Using Audience Segmentation to Connect Your People to Your Brand

Your brand’s stakeholders all look at your brand from a different perspective.

Designer.

Brand Manager.

Customer-facing consultant.

They’re all looking for that one piece of information, collateral, powerpoint template that they need at that moment to do their job. Brand standards aren’t one-size-fits-all.

Your internal stakeholders all regularly need something different from the brand, and there’s nothing more frustrating, time-consuming, and efficiency-killing task than digging for the basic business information you need wading through pages of a brand guidelines pdf.

Achieving brand consistency starts and ends with the people that represent your brand, but every brand has a highly nuanced mix of stakeholders. While your creative teams live and breathe every little detail of your brand, a vendor or salesperson may be looking for the latest logo or word template. This makes the role of a brand manager all the more complicated, as they are tasked with getting the right brand assets into the right hands. 

Digital brand centers engage your audience. Though, before you can get it right, you must analyze your audience’s needs. It’s marketing 101! By tailoring the brand center experience for each person, you are making it easy for them to access the assets and education they need when they need it. The result? High quality branded experiences. 

Segmentation should be based on needs by role, department, and location. Give your audience messaging that is sure to resonate. Inspire them with the power of your brand. 

Once you understand the needs and motivations of your audience, you can then create targeted messaging and content that resonates. This can include things like custom landing pages, email campaigns, social media posts, and other marketing materials. The goal is to create content that is relevant and engaging for each audience segment.  

This relevancy drives engagement, creating the opportunity to connect with other business units that may not otherwise understand their role in brand. This ensures that the brand is being consistently applied across the organization, and that all business units are working towards a common goal.  

To help employees understand the need for aligned brand content, it can be helpful to provide training and education on the importance of brand consistency and compliance. This can help employees understand how their actions and decisions can impact the brand, and why it is important to follow brand guidelines.  

Here are some ways to help employees understand the need for consistent brand content:  

• Go beyond communicating the rules, inspire your audience with your brand experience. 

• Provide regular training and education on the importance of brand consistency and compliance.  

• Encourage employees to ask questions and provide feedback on brand-related issues.  

• Celebrate and recognize employees who demonstrate a strong commitment to brand compliance.  

• Implement processes and systems to ensure that all brand content is reviewed and approved before it is published or shared.  

• Most importantly, in all communications, don’t belabor the rules, rather tell stories about how the brand has been used both positively and negatively. Stories engage your audience and are easier to recall when needed.

It is important for employees across business units to understand the impact of an organization’s brand on the long-term health of the organization. This includes correct usage of brand assets and an understanding of the value that lives within our brands. Leveraging the right tools, like Beam’s Brand Center, can further drive your team’s brand usage past just distinguishing between a library of rules, and even inspiring them. 

To create a brand center that speaks to those who don’t understand brands, it can be helpful to focus on providing clear and concise information about the organization’s brand, and why it is important. This can include things like the brand’s values, vision, and mission, as well as its key differentiators and benefits that combined, tell the unique story of your brand. 

It is also helpful to provide examples and case studies that illustrate the impact of the brand on the organization’s success. This underscores the importance of the brand in tangible and relatable ways for those who may not understand it.  

Additionally, providing collaborative training and education on the brand, and encouraging employees to ask questions and provide feedback, can help to ensure that everyone has a good understanding of the brand and its importance. This can help to create a culture of brand awareness and compliance within the organization.  

Segmentation enables you to give people the information they need without distractions, making user groups and permissioning a vital feature of any brand center experience. We encourage any brand seeking information on building a brand center to ensure they can support segmentation and targeted delivery of the most relevant content.