Making your mark: how to reinvent a brand in tech
When I joined visual storytelling technology company, disguise, I wanted to "make my mark" by helping disguise redefine its brand and marketing approach.
Although the marketing field is not particularly male-dominated, the tech industry is. According to a recent study, women hold only 22% of tech leadership roles.
A year later, when I was made Global Head of Marketing, I realised this was my opportunity to not only elevate the disguise brand and drive growth, but also to build up the women around me in the tech industry.
I joined disguise in December 2019, just before Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic. With the company's history and reputation in empowering the world's most spectacular visual experiences for concert tours for the likes of Massive Attack, U2, Guns ‘n Roses and many more, our main customer base purely existed in the live events industry - a sector that was under threat.
After Covid-19 caused an indefinite halt on all live events around the world, we had to rethink our core business offering and what new markets we could reach. Luckily, our team was well into the development of our innovative extended reality (xR) solution, a workflow that allowed our users to blur the line between the real and imaginary and create spectacular virtual scenes and sets using real-time graphics. This technology, in the past two years, has empowered remote collaboration in film, broadcast, corporate events and has even enabled exciting virtual concert livestreams among many other applications.
disguise accelerated our development of xR with a beta release in May 2020 and partnered closely with a select group in our user community to test out the technology and gather valuable feedback that led to its public release in April 2021.
A brand new solution needed a brand new audience and new leads to fill our pipeline. Our team had our work cut out, but we persisted and we are proud that our marketing efforts enabled our company to meet a global growing need for extended reality productions. In the past 18 months, disguise xR has powered over 400 projects, including major productions like the 2020 MTV VMAs, ITV Sport's coverage of the UEFA Euro 2020 Championships and various shows and coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games.
My experience in leading the marketing team during this turbulent time taught me a lot about how to launch a brand to a whole new market. If you are pivoting a business into a new market like I was or building a brand from scratch, here are some tips and tricks that helped me along the way:
- Take a moment to understand your brand and the value it provides customers.
A brand is so much more than a logo, it is the values we uphold as a company and the overall experience we leave our customers with. Before launching major marketing campaigns, I always like to go back to basics and remind ourselves how we can help the customer with a specific need or challenge and how we define and deliver that through our brand.
Once you are clear on the direction and more importantly the ‘why', create a solid foundation for your messaging and know your story, so you can get to work on moving your value proposition and brand forward and make an impact!
- Track and report on every marketing activity
In an age where we have a wealth of information available, accurate tracking and reporting has never been so important.
Understanding and communicating data is a vital skill for any operation across the business. How do you know if your initiatives are working if you cannot measure their success? Knowing how to analyse data, ask the right questions and communicate insight is what will give any Marketing team and business a competitive edge. We need to understand what is driving our prospective customers to engage with our brand so we can understand them better and tailor our marketing so we appeal to our key audiences.
Take time to set up the right operation so you can see what is driving engagement throughout the buyer journey. Once this is done, use key data points to report on specific marketing activity goals and feed the findings into your overall strategy.
If more marketers are data-driven in their approach, this will help business leaders understand the value of marketing and continue to support marketing initiatives. This is crucial to empower the marketing team to drive even greater growth for the business.
- Focus on building connections with prospects and customers across the entire customer journey
When generating leads, there is sometimes a tendency to drive thousands of leads into the sales funnel, without checking to see if this translates into actual sales activity, and, more importantly, customer satisfaction and retention. If a brand wants to be truly successful, they need to look at the buyer journey as a whole and make sure that the core brand values are reflected in every touchpoint with the customer.
Marketing teams need to not exist in silos but speak regularly to Sales, other customer-facing teams and customers themselves about what unique needs and experiences these customers have. I am proud that, at disguise, the marketing team can count on support from across the business as well as our talented disguise users and "partners" that collaborate with us so well.
- Personalise content and campaign activity to cut through the noise
Content marketing has gone from an exciting new marketing trend to becoming an essential powerhouse for all marketing activities.
Generating high-quality content and campaigns through multiple channels (Search, social media, email etc) ensures more and more people engage with the brand and business and develop trust. This, in turn, empowers sales and bottom-line revenue growth for the business.
The best content and campaigns, however, are not where you merely rave about your brand. Rather, the campaigns that truly drive engagement and growth are ones that are personalised and answer the unique needs of your brand's target audience. According to a recent study, 34% of consumers would be motivated to promote their favourite brand online with content that's relevant to their interests.
A famous example of this is Spotify's "Wrapped" campaign where they give their users a snapshot into their listening habits over the past year. Once this campaign launches in December, social media is peppered with discussions on Spotify - driving interaction with the brand.
- Attract, hire and retain the BEST talent to drive these initiatives with you
The biggest takeaway from my career is that you are nothing without the people you work with. I aim to hire people with the potential and drive to achieve incredible things, give them the tools they need to succeed, guide them and empower them to take ownership and work their magic!
My team, together with all teams at disguise, have certainly worked hard and stayed focused on pushing the industry and supporting our partners over the past year and a half. Even after the core business was impacted by a pandemic, disguise was named as one of Britain's private companies with the fastest-growing profits over the last three years in the 22nd annual Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100. We have also been recognised by the Financial Times as one of the fastest-growing businesses for 2021.
I have loved every minute of working with my team at disguise to drive the growth that the company is seeing at the moment. Our team has thrived and worked hard to break barriers in the male-dominated world of tech and I can't wait to see what we do next!