Resoundcast - the branding podcast from Resound, a creative agency Resound

Did you know your content ideas can give you monopoly power in your market? That's because when you really know your audience, your content tells them what they're thinking and then answers it directly, helping them to know how to think about a topic.



And when they think about your topic in exactly the way you do, you win.



But before you can connect, you have to listen.



Today, I want to talk about how authentic branding, paired with an understanding of your audience, will activate relationships at the top of the marketing funnel, and all the way down.



Remember, this all doesn’t have to happen today. But if you’re intent on brand and service strategy by including your audience in the conversation, this process is for you. Don’t stress about doing this overnight. Keep it simple and then focus on the next thing.



https://youtu.be/eggheR2Mgls

Identify the Audience You Want to Understand

"Understand who you should be talking to for maximum brand resonance."



What does this mean? Brand resonance is a fancy way to say your brand makes sense to your audience.



Have they been beaten over the head by the industry, and you’re making them feel like you’re on their side?

Do they have a frustration with the industry that you’re solving? You know, because you listened?

Are they sick of seeing every firm acting like every other firm? In a world where everyone’s trying to be relevant and current, you stand out by focusing on what’s important. You rely on your values and brand personality, showing that you care less about impressing people with external things and more about timeless values—focusing on things that really matter.



Define your ideal client by creating a persona. This process involves going to different resources and finding out where your potential clients hang out. The key is to place your brand where your ideal clients already are, as they usually won't come to your brand on their own. 



Give the persona demographic data, problems they're encountering, key values they hold, and psychographic information about how they think. Demographics can encompass details such as income, job title, type of firm they work for, and the size of the company.

Understand Your Audience Using Inside Knowledge

"Tap into internal insights to authentically reach your target market."



All this means is that you should talk with other people in your firm about your clients. Build an understanding of who they are based on shared internal knowledge.



What's going on when they're trying to take their kids to school?

What's going through their mind when they wake up in the morning?

Is there anything you don't know about the cycles of their business?



So it’s not a scientific study or focus group. Oh well. It’s easy to do, and It’s more information than you had before, and now you can test the insights you gain from each other in other ways, such as by talking to clients.



Plus, it builds a client-focused culture and lets everyone know that you’re interested in providing leads for them.

Understand Your Audience's Preferred Channels

"Explore unconventional marketing channels"



Simply put: Find where your audience hangs out and engage them there.



This is the core question of all media buying. 



Do they all have offices in the same part of town?

Do they all go to the same hot dog stand or deli for lunch?

Are they all in one LinkedIn group?



Related: how does your competition try to reach them? If everyone’s using the same medium or marketing channel, you just need to think things through. Maybe you go back to sending postcards or invite them to a webinar.



It helps to go back to your brand and product,

Accounting firms are all the same, right? Nerdy, dad-joke-telling professionals who drive sensible cars and wear beige suits to work every day. Unless they’re feeling saucy, in which case they throw caution to the wind and go with the branded polo.



Of course, these accounting stereotypes come straight from the ’90s and, more recently, Parks and Rec.



But the industry isn’t exactly doing its job in busting that myth.



Most accounting firms:



Claim to be “more than just accountants.” 

Use blue and sometimes green in their branding. 

All on a mission to come across as a little more human than a calculator.



Of course, we know these stereotypes don’t reflect the people working in the industry. And we’d like to help.



https://youtu.be/GRal1TSGuGU

The Index

Here at Resound, we thought it would be interesting to see exactly how differentiated—or how homogenous—the industry actually is. So we grabbed 40 data points across 1,485 accounting firms, crunched a little data, and named it the “Remarkabrand Index for Accounting Firms.”



The index reflected our desire to give firms a measurable standard against which to judge their branding efforts. Basically, “Are we different, or are we undistinguishable from our competition?”



Why? Because differentiation is a real challenge. Accounting firms struggle to distinguish themselves in a competitive market. And until now, there was no quantitative, benchmarking tool to objectively measure brand differentiation. 



…until now.

So How Did We Collect the Data?

Tons and tons and tons of manual, sometimes painful, data entry (we're working on automation for this now).



But other than that, it was easy. We looked at 40 data points, including SEO scores, naming conventions, word-choice differentiation (e.g. in tagline), and color and logo style ratings, to name just a few.



The index revealed insights into effective differentiation strategies used by top firms.



Here’s an overview of the data collection:

SEO via Domain Authority Score

We used a standard measuring tool called Domain Authority from Moz, which acts as a good summary indicator of SEO strength. For additional context, we looked at inbound links as well.

Can Small Firms Compete?

Toward the end of data collection, we started asking what company size and revenue had to do with the index score. Surely, bigger firms by revenue and employee count would do better, right?



We’re glad we asked, because the results were a bit surprising, with many of the top-performing firms having fewer than 200 people.

Visual Was Huge

Through the Eyes of a Designer

Some of the data wasn’t so straightforward from an evaluation standpoint. After all, there’s no math formula we know of to evaluate the quality of a logo or even the decade that inspired it.



So we brought in the professionals.



And lest you think designers are kookie, impractical, blocky-framed-non-prescription-glasses-wearing artsy types with no grounding in reality, we’ll have you know…our designers are pros.



And it’s a good thing they are because we have deadlines.



We asked them to evaluate based on design and branding principles. They tagged the logos and websites, collected colors, and, yes, even estimated the decade of the logo based on style.

Does Accounting Look Old?

In addition to how firms differentiate, we wanted to know: is it time for a rebrand? Has there been deferred maintenance on the brand? Who needs a new brand makeover?

Every brand gets its power from connecting with people and delivering on its promises. And that starts with internal branding.



I’m taking inspiration from a conversation I had with David and Sam, where we emphasize internal branding: taking an internal focus before taking your brand identity to the world.



We’ll explore why internal branding should be your first focus, the pitfalls of neglecting it, and how to implement it successfully within your team.



By aligning your internal stakeholders first, you set the stage for a more cohesive and powerful brand presence in the market.



https://youtu.be/hlG0ojbxGo0

Focus on Your Team First

Nobody advocates for your brand like employees. Their words and actions tell everyone what your brand stands for. If they know your brand—and you hire well, based on your brand—your employees will see the connection.



And that consistent brand experience—through the words and actions of your employees—connects with customers more than your claims ever will.



Create clear guidance and your employees will give you a cohesive internal brand that enhances customer service, employee satisfaction, and overall business performance.

Not Convinced Internal Branding Matters?

Here’s what happens when external branding fails to connect with your employees.



Lack of Cohesion. Without internal branding, your team acts and speaks inconsistently, confusing clients.

Employee Disengagement. When employees don't feel connected to the brand, their engagement and productivity suffer.

Reputation Risks. Inconsistent branding can damage your reputation, making it harder to attract both clients and talent.

Missed Opportunities. A team that's not aligned with the brand won’t know how to represent the firm in social settings or online platforms.



Neglecting internal branding can have real financial consequences, from lost sales to increased employee turnover.

The Overview: Implement Internal Branding

Branding starts at the top but doesn’t stay there.



We’ve all seen companies that embrace amazing-sounding values but don’t live up to them.



You might be at the counter at the car rental desk, and you can’t get the agent to live up to their own values. The values are literally on the wall behind the person helping you.



They’re just not lived out.



So how do you build out those brand values properly and honestly?



Start with Leadership. The first step in internal branding is getting buy-in from the top. Leadership needs to exemplify the brand values.

Synthesize. People grow in understanding when they’re asked to think through the brand regularly. Ask everyone to apply them to a situation that happened recently. Did they live up to them? Is there room for improvement? Make sure everyone understands the brand's values, mission, and vision.

Give them Guides. Don’t give them long paragraphs to read. Give them workshops, handbooks, or even regular internal communications.



Know the Tools for Internal Branding

Internal branding uses different tools than external. But they all do the same thing in the end: instill an understanding of the brand to humans who can either be encouraged and excited about values or eventually forget.



Here are some ways you can keep everyone engaged internally.



Brand Handbook & Workshops: Combine a comprehensive guide with internal training sessions to educate team members on brand elements, values, and practical applications.

Digital Communication: Use platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams for...

Tech innovations, like AI, come along every few years. The real question is, how will you leverage it—understanding the advantages and disadvantages of AI—to elevate your performance?



AI improves automation and efficiency. It can analyze data, generate content, and even interact with customers. And it’s tough for humans to match the speed and cost.



But ultimately, AI only replaces you for routine and repetitive marketing tasks. Maybe it’s time we talk about all its shortcomings, and what you can do to rise above yet another “disruptive” technology innovation.



I talked with Anait Zubia, former marketing manager at Quora, about how she sees AI, and these insights came from that discussion.



Let’s cover a few things AI’s not very good at and a third piece of advice for how to put it to work, pushing your career forward.



https://youtu.be/N6teW246RdA

You Dictate the Why: Measuring AI against real marketing objectives.

For all of the benefits of AI, it doesn’t know how to create objectives, strategies, or even executions for your brand without your help.



AI isn’t a project manager. You decide where AI fits in the process and what you expect it to do. Like any tool in your stack, keep it simple and build from there.



AI isn’t a brand manager. It may understand your color scheme, but it doesn’t know how to connect with people. Your brand needs to do that. It can do a lot of work, but it needs accountability. This is where you put your brand manager hat on.



AI isn’t a leader. Leaders make moral decisions. Sure, we think of leadership as everything from strategists to theorists who help us understand practical ways to get from here to there. But at their base, we expect leaders to be moral actors. It’s a prerequisite (except, apparently, in politics). The bottom line is that marketing leaders are still needed to make sure that what we do—and how we communicate—is moral, not just expedient.



AI is not a replacement. It’s a support. It’s a tool, not a worker. But if you think about it the right way, it can free you up for other things. For example, the time you’re saving from writing a blog outline could be spent reading about leadership, or even walking around the office, exercising leadership by encouraging, problem-solving and helping others make good decisions and get work done.



Leaders bring a sense of order and brand to the work. AI is just a tool that can help you execute. Leaders should view AI as a tool to enhance, not replace, human capabilities, allowing them to tackle more significant challenges in an AI-augmented world.

The Dangers of Blind AI Trust

For brands, we’re bringing a point of view to the areas we speak to. Your ability to evaluate and respond to new trends based on your brand makes your content interesting and gives it depth. But if you rely on AI to speak into your topics before you get a chance to analyze them, you may lose your edge, creating content that’s predictable and not valuable to your audience.

Refresher: How Point of View Works in Creativity.

Students of the creative process know there’s a thing called “top-down” thinking, which refers to your ability to form an opinion and dig into a topic before you start receiving information about it from outside sources.



This gives your content originality.



By forming an opinion based on your values first, you’re creating thought leadership in a way that makes sense, unpolluted by the complicated and often-convoluted thoughts of others…or the oft-misapprehended outputs of AI.



This is especially true with political topics.



AI is likely to take an inoffensive approach, which sometimes puts politeness over truth.

In marketing, authenticity builds lasting connections. This means creating content that matters to your audience. But what happens when we introduce Artificial Intelligence (AI) into this equation? Can we really maintain authenticity while leveraging AI for content creation?



To understand the topic better, Sam and I interviewed Anati Zubia a seasoned marketing professional with stints in tech startups and, most recently, Quora.



What are the rules for using AI to bolster your marketing efforts? Here’s what came out of that conversation.



https://youtu.be/lX7edQm6Qxw

Remember Your Goal: Create Content that Matters

Technologies and fads change, but meaningful content will always build relationships. Don’t lose sight of this, because it’s your job. Anati stressed the importance of crafting content that truly resonates with your audience and addresses their core problems.



Know your audience’s pain points. Content starts with understanding the customer's problems. If you know their problems—and how they speak about them—you can cut through the clutter.



What are their needs?

What are their goals?

What’s between them and those things (that you can help with)?



AI doesn’t understand these things. It doesn’t grasp the complexity of human problems and changing preferences. The dynamic nature of customer needs and market trends adds a layer of intricacy that AI is still evolving to navigate accurately.



This affects the ability to write strategy (understanding problems) and to write copy (to connect with people).



AI can certainly aid in content creation, but authentic human insights into customer pain points and desires remain at the core of content that resonates. As businesses integrate AI into their content creation strategies, the alignment between AI assistance and human understanding becomes the key to producing content that genuinely matters.



So how do you align those things? Keep reading.

1. AI Can't Generate Original Content, but It Can Help

AI tools like ChatGPT aren't innately original, but they boost your creative process by leaving you lots of energy to put toward other things, like editing and asking questions. 



You can use AI-generated content as a springboard for your marketing materials. By merging AI-generated ideas with your human insights, you can craft standout content while retaining authenticity.



Why can’t AI create new ideas and connections? Because at the center of creativity is the ability to connect with people by connecting ideas that aren’t explicitly related to ideas.



And how do you train AI to see the funny side of something if the idea of “funny” is different in every situation?



The human brain possesses a unique skill in linking seemingly unrelated concepts. Effective content sometimes pairs ideas that initially appear unrelated, resulting in a perspective that conveys a sense of discovery.



Only the human mind can do that. And AI can free up more of your time for things like that if it can act as your secretary, doing the simpler tasks for you.



Where AI is strong: Using tools like ChatGPT can serve as a compass to gauge language trends and content styles. These outputs give us insights into current usage and style. In a way, it shows us what everyone else is doing.

2. Use AI to Create Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

We mentioned using AI to do the more menial tasks of marketing and content creation. Creating an FAQ is a great use and one that Anati recommends.



Since AI-powered tools can aggregate and organize industry info, it’s great at generating, organizing, and refining FAQ content to provide web content. 



Here's how AI can help with building FAQs:

Mergers and acquisitions can ruin a B2B brand. Even the best-intentioned M&A can take a toll on a brand when rushed decisions lead to a lack of coordination in the culture and a timid approach to the market. I had a conversation with Jaimi Koechel who’s a veteran of both a firm rebrand and a B2B brand merger about how to execute a merger well, from a branding perspective.



https://youtu.be/YjBNFIHU0BU

B2B Brand Mergers: 2 Views

Firms take different views on M&As. Some see it as just an opportunity to expand, adding a book of business and making the firm’s strengths available to a wider audience and geographical area. But while the firm’s management may be thinking about expansion, and making higher-level decisions about naming, the accounting firm marketer’s job is to think about how the brand gets lived out over the course of the merger.



Anyone who’s been through a merger knows that, although the technical aspects of a merger take only months and end when the announcement is made, everyone gets new office signage, new email signature lines, and t-shirts with the new logo, the effects of the B2B brand merger last until everyone understands the new brand.



It can take months and years to get everyone to embrace the new brand, especially when two companies form a merged brand, and two cultures come together.

The Marketing Goal of a B2B Brand Merger

As a marketer, your job is twofold:



End up with a strong brand whose values are understood and mean something, along with the requisite visual and verbal assets and guidance.

Shorten the time between the merger and a strong culture that will consistently and convincingly live out the firm’s values.



We can’t control how quickly people grasp the culture at the individual level, but we can think ahead and make the path clear.



The Remarkabrand podcast was joined again by award-winning accounting marketer and former client Jaimi Koechel to help us understand what’s coming down the pike when two firms form a single, merged brand.



https://youtu.be/YjBNFIHU0BU

3 Decisive Moves Toward Brand B2B Brand Merger Success

I asked Jaimi about some of the challenges accounting marketers face during a merger. How do you maintain the strength of a brand when a merger presents every opportunity to dilute the brand? How do you help everyone make sense of the rebrand and keep them focused on what’s important?



Brand managers face a unique challenge when their firm merges with another firm since planning isn’t always straightforward. How do you make a merged brand that makes sense?



Let’s continue on and talk about things you can do to solidify the brand during a merger or acquisition.

Predict Brand Disagreements

Nobody’s more likely to see potential brand disagreements than you are. As the caretaker of a brand you may have had a hand in developing, you’re likely more aware of the conflicts you see coming. And if you can express your concerns well—and think of ways everyone involved can work together to solve them—you could turn a problem into a big win for everyone—especially you and the firm.



After all, it’s not the order-takers who help the leadership make sense of things. Rather, it’s those people who can solve problems, make decisions and get people working together.

A Few Examples



Whose logo and brand name will we use? Although this decision is usually implied by the structure of the merger/acquisition, it opens up a broader question about the rollout: how will we make this make sense to our clients?

How aligned are the two brands to begin with? Do the voice, tone, mood, and values complement each other, or do they conflict?