Staying relevant in today’s fast-moving, distracted world can feel like an uphill battle for brands. The Inkhouse team dives into how you can cut through the noise, using strategic insights and real-world context to strengthen a brand’s connection with its audience.
How can you connect with audiences in an ever-changing, always-distracted world?
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) is a good baseline for assessing the current state, including how your company is showing up in the world. What’s working well? What isn’t? What could you do differently or better? What might make that impossible? The SWOT is inwardly focused, yet strategic communications don’t happen in a vacuum.
At Inkhouse, we recommend pairing the SWOT with a PEST analysis.
PEST (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological) looks at the context of the real world you’re showing up in and how it affects the stories you tell. It identifies outside obstacles and potential opportunities to add to the conversation.
We tell our clients to be at the intersection of “their news” and “THE news.”
The election, the Fed and interest rates, Amazon’s five-day return to office, and the threat of TikTok bans are external factors that affect communications strategies.
They inform which stories you tell and how you tell them and present other conversations you could join or prepare to avoid.
Which conversations?
Some are obvious: cybersecurity experts talking about a rise in insider threats.
Others are more nuanced: What do lower interest rates mean for B2B tech?
Others are much more complicated: the election, gun violence, and reproductive rights.
You may want to avoid entering these conversations proactively, but you should be prepared for questions about them. Even an interview about database technology could pivot to the election. All beats are political now.
Before entering any of these, you’ll want to answer at least these five questions:
How do we feel about it?
How does it affect our employees? Our customers?
Does it align with our corporate values?
What are we adding to the conversation?
What is the impact of speaking or not speaking?
Though attention is becoming increasingly fragmented, and it can feel hard to break through the noise, it always comes back to solidifying your story. See how we used PEST analysis and a variety of creative digital marketing strategies to help our client, OneSpan, build brand authority and establish trust.
