The Value of Brand Stories | S01 E19

Hello everyone, and welcome to New Breed's Adding Value podcast. My name is Guido and I'm the manager of Acquisition and Strategy at New Breed. For those of you who don't know, New Breed is a customer acquisition agency focused on helping B2B companies grow and expand their business. And we do this by following the inbound methodology, which at its core is about adding value before extracting value. So the goal of this podcast is to bring you stories of how people add value to their customers, their company, and the individuals around them. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, give us a five star rating and check us out on newbreedmarketing.com today. I'm excited to have New Breed's Director of Services, Al Mohr, join the podcast. Prior to joining New Breed, you were most recently the Director of marketing@dealer.com, a digital marketing solution and partner for the automotive industry. So, Al, I really appreciate you taking the time to join today and welcome to the podcast.

It's awesome to be here. Thanks so much, Guido. This is my first time on the behind the microphone of a podcast. I think sometime in the, in the near future, every human being is going to have their own podcast, but until that time, it's fun. It's exciting to be here. Thank you.

Podcasting is the future of social media, right? So you have a really interesting background. Over the course of your career, you've worked as a writer, a coordinator, communications consultant, website and social lead, a brand manager. So to start off, can you talk about how your experience across those different disciplines shaped your approach to marketing?

Sure. Well, you know, when you play it all back like that, it sounds like a lot of different jobs, but at the end of the day, they mostly all pertain to kind of brand storytelling and defying and articulating what the narrative and what the through line was for any given organization. And I had really tremendous mentors and teams along the way, and I was very fortunate to be a part of some, some really great growth stories. So I'll just start by just acknowledging that, I think, you know, anybody, any marketer or salesperson will tell you that, you know, you need a lot of help and support and a team along the way. And it's always great to have that, and I was fortunate to have had that in my career to date. And yeah, the common thread has really been about how can we articulate and define the story we're looking to tell as an organization and align all of the different levers and opportunities to tell that story in the right way, and that's really been the core of it throughout my career to date.

So how have you seen that change over the course of your career where brands have different ways of telling their brand story?

Well, I mean, the obvious is just the tidal wave of digital. When I started my career, digital was, it was a part of the marketing puzzle, but it wasn't the defining piece of any marketing strategy necessarily. It was viewed as kind of adjacent to core traditional marketing. And that obviously has completely changed. And the other piece of it has been, in terms of big trends, has been the rise of content and also the rise of analytics and attribution. So, for example, content marketing, what's come to be known as content marketing, kind of has always existed within marketing. How can we create some self published storytelling, whether it's brochure content or white papers, but how can we, you know, you know, tell our story in these different mediums? But then as digital kind of came along and there was this proliferation of different channels and avenues to tell the story, you know, content marketing really rose as a core discipline and a core staple within marketing. And then the other final piece of this is inbound. I think, you know, we take it as a given that inbound marketing is, you know, a core successful methodology in a lot of cases. But what inbound the methodology has done for us is actually create sort of a galvanizing, like, unifying framework through which to deliver your digital marketing and your content marketing so that there's a lot less guesswork in terms of the things that you need to do to be successful in terms of articulating and telling that story. So say those three core trends have been at the heart of the change that I've been lucky enough to see and be a part of over these last 10 or 15 years.

And as you were talking through there, you mentioned things like digital becoming a lot more prevalent in inbound marketing and even attribution. So can you talk a little bit about how those things have made it easier for marketers to not just send a content mess out or a piece of content out there in the hopes that someone comes across it, but now in a way where we can be a lot more targeted and laser focused in the way that we deliver that message?

Right. Well, there's a few different, you know, on the tactical level, there's things like SEO and you can actually identify now what your audience is actually searching for and where the interest is. And then on the attribution side, where we are right now is, you know, really exciting because when the digital you know, I mentioned the tidal wave of digital. When that first started to come along and in an earlier kind of iteration, you know, everybody was excited and delighted by the prospect of real, you know, marketing attribution. But a lot of the ways to get at that attribution were sort of primitive and marketers had to inspire, invest a lot of time and energy into piecing data together from different data sets, including Google Analytics as one piece of core piece of that puzzle. But it was still difficult and challenging to actually really solidify a story around the data and an insight around the data. I think that now we are in a way better place to look at the data, identify where the audience is searching, identify what's driving the traffic, and then carry that all the way through into revenue and sales attribution and business impact. That's been a profound shift. And again, as you know, when you think about the brand story or the content strategy, knowing what levers are driving real business outcomes gives you a lot better insight in terms of where you want to put your focus and where you want to align your resources. I think that articulating the brand, brand story is a little bit outside of that, but in terms of how you deliver that story to get results now we have so much more clarity around that. It's really, really exciting.

Yeah, I like that you hit on that at the end there. Because that's one thing where with the rise of all of the ways that we can target people, the way so we can drive revenue and the way that we can attribute all that back to the efforts that we're doing, I think it's a lot more probable now for people to become hyper focused on just the types of activities are going to drive revenue for the company. How do you avoid allowing that to pull you away from the types of things that help you tell that story for the brand in a creative way? Because there's those two possibilities that are always present. And I think it's important for marketers to find a balance between the two.

Yeah, I would agree. I think that what I'm hearing from you is you're getting at that overlap between brand and demand generation because you can't just got to be a symbiosis or you can't have one without the other. You need to be able to really understand how your brand is positioned, who your audiences are, how you want to be perceived. The look, the feel, you know, the overall reputation, the overall core narrative of how you want to stand out in the marketplace and get your, you know, get again, get your story told, and then how do you reconcile that and make sure that you're doing that in a way that's going to really drive business results and fuel demand for your product and.