: Five ways to grow your brand in 2025 - marketing strategies for long-term success

Marketers are increasingly under pressure to deliver ROI against a backdrop of the necessity for broad skillsets to achieve tall objectives. Embrace Marketing’s MD and Brand Strategy Lead shares her perspective on five ways to grow your brand in 2025 amid a challenging environment for marketers.

Lead with your brand with purpose

There are very few organisations who genuinely lead with a meaningful and distinctive brand purpose. You hear it all the time – you must lead with “your purpose”. I’m fully onboard with this. I’ve seen the impact that being a purpose-led organisation can have. This is based on my own experience as a business owner and through helping other B2B organisations and charities to uncover and share their purpose and what makes them different.

Your purpose should be the guiding light that sits behind every action and interaction that you have with team members, prospects, customers and suppliers. It should inspire, emotionally connect, differentiate, be memorable and most importantly guide you towards long-term growth. With only around 5% of B2B prospects ready to buy now – it’s about building long-term recognition and relationships with your target audience, so when they are ready to buy, they choose you.

Spend more time on your marketing strategy

Many organisations jump straight into the tactics and do little or no strategic work upfront. There is an increasing pressure in most organisations to generate leads right now. As we know – there is only a small proportion of your B2B prospects who are ready to buy and enquire immediately. Creating a thorough marketing strategy is essential for generating long-term brand growth.

There are many existing frameworks to help form marketing strategies which are often not utilised. SWOT/PESTEL are great for assessing the current market situation. Completing these exercises always provides lots of ideas on the areas to work on, dial down/up and opportunities to differentiate and grow. Combining market understanding with a clear grasp on who the target audience is and how best to segment your audience will always help refine your strategy for success. Customer empathy mapping, creating personas and mapping out the customer buyer journey are all incredibly useful in placing you in the prospect’s shoes.

Focus on four key campaign topics this year

Don’t try to communicate too much, otherwise little/nothing will be remembered by your target audience. Psychologist Ebbinghaus conducted studies into human memory citing that “frequent repetitions are indispensable in order to make possible the reproduction of a given content”. It’s commonly thought that you need 7 points of communication with your audience for your message to stick. Ebbinghaus also cited ‘the spacing effect’, whereby messages that are spread out over time are more effective for memory retention than cramming.

Think less is more. What are the most important top-level messages you want to run campaigns on this year to best fulfil your strategy? Stick to just these key campaigns – creating a suite of clear, cohesive and consistent messages and several touchpoints across relevant channels per each campaign.

Make your efforts go further

When you’ve created your primary campaign content consider how you can increase your exposure with your target audience. Assess how you can optimise each channel you use. A/B test to see what is most effective and continuously adapt and improve. For example, when you’ve put the time into your company LinkedIn posts, ensure that there is a clear process in place to maximise the reach.

People connect with people and LinkedIn’s algorithm tends to favour posts from individuals over companies. Consider who can be your LinkedIn advocates and influencers in your organisation and work with them to share your company’s key messages in the most effective way.

Keep it fresh and share something new

The same old messages and look and feel get immediately ignored. Yes, you need to be consistent, but you must also share something new. We’re in an age of information overload! We’re constantly, subconsciously having to prioritise what we tap into. You need to stand out more than ever before with strong messaging and bold creative. 

‘The information gap theory’ in behavioural science highlights how humans are motivated to seek information to fill the knowledge gaps. Are you genuinely grabbing your audience’s attention and sharing something valuable that they don’t already know? People are conditioned to respect and respond to authority figures. Identify the authority figures in your organisation and engage them in marcomms to share their individual point of view. Afterall, people connect with people and not businesses.

Looking to grow your B2B or not-for-profit brand in 2025? Get in touch to chat about your brand and marketing challenges, objectives and the best path forward!

This latest thinking article was written by:

 

Becky Reardon
Managing Director