If you have a marketing excellence program for your brand management team, the focus should be on the marketing skills related to strategic thinking, brand positioning, marketing plans, marketing execution, and marketing analytics. Most importantly, your marketing excellence training programs should focus on how to think, define, plan, execute, and analyze.
There are marketing skills, behaviors and experiences you must collect throughout your marketing career. Many will show up naturally in your career. However, it is possible for you to end up with specific gaps due to specific jobs you have along the way. Assess where you stand and which gaps you need to address.
Marketing Excellence
We empower the ambitious to achieve the extraordinary.
Without a doubt, our role at Beloved Brands is to help the ambitious marketers who are trying to improve their marketing skills. Most importantly, we will prepare you so you can reach your full potential in your career. You will learn about strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, marketing execution, and marketing analytics. As well, we provide a suite of marketing tools, templates that will make it easier to do your job, processes that you can follow, and provocative thoughts to trigger your thinking.
Have you gone through an assessment of the marketing skills of your team? Take a look below:
The fundamentals of marketing matter.
Our Beloved Brands marketing training programs cover different streams to suit your type of marketer. For instance, our marketing training covers consumer marketing, B2B marketing, and Healthcare marketing.
The marketing fundamentals that we show in this article are part of what we use in our marketing training programs. Ambitious marketers will learn about strategic thinking, brand positioning, brand plans, marketing execution, writing creative briefs, advertising decision-making, marketing analytics, and marketing finance.
Importantly, investing in our marketing training program will help your team gain the marketing skills they need to succeed. Without a doubt, you will see your people make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth.
Finally, I wrote our Beloved Brands playbook to help you build a brand your consumers will love. If you are a B2B marketer, try our B2B Brands playbook. And, if you are a Healthcare Marketer, try our Healthcare Brands playbook.
Beloved Brands video
Everything a Marketing must know about.
Importantly, Brand leaders need to know how to think, define, plan, execute and analyze with the best of them. Moreover, while the brand leaders don’t really know how to do anything, they are looked upon to make every decision. Have a look at our five minute video on everything a marketer must know. To read more, click on this link: Everything.
To view, use the ▶️ controls to play or volume buttons
If you are looking to make your marketing team smarter, we can help. To get started, email Graham Robertson at [email protected]
Strategic Thinking
Smart strategic thinkers ask challenging questions.
To start, could you take the opportunity to improve your strategic thinking skills? Look to the five steps to building an effective brand strategy.
We show how to use our Strategic ThinkBox and lay out the five elements of strategic thinking. Next, we go deeper to challenge your brand’s core strength, engage with consumer strategy, or develop a competitive strategy.
Undoubtedly, you must understand the business situation before making your next move. We provide insights on how to craft the ideal strategy statements that can effectively guide your marketing plan, ensuring you’re well-prepared for any business scenario.
Video Lesson: Key Issues
To illustrate, watch our video on how to find the key issues on your brand that you can use in your marketing plan. Importantly, it helps you find the best possible questions. Subsequently, it sets up strategic solutions to answer those questions.
To view, use the ▶️ controls to play our brand strategy video.
Staying on strategy through execution.
As you move to the marketing execution, you need to use in-the-box creativity to stay on strategy. We map out the advertising process and the innovation process. Look at our Creative Brief and the good and bad creative brief examples. Then, we set you up to make marketing execution decisions using our advertising checklist to evaluate creative advertising ideas. And, you can use our innovation checklist to compare new product ideas.
Importantly, marketers must understand media planning, pricing, and social media strategy.
Marketing Careers
On a classic marketing team, there are four key levels:
- Assistant Brand Manager.
- Brand Manager.
- Marketing Director or Group Marketing Director.
- VP Marketing or CMO.
To illustrate, click to zoom in on the brand management career pathway.
In simple terms, the Assistant Brand Manager role is about doing, analyzing and sending signals you have leadership skills for the future.
At the Brand Manager level, it becomes about ownership and strategic thinking within your brand plan. Most Brand Managers are honestly a disaster with their first direct report, and get better around the fifth report.
When you get to the Marketing Director role, it becomes more about managing and leading than it does about thinking and doing. To be great, you need to motivate the greatness from your team and let your best players to do their absolute best.
And finally, at the CMO level, you must create your own vision, focus on your people to make them better and shine, drive the business results, and run the processes.
Our Beloved Brands Marketing Training program will make your team smarter.
If you are running a marketing team, you will always benefit from having a smarter team. When you invest in our marketing training program, you will help your team gain the marketing skills they need to succeed. As a result, you will see them make smarter decisions and produce exceptional work that drives business growth.
We’ll work with your team to help them learn more about the five core marketing skills: Strategic Thinking, Brand Positioning, Marketing Planning, Marketing Execution, and Brand Analytics. Most importantly, your marketers will learn new tools, concepts, and ideas to trigger new thinking. To help their skills, we get participants to take each tool on a test run. Then, we give feedback for them to keep improving.
Strategic Thinking:
Our marketing training teaches brand leaders how to ask tough strategic questions to slow everyone down and engage in the debate of options to move forward. To start, you will be given various tools to approach strategy thoughtfully and analytically. Importantly, marketers need to learn how to change brain speeds to move from a strategic thinking style to uncover what is holding back a brand and onto an instinctual thinking style on marketing execution.
We introduce our Strategic ThinkBox, which allows marketers to interrogate their brand. Importantly, our ThinkBox pushes you to take a holistic look at the brand’s core strength, competitive landscape, tightness of the consumer bond, and business situation.
Brand Positioning:
Our brand positioning process teaches how to decide on the target market, consumer benefits, and reasons to believe. First, you will learn to define the ideal consumer and frame the definition with their biggest needs, consumer insights, and enemy. Then, we provide our benefit cheatsheets to help you discover the functional and emotional benefits that a brand can deliver. Importantly, marketers need to decide whether to try to stake out a unique space that is motivating to consumers and ownable for the brand.
Learn to use our brand idea tool and see how it helps to communicate the brand idea to everyone across the organization. Finally, marketers will learn how to take the brand positioning work and translate it into a brand concept, brand story, and a brand credo.
Marketing Plans:
We see the marketing plan is a decision-making tool on how a brand will spend their limited resources. Moreover, the marketing plan communicates the expectations to everyone who works on the brand. Importantly, we teach marketers how to create the vision, purpose, goals, key issues, strategies, and marketing execution plans.
Learn how to write key issue questions and strategic statements that form the foundation of the marketing plan. In addition, our marketing training provides various marketing planning templates, including our one-page brand plan and ideal Marketing Plan presentation deck.
Marketing Execution:
Our marketing execution training starts with the concept of our Marketing PlayBox, which matches the Strategic ThinkBox. To keep marketers on strategy throughout the execution stages, our Marketing PlayBox helps find in-the-box ideas that meet four dimensions: they are focused on our target, fit with the brand, deliver the message, and execute the strategy.
To start, we show how the creative brief sets up the PlayBox, bridging the plan and execution. Importantly, you will learn to use our Creative Checklist to help make smarter decisions on creative communications. We will workshop you on how to give feedback to your agency based on the gaps you see in the checklist.
Learn to make media decisions that match your consumer’s purchase journey. We also provide a similar Innovation Checklist to compare innovation ideas.
Brand Analytics:
Our comprehensive brand analytics training teaches brand leaders how to lead a deep-dive business review. We outline the best analytical thinking so you can become a well-rounded marketer.
Learn to look at the marketplace, consumer analytics, channels of distribution, competitors, or other brands in their industry. Then, learn to assess the brand itself. Importantly, you will learn how marketing funnels can help assess the brand’s performance. We provide 64 analytical questions that marketers can ask of their brand. Finally, we show how to understand the brand’s financial performance indicators.
Our training looks at three specific streams: Consumer Marketing Training, B2B Marketing Training, and Healthcare Marketing Training. With each program, all of the examples are tailored to the type of marketer. Undoubtedly, marketers will be at their best when they can see the concepts or tools working on their type of brand.
