping into our teams corporate IT background and delivering tactical go-to-market strategy support.

It’s then important to be in lockstep with your team on your mission, vision and values. And to be able to clearly and succinctly define them as well as visually represent them.

We get it, branding is not easy. And it can often fall to the wayside as you build a company or product. But it’s important to remember that your brand is the heart and soul of your company and will support every and anything you do.

If you handle marketing at a VC firm and want to trade notes or are an enterprise startup looking for some guidance, feel free to reach out!