AI brand stories - the only way to secure ROI

All marketers need to know how to weave a captivating narrative to show their brand off in its best light. 

When brands can spin a good story, they’ve got a higher chance of securing:

• Recognition – both internally and externally
• Distribution contracts – both regionally and nationally
• Pitches – convincing agencies, clients and more, that they're worth taking a shot on

But most importantly…

Brands with good narratives can prove the ROI of their actions. And with this kind of proof, the possibilities for progression are endless, as with proof comes trust, a larger portion of a company’s budget, and the ability to execute bigger and better marketing activations.

A good story can unlock so many doors for brands. So, if you want to learn how to create a compelling brand narrative - using AI - to prove the impact of your marketing, let’s dive in.

The first step to a killer brand story

Every good brand story starts with objectives. To be specific, your company’s objectives. Understanding your company’s overarching business goals for the year and quarter will help to keep you on the right track, so when it comes to creating your own story, it is aligned with what your company is trying to achieve.

Every business will have a unique set of intentions but common features are:

1. Growing Distribution – Convincing retailers your brand is worth it and proving your product is better than the competition. 

2. Gaining Penetration – Getting into more households. Finding ways to increase your brand awareness and keep your brand front-of-mind.

3. Driving Market Share – Chipping away at the competition by learning what non-users feel about your brand, and what competitors’ users feel about competitor brands. Then using this information to identify how best you can steal share.

4. Growing the Category – Understanding your category’s penetration and whether the category is expandable. If you find it is, taking some category development action. If not, investigating how you can drive more users, more usage, and more trade up.

5. Disrupting the Category – If you’re in a category that has a lot of larger players in it, and you want to disrupt, doing something different. Attacking a space that no one has their eye on.

Once you’ve understood what your business’ objective are, it’s time to set your team’s objectives. Whether you refer to these as ‘Marketing goals’, ‘KPIs’ or ‘targets’, the intention behind these is universal – to support you in achieving your business’ goals.

When setting your team goals, ask yourself:

• What is your company’s overall revenue goal for the incoming quarter?
• What is your Sales team’s biggest challenge? This should be the focus of your story and you should clearly demonstrate how you’ve addressed these painpoints through your Marketing activations.
• What is your target audience? Showing how you understand your consumers’ wants and needs will bring your story to the next level - proving your activations are impacting the audience your company is going after.

• What will success look like? How will you determine whether you’ve reached your goals?

Your targets should be clearly aligned with sales’ targets – taking into account their goals and audience.   This alignment will help to prove the value of your marketing activations, as when Marketing achieves, so too will sales.

To learn more about setting objectives, click here.

Frame your story

Now you’ve got clear goals in mind, it’s time to decide how to frame your brand story.

Remember, the best stories are data-driven.

When you have data at your disposal, you don’t need to convince people to believe in you, since the proof is already there. And if you’re using your brand story to ask for more budget, numbers will be your best friend.

The departments that control the ‘wallet’ - like Finance and the Executive board – respond well to numbers, as they live and breathe these every day. So, if you can go in there and speak their language this will really help to build your case.

To learn more about speaking a CFO’s language, click here. 

When adding more depth to your brand story, you can look for numbers on:

• What your team is currently bringing in, in terms of revenue
• How much your team is costing the business
• A rough cost-per channel

Having an accurate marketing forecast and precise numbers to support the success of your previous actions, will help you to predict the ROI of your next venture in this brand story.

But gathering this data can be an incredibly time-consuming and expensive process.

That’s why AI platforms have never been more needed. With a Marketing platform, like ProQuo AI, you’ll have unlimited data at your fingertips to boost the quality of any brand narrative. This will free up brands, saving them time and arming them with the data they need to prove the ROI of their marketing executions.

Let’s see how this works in action

Hundreds of brands are creating compelling brand narratives through ProQuo.

With ProQuo, you can see what is most important to your category and your customers before you start planning. This helps you to pinpoint (before spending money) the best areas to focus your strategies around. Say, for example, your customers are needing more brands in your category to stand up for social causes. You can capitalize on this need, ensuring your next campaign is focused on causes your customers are interested in.

You can also segment this data down by gender, age and users, to understand how the needs of specific audiences vary. And you can add in real-life events into the platform, so you can see as your sales grows, so too does your sentiment data – the way people feel about your brand.

With ProQuo, you are freer to try out your hypotheses in a low budget way. This allows you to experiment more with new techniques. Say you wanted to reach a new audience, but you’d never targeted this group before. You could use your ProQuo data as a justification of why you think your plan will work – showing how your audience’s needs are in line with your strategy.

And because all of this data is live, you’ll always be a step ahead of the competition - in tune with the latest needs in your category. This will help you to create marketing activations that really resonate with your intended audience. Forget going broad, your current marketing plans can now be as specific as you like. And because you have the data to back up your choices, you can prove in your brand narratives why what you’re doing will generate ROI.

Being data-driven is the way forward for marketing. But most data-driven brands are always relying on what they’ve done previously to inform future strategies. Yet with ProQuo data, you can see in the moment what is and isn’t resonating. This will help you to build compelling brand narratives to show why you need more budget to reach a specific audience or to get you closer to achieving your company’s goals.

And if you want to guarantee your brand story will hit the mark…

Check out ProQuo’s BrandManager platform to create effective brand narratives, in seconds.

Here’s how it works.

The AI runs through your platform, seeing where you’ve succeeded and where you’ve fallen short – as well as how the context of your category has affected these results. It then generates a persuasive and data-driven brand story for you to use to prove the ROI of your actions.

Having data will help you to build a winning narrative. And with ProQuo by your side, you won’t just get access to unlimited data that runs everyday, you’ll also have convincing AI-driven reports, at the click of a button.

Seriously, it’s never been easier to prove the ROI of your marketing investments.

And if you want to learn more about proving ROI, click here.