Dan Beresh: [00:00:00] Hey, welcome to the Fide Podcast. I'm Dan Beresh, founder of Fide, uh, an ex-Deloitte digital creative director, and I've got Joe with me here today, and I'm real excited to chat with you, Joe.  

Joe Simone: Hey, Dan. Uh, for those listening, I'm Joe. I'm the creative director at Fide. Uh, I used to work at PwC and have worked in professional services marketing for essentially my entire career.

Dan Beresh: So the question today that we get from almost all of our clients is, how can I be more proactive about my marketing? And the thing that I think happens when you work in professional services is you are this pinch point, uh, you know, in terms of getting things out to the market, partners constantly coming to you with these last minute asks.

"Oh, you know, Accenture put out this press release. Oh, my God, we've gotta respond to it." And so we have helped a number of our clients go to market in a more proactive way over the last few years, and we wanna share with you today some of those tips and tricks to try to get you [00:01:00] thinking ahead so that you can go out to market over the next fiscal year and have produced consistent content, feels like it hangs together, and ultimately tells that story that compounds rather than feeling like a series of, you know, little one-off blips here and there that burn bright for a minute and then suddenly, uh, fade away.

The other thing that we find is when you work in one of these really big companies, you have people across verticals, horizontals, geographies, and, and o- and others, right? You're working on a marketing team that is not the marketing team, it's one of many. And so the challenge becomes how do you know what those other teams are doing?

Can you coordinate with them? And if you can't, how do you carve out your own space to really be a marketing team that stands independent and, and has that, that set of clients, uh, that you kinda can go out to and who can depend on you to deliver value and, and quality content to kind of build that trust over time?

Joe Simone: Yeah, a- and to your point there, sometimes on those, [00:02:00] like, it- it's not just outside competition you're competing with. Like you said, you're competing with teams in your organization. How do you create messaging under that master brand umbrella that they are also using but is unique to your audience? How do you differentia- differentiate your team, your offering without-

Breaking the rules, or at least all of them  

Dan Beresh: Sometimes you gotta break some rules, I think. Well, we'll, we'll talk about that. And, but it's how you break the rules, isn't it? It's, it, you can't ... You're not gonna... You don't wanna be on the front page of the New York Times on Monday. And God knows that the New York Times would, loves a story about the Big Four, loves a story about a big consultancy doing something wrong.

So, you, you know, you do wanna avoid that, but how do you break the rules in a way that's gonna be calculated and beneficial?  

Joe Simone: Exactly.  

Dan Beresh: So the first thing that, uh, you know, Joe and I were talking about when we were prepping for this episode is what we call a, a team persona or a sub-identity. And I'm just [00:03:00] gonna say right now, even with company brand guidelines, you working on a team inside of a big organization, those brand guidelines might not be enough because they're broad, they're generic.

Y- you think about a, a big professional services organization that does audit, tax, legal, consulting, and it consults over every single vertical that you could imagine. The brand that you're working with, does it really speak to the clients that you're s- you're serving? We have tried to, to push some of our clients, and I think quite successfully, to create what we call these team personas.

So what I mean, Joe, is, like, if you think about your master brand guidelines and, you know, your, your, y- they say, okay, you gotta be human, you've gotta be clear, those kinds of things. Now we're talking about, okay, I'm selling into life sciences and healthcare in North America, and so I am going to [00:04:00] start to develop some specific messaging that I am going to use across all of the marketing I'm gonna do, say, in the next year.

And y- y- frankly, like, you probably already have a bunch of this messaging because you've already put stuff out into the market. But the question is, how do you take that messaging and kind of wrap it up into a document that becomes that master, um, you know, what I might call sub-identity? And don't tell the brand police we said that.

You know, how do you wrap that up into a document that allows you to create that consistency, I think, over time?  

Joe Simone: Yeah. To your point, it's about consolidating kind of what you've already done, the tone that you've already created within your team, so that you can use that going forward, not just within your team but, but across the organization who might come across your marketing team as well.

So it's things like developing a common language, um, a set of consistent terms, that tone we spoke about that fits within the master brand, yet is still very unique to your team [00:05:00] and ensures every piece of content feels like it's part of the same front Um, messaging guidelines specific to your audience.

Like you said, Dan, the master brand guideline is so catch-all. That's not-- You're not trying to catch everybody. You are trying to catch a very specific audience. Another thing, and, and I've seen this get a lot of flak, but I think it exists for a reason: develop a catchphrase that you can plaster across all your deliverables.

Have that consistency showing up over and over and over again. You know, catchphrases and taglines have existed for so long for a reason. It's because they work. They're rememberable.  

Dan Beresh: Catchphrases, it's so funny, Joe, when you say that, it sounds to me like it's from the '90s. You know? It's like a jingle or something in an ad.

And, uh, I, you know, and I think tagline, catchphrase, like, oh, God, you know? But, uh, but I totally agree with you. Uh, to your point, Deloitte just released their first ever global tagline, [00:06:00] "Together makes progress."  

Joe Simone: Mm-hmm.  

Dan Beresh: I think that's a really interesting thing. I think it kinda, it nicely wraps up, you know, what Deloitte's trying to do.

But to your point, I think you have to go deeper. You, oh, you can't go, "Oh, yeah, um, life sciences and healthcare together makes progress." No, no, we need to, we need to speak more directly to that audience and to the value I think we can provide to them.  

Joe Simone: Exactly. You can even go a step further than just creating this messaging.

You can create things that make your, your life a little bit easier, like templates or standards from sell sheets to decks, just so that everything hangs together. There's consistency.  

Dan Beresh: I also think that as a marketer on one of these teams who knows... You know, I'll give you an example. Uh, if you're working as, in a partnership, k- some kind of partner marketing, you know, with a, with a Salesforce or with a ServiceNow or, you know, Workday, et cetera, I think those clients who want solutions are inevitably some of them thinking about which partner am I gonna go with?

And so your partner marketing [00:07:00] team is also out there saying, "Hey, we, we need to, we need to pitch our tech solution as the one that, that gets the business." So, in that way, a-and as we said before, like you are competing with those other t-teams internally in that kind of a, kind of a way, and I think the more you can differentiate your specific team, the more the leadership will come back and say, "Wow, you know, this, this team is, is incredible."

And so developing those decks, even internal decks, to show, hey, here's what we're driving in terms of the metrics that we're providing to the organization, that the minute that deck feels like it's part of that subidentity that you're creating- Suddenly your leadership is gonna look at it and say, "This is something different.

This is something elevated. This team knows what they're doing and is organized." And coming back to our initial point, is no longer, it's no longer reactive. You feel like you- th- this team is proactive against the goals that we've set for them.  

Joe Simone: You know, [00:08:00] we, we've seen examples of this. We had a client come to us and, uh, talk to us about developing this team persona.

We ended up building them a messaging identity or a persona for them so that, that they could go to market with and be consistent and distinguished from the rest of their marketing teams. And that included, you know, messaging style, a tagline, uh, boilerplate messaging, tone, uh, language guardrails specific to their audiences, and really set them up for those reactive asks.

Um, and not that this was reactive. They, they knew an event was coming, and leadership wanted an event video to be played at this event, but the event organizers gave them a microscopic timeline to deliver And they had to deliver months in advance.  

Dan Beresh: They came to us being like, "We knew about this event. We didn't know about this deadline."

And they were scared. Uh,  

Joe Simone: they were scared. I mean, I'd be scared too. That- it's... That's not a lot of [00:09:00] time to make a video. Um, but because we had done that upfront work of developing their persona that they were already using, we could just go back to it and, you know, it helped us expedite script timelines.

It helped us expedite storyboard timelines. Everything just got condensed down into faster delivery because we were already prepared for that. And the end result was three distinct cuts of this video, when the initial ask was one, that they could use across all their channels, not just at this event.

Dan Beresh: That was a hugely successful project, Joe, and I mean, I think kudos to your team for, for pulling that off. A unreasonable timeline, uh, that was kinda nobody's fault. Um, and I think the challenge is that bad video hurts you. And so if this is your marquee event and you've got less time than ever to prep something, you know you have to deliver a video.

There's not an option to not. The only question is, are you gonna deliver well or is it gonna be [00:10:00] something that, that looks bad? Um, our client actually said that there were people who came to their booth at this event specifically because of the video. They said, "I saw the video, I loved it, and I wanna talk about, about buying."

So, and, and the video was, uh, what was it, Joe? 30 seconds? Like, it wasn't long.  

Joe Simone: It was 30 seconds long.  

Dan Beresh: Yeah. So, so that is how pinpointed you can make your messaging with this messaging identity, I think, I think, uh, upfront. And it's not about rebellion. I just... I wanna just reiterate this. It's you've got a sandbox, which is your master brand.

You just wanna carve out your space in that sandbox. Are you going to the brand people and saying, "Hey, I want you to approve my, my sub-brand"? I, I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't, because you're not trying to create something net new. You're just, "Okay, here's the palette. What colors are we gonna use?

What messages are we gonna..." You know, it's, it's about shrinking the aperture to pinpoint the focus. Here's a hot take for you, Joe. I think in [00:11:00] this market with the types of companies, so, you know, that meaning professional services, enterprise tech, I actually think brand guidelines are, to some extent, useless.

And I think that they are from an era where you had an agency on retainer with hundreds of people who could at any time be working on specific brand assets. At this moment, you need to react to individual asks to do the best you can with limited marketing budget. And yes, we want things to hang together, and yes, there's value to brand.

But 100-page brand deck with, you know, individual do's and don'ts and yes and no, like Who's, who is reading that? I mean, sure, your agency is reading that and they're, you know, they're, they're getting behind it, but you, you got all these other teams trying to make videos that they're not marketers, they're not creatives, and you need to enable them to be successful  

Joe Simone: I think useless is a strong [00:12:00] word.

I think there is some value to it, but you need to make all these other teams who you know are not gonna be reading this massive document, you need to make it easy for them to be able to fall at least somewhat within those guidelines. So some of the ways that we've seen this be solved is what if you make a simple one-pager of all the, like, absolutes of your brand?

You know, things like the logo, don't touch it. It just gets pasted here. That's where it goes. Your colors, maybe not all of them, maybe just give them... refine their choice for them. And you can even go a step further than that to really make sure that you are within the guidelines and, and not a risk. You can use software to develop templates that can implement all your brand colors, your fonts, your logos, et cetera, and help expedite those deliverables from people across your org, [00:13:00] not just the creative team.

Dan Beresh: Yeah, I've seen, um, Canva is a great example of something that, uh, on the surface I shouldn't be recommending 'cause I'm a creative and Canva feels like the, you know, the worst democratization of you're gonna make a bad design. But I think we have to enable people with simple tools, and the tools that we use as an agency are not simple.

They are really hard to, to get. So, so I think you, Canva, like you s- you put your brand color in there, you put your logo, you, you put your font, et cetera. Figma's another example of a little bit harder to use, but I think still has the ability to be, be, be quite user-friendly.  

Joe Simone: Yeah, I think it's, uh, as marketers, it's easy to forget the actual end goal of marketing.

Awareness, awareness, awareness. It's actually about, at the end of the day, driving revenue, and what's going to actually generate that rev- revenue? Is it being the brand police? I mean, uh, there's a time and a place for it, but let me give you a scenario here. What if a leader needs to [00:14:00] react to new information?

They need to be able to move fast, and you need to enable them to do so. It's, it's about taking these calculated risks. It's about setting them up, uh, for success.  

Dan Beresh: I think we, we get obsessive about rules, and I say this so often to our clients, brand guidelines, not brand rules. They are guidelines, they are guardrails, and I think that there has to be creativity in marketing.

And, and what I mean by creativity in this con- it's like this, it... You gotta create something different That everyone else is not doing. That's how you stand out. And yes, there is a, a too far. Yes, there is a, "That was too much risk." And so the question is how you take that calculated risk, and I think that that's why guidelines is such a great word, is because, yeah, u- use the, use these, you know?

But, but don't, don't go crazy. I love this idea, Joe, of a one-pager. [00:15:00] You know, you could share that with the partners in your specific team and your group. Because content production has become so democratized that everyone can put stuff out, and the speed of the market and the lack of trust of, of certain, you know, clients and a lot of buyers, I think, means that we all need to be putting more content out, even if we're not marketers.

Like, you can't just rely on an agency to, to... Where, where we... I think where we play a lot of the time is we come in to make, like, the super high quality stuff that you know needs to be evergreen, that needs to be, uh, that, that needs to be really impactful, that could play on a, a main stage at a huge conference and you know it's gonna be perfect Not all your content needs to be that.

In fact, I think there's a good argument to be s- to be made to say, make some user-generated stuff, you know? Film some people in your office and talk to them about what they're doing and their clients, and you can, you can hire an agency to [00:16:00] help you with that. But at the end of the day, I think you could also empower your own people to be, to be doing more of that, and I think that there's some real power there.

But those people are not gonna read a 100-page brand guideline.  

Joe Simone: No, they're gonna see that, and they're gonna throw it out. But if it's one page, you- you're more likely to get them to at least take a look at it, and if it's easy enough to follow, then implement those actions. You know, I, I have an example of when I did work at PWC.

Um, our social team, they, they wanted so much video content, uh, and rightfully so, out in the market. They wanted to be always be on and dropping content, like whenever they could, but there weren't enough video editors for the demand of all of their needs, or we could do it in the time that they needed it for.

So rather than saying, you know, "Too bad, you can't have all the videos that you want," we looked into, well, how do we enable this team, who aren't video editors, to get to the product they need as quickly as possible? And that comes back to our software solution we talked about earlier. We found software that allowed us [00:17:00] to pre-brand, make a bunch of templates for social videos that had all of our brand colors, had all of our logos, and it was a simple drag-and-drop process for them.

It had a pre-approved library of stock footage. So we just empowered them and gave them all the tools so that whenever they had the need, they could just go and do it, and it didn't need to be approved by the brand or the video team because everything was already baked in. You, as a marketer, know the nature of this business is reactive.

So we can sit here all day and say, have all, like, everything ready, but you know you're still gonna have to be reactive.  

Dan Beresh: It's never gonna ha- Yeah, it's not realistic.  

Joe Simone: You're, you're not gonna be perfectly ready 100% of the time, but you can set yourself up so that when those asks that you know are gonna come do come, you are ready.

And what is one idea that we've pitched to clients before, Dan?  

Dan Beresh: We often talk about building content systems or what we might [00:18:00] call a modular content toolkit, and what I mean by that is a bunch of pre-made assets and, and pre-decided decisions that are gonna enable you to move super fast. Let's say that you're gonna do, I don't know, a client story and you wanna record it remotely because the client's in Germany and you're here in the US, whatever.

The quality of that content, you know, may not be perfect. You wanna have a little lower third, that's the name and title of the person, you know. You wanna create something that feels like it's on brand for you. So what do you do? You create, for example, that lower third template. You create the, um, the, the, the border that you might put, you know, around the footage.

Uh, and, and more than that, you, you know, you can create templates for PowerPoint decks, for, uh, out-of-home ads or other design that you know you're gonna need throughout the year. And you set yourself up so that when you have that last-minute ask, you're able to move quickly.  

Joe Simone: And it will feel [00:19:00] consistent. It will be coherent.

Yeah. And, and you don't have to go through all the checks that you might normally need to go through because it's already been done.  

Dan Beresh: I think if you don't have a content system, you're wasting your money. I think you are spending on agencies or creatives or internal capacity to make and remake and remake.

And you're not remaking your brand So it's the creative has to sit there and say, "How do I take this brand and do something completely different with it?" 'Cause that's how, how creatives think in a way, right? Is I, I don't wanna copy what was done before. But I think as a marketer, you're saying, "No, no, get the content to market.

Stop. This is not an arts and crafts project."  

Joe Simone: This, you know, modular content toolbox that you create is the culmination of the past two th- past two topics that we just talked about, and it enables you to get there faster. You know, this is what we did, uh, when I was working on campaigns at PWC. We know that it wasn't enough to just do all the upfront work on a [00:20:00] campaign, drop it in the market, and walk away, let it do its thing.

We, we know that we would have to react to requests from leaders that wanted to further go into the market at different touchpoints to support that cam. So how do we do that effectively? So for most of them, what we would do is, you know, writers would design a little message house, and designers would build a bunch of assets and guidelines of like, you know, what kind of imagery are we gonna be using, and h- and here's a bunch of imagery that we pulled but haven't used yet that's up for grabs.

And then they would design, you know, specific elements and icons, and then the video team would take those elements and icons and build out things like a lower third for a social video or an intro for the social video or a call to ac- animated call to action and put that in a repository so that we could give that out to a wider team and let them create faster and get to market faster.

Dan Beresh: I think video is, for whatever reason, skipped over by a lot of the more traditional kind of [00:21:00] brand asset creation. A lot of the guidelines we use across our clients are print and digital guidelines, and when they say digital, it's static. And so as people who do a lot of motion and video, and I'm... I don't know about you, Joe, I, I'm kind of shocked 'cause I, I come from that video background and I've always beat the drum of, you know, video's the best.

But we just consistently see year over year LinkedIn coming out saying, "More video. We want more, more of this content. This is the content that works. It's what people are watching." And we're recording this on video now. Like, uh, you can't ignore it.  

Joe Simone: To not prepare for it is, is you're, you're doing yourself a disservice.

It's here. It's here to stay, and it's only going to get bigger, and there's only gonna be more noise in the market. So set yourself up to succeed and, and execute quickly.  

Dan Beresh: I would say that very few of our clients and client teams we work with are adequately set up with content sys- with video content systems.[00:22:00]  

I think most of them have been set up with these kind of still static assets, and w- a lot of the work we're doing is, hey, let's take this static stuff and let's add some motion to it. And the motion It doesn't have to break the bank. It, give you an example. So we have these 3D assets that came from a, a different agency, uh, and they're, you know, these static assets.

They look great, you know. And, and I guess the old agency had said, "Well, we can't animate these because, you know, they're 3D and there's a lot of complexity to adding motion to 3D, and, you know, to do that would be a massive effort." Or maybe they didn't say they can't do it, but it would be a lot. But what we did is we took, uh, we took these assets and we just rotated, we just gave them a little rotation  

Joe Simone: You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just have to add a little something extra.

Dan Beresh: Exactly. Exactly. I, I, I think that this also, you know, bringing it back to the reactivity, it, it, it's about setting yourself up for [00:23:00] that success, and I think not being too hard on yourself when it comes to brand guidelines and saying, "Look, I am going to play within the sandbox that I've been given. I'm gonna carve out my own little space within that sand...

Not outside, right? Within that sandbox, right? We, we are still within brand." But also getting that set up, especially, I think, at the top of your fiscal year when you're just thinking about, "Okay, I'm gonna hit the ground running with lots of stuff that I wanna put out into market." Something to be said about maybe slow down a little bit in Q1 and just say, "Let's focus on building some, building some longevity, building some, some resiliency against that inevitable reactivity."

Joe Simone: Yeah. It, you know as a marketer, as we said, reactive is the nature of the business. You are always gonna have a leader that is gonna come to you with a last-minute ask, and you don't have control over other parts of the business or the competition. [00:24:00] The, you know the avalanche is coming. Don't arm yourself with a shovel to dig yourself out when it happens.

Build a foundation and be prepared for it.  

Dan Beresh: If this is something that you are, you know, kinda lost about or you feel like you need some help or some guidance, this is the kinda thing we do all the time. We help clients to make messaging identities, team personas, modular content toolboxes, content systems, uh, as well as small, you know, reduced little brand guides that, uh, that help partners and other people to, to create content easily.

So if that's something you're interested in at all, we do offer a free 30-minute, you know, current state marketing evaluation and help. We'll happily get on the phone with you. There's no obligation to work with us after that, so don't hesitate to reach out if that's something you need. If you just need some advice or you wanna kind of figure out where your position should be or maybe how much effort to put into this, uh, we'd be happy to help you.

As, as we often say, the market won't wait, and, and neither should you. So the time... You know, it's never the perfect time [00:25:00] to do some of this upfront work and, and it might feel like a bit of a, "Hey, I'm slowing down a little bit," but I think slow down, do your pit stop, change your tires, fill up the gas, and that's how you win the race at the end of the day.

Joe Simone: Thanks for listening, everyone

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