When you are looking to increase the impact and efficiency of your marketing communications, and wish to do so strategically, you have three great options. While all three revolve around the same central questions – they each take a different route, with obviously increasing degrees of intensity, business-mindfulness, thoroughness and their capacity for increasing resonance, differentiation and long-term marketing performance.

The same central questions are always about honing in on your points of target intersect. Who we are, who they are and what is the available messaging space may seem like easy questions on the surface. But how deep you, your agency, your copywriter or your brand messaging specialist dive into these has everything to do with the results you get. The three different angles of attack include a small, medium and large option, depending upon the size of the difference you want to make in your marketing strategy and the rate of company growth you seek are:

SMALL    >>>     THE CREATIVE BRIEF

MEDIUM >>>     THE POSITIONING BRIEF OR STRATEGY BRIEF

LARGE     >>>     BRAND BLUEPRINT OR BRANDING BRIEF

Up the ante on your business’ marketing

Here are more details on your 3 golden opportunities to increase marketing performance by clarifying and simplifying your marketing messages:

The creative brief

The creative brief sets the strike zone for “how to say it best,” by making sure the “it” of your assignment is precise, salient and executable. Who targets for this piece of communication are, where they are in their own minds or in the buying process (real communications, branding and marketing insight is psychological not just geographical), and what nobody else is saying are all ripe for review, reinvention and reorganization by a fresh brand development perspective. Naturally, all of this needs to be vexed and vetted prior to “rushing to execute,” a notoriously bad habit that bypasses marketing’s most virtuous and valuable service to you: how to better connect you with your audience.

The positioning brief

The positioning brief digs even deeper into the “what” of what to say, but it takes a company-wide approach. Here, we aren’t thinking about only one product or service and only one communications medium, but the platform for the entire company. In addition to a tightened and newly calibrated Unique Selling Proposition, your strategic positioning brief should make clear for all future creative assignments (company, service or product naming, tagline, logo, etc.) how who we exist for and the benefits we deliver are unique to us.

A brand blueprint or brand strategy document

Your brand strategy documentation or brand blueprint identifies a more robust brand position by spelling out the company’s core competitive differences, converting what you need to be saying into a “who” (who must the company be in order to better connect) and a “why” (what drives this one-of-a-kind marketplace personality.) At Articulated Brands, we deliver a personality matrix that defines a core attitude for the company and its 3-5 supporting pillars. We then contrast the proscribed brand with key competitors, seeking to ensure a differentiated brand and highlighting opportunities to widen the moat whenever possible. Your brand blueprint can also go a long way into informing the “how” of your communications in the form of an uber-brief that will govern all other forthcoming assignment-specific briefs.

The good news is you can begin to sharpen your marketing sword starting tomorrow.

In all of these initiatives, whether quick & breezy or studied & methodical, it is the ability to open up simultaneous areas of inquiry and to juggle a vast amount of variables (precious little is binary in the worlds of ideas and perceptions) in order to arrive at a set of more precise marching orders for your marketing dollars. After all, strategy is not a choice of outreach tactics, nor is it a simple statement of business purpose or marketing objectives. It is a carefully measured recipe – which ingredients at what quantities will yield the preferred mix of near and long-range gains? Tough choices, nuance, imagination and pragmatic business thoughtfulness: these are the hallmarks of legendary brand strategy.