The Three RRRs in Brand

“Now, when I talk about brand, I tend to talk about it in terms of their three R’s and brand. There’s recognition, there’s reputation, and there’s rankings.”

The Three RRRs in Brand

Video Transcript

Recording of Steve Keifer

“Now, when I talk about brand, I tend to talk about it in terms of their three R’s and brand. There’s recognition, there’s reputation, and there’s rankings.”

The First R – Recognition

“Let’s talk about all three of those one by one starting with recognition which is short for brand recognition which is simply means do people know who you are and what you do?

If your prospective buyers don’t know who you are, they’re definitely not going to buy anything from you. So how do you build brand recognition? Well, it’s a lot easier than you might actually think. You simply need to figure out where your customers or prospective customers congregating on a regular basis, and get in front of them. Do they go to conferences or they’re professional associations?

Do they have a private slack community or their zoom calls that they do weekly webinars that are put on? And then you want to spend a little bit of money to sponsor those channels so that you can get in front of them, underwrite a research study, go to the conference and speak, get on a webinar and moderate a panel.

You’d be surprised how just a modest investment in some of those channels where your customers are already at will build brand recognition really quickly.”

The Second R – Reputation

“Now let’s talk about the second R, which is reputation. And this simply means not only that people know who you are, but they have a positive view of your company and your products. Right? If everybody knows who you are but they don’t have a good opinion of you, that’s not really where you want to be.

Now, reputation is hugely impacted by how well your product works, how responsive your customer support team is, and a whole bunch of things that are completely beyond the scope of marketing. But there are things that the marketing team can do to try to improve your reputation. One of them is starting a customer advocacy program. Nothing has a bigger influence on C-level executives than them hearing one of their peers talk very positively about a vendor that they’ve had a purchase or an experience with.

You can also build a thought leadership program, but you’ve got to do it right. It’s got to be genuine. It’s got to be high value. You don’t want to hire a content marketing agency that has absolutely no domain expertise.

You’ve got to get your internal subject matter experts to actually roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of coming up with those ideas and best practices.”

The Third R – Rankings

“Now let’s talk about the third R, which is rankings. And that’s usually the easiest one for people to understand. And what I’m talking about here is how well do you show up in the quadrant or the G2 grid. And again you want to make investments to improve your rankings. So one of the big ones is having a formal analyst relations program.

You want to make sure that you really get in front of the IDC analysts, the Gartner analysts, the Forrester analysts. They’re writing about your space. You’re spending money with a tier two niche analysts that are covering your particular market. So they’re informed about what your product roadmap is, what your strategy is, what your differentiation is relative to the competition.

You also want to have a formal program around rankings on review sites. You want to incentivize your technical support and customer success teams to be sending happy customers up to G2 to trust radius to cap tier to write five star reviews about you. Should your rankings improve over time.”