Building a Leading Brand the Nova Way
At Nova, we have built an inspiring brand in a relatively short amount of time without any paid marketing. In this issue, we share some key insights, and a few lucky shots.
In this edition, we will dive into one of the key milestones of our entrepreneurial journey so far: how we built a leading and trusted brand that top talent showcase with pride on their CVs and LinkedIn profiles as a badge of excellence.
Getting here wasn’t easy, and to be frank, we had a few lucky shots on the way. We did, however, learn a few key lessons on how to build a brand in a relatively short amount of time with zero euros invested in paid marketing and we are happy to share them with you.
Summary
🔎 What did we learn from building a leading brand? - We dive deeper into some of the lessons learned while building, organically, a leading brand that today stands for excellence and merit and is recognized by leading institutions as a badge of excellence.
🌟 A couple of interesting resources for you (at the end of the article):
Our Head of Product has written a great guide on How to Hire Great PMs (It's in Spanish… but luckily translators can do the work).
If you are not a Nova member, we reward you with a direct nomination to the network where you can test yourself by completing the assessment process.
In the previous editions we have discussed what makes employees stay longer, their career preferences, and much more, you can access all our previous editions here.
Five Insights Behind How the Nova Brand Was Built
It’s 2024, we look back at our journey this far and one of the things that makes us the most proud is that Nova is a global brand associated with merit and excellence. A brand that identifies a merit-based community that some of the brightest young professionals and students aspire to belong to.
As of today, our LinkedIn page has achieved 110K followers, a number that is hard to find in companies of our size, the community has reached 20.000 members all of whom discovered Nova through referrals or organically. We have reached a level we could only have dreamed of, especially when taking into consideration that we have spent 0€ on marketing and content.
As you build a company things move very fast and we have never reflected on the details of how we managed to reach this level of brand awareness organically. One success factor is evident and easy to pinpoint, we were able to hire superstars in our marketing and communication team but beyond that, we want to share some key insights and reflections on what has accelerated our brand growth hoping to inspire some of you working with brands and communities. Let’s start.
Insight 1: Make your brand as tangible as you can as soon as you can
This brings us back to the very early days, we had very clear who Nova was if she would be a person and we made it easy for our team members to relate to her and understand the type of brand (and company) we were aiming to build. Making things relatable and personified, helped everybody understand fully what our brand was going to stand for.
We don’t know if it’s a best practice, but it surely helped align the team on how each one of us communicated externally.
A key concept about brand building is that regardless of your intentions you are constantly building your brand. Whether you are mindful of it, customers, prospects and the world is constantly shaping an idea of what your brand stands for.
This is why, the sooner you realize that you need a strategic approach to brand building the better it is. We had this very clear in our minds thanks to a few mentors, this is why from the get-go we gave a deep and hard thought about the type of brand we wanted to build.
To give you a feel for how that looked 4 years ago, we paste below extracts from our brand personality written in 2020, those traits still apply today, which shows we had a consistent and genuine approach to nurturing Nova’s persona over the years:
“Nova is an intelligent and driven 32-year-old individual. She grew up in a middle-class family and excelled through her education getting the highest grades in her class. She is the pride of her family, which sometimes makes her feel under pressure (…) If you had met Nova in college, she would have been that driven student, very charming but never posh, with a great sense of humor paired with a strong sense of respect (…) If you meet Nova at work, you will find her to be very ambitious, with a strong sense of ownership and a strong drive (…)!
It’s crucial in the early days to have that conversation with your founding team and make sure people take it seriously. Every touch point with customers and members, every post and media interaction contributes to shaping your brand. Clarify this to all stakeholders and you are on a good start.
Once you agree and feel you have the right pillars around how your brand should be experienced by people, you can move on to articulating content that genuinely reinforces and builds your brand into the world.
Insight 2: Identify what makes your company and team genuinely unique
Building a brand people love starts from understanding your uniqueness, something that to you comes naturally and is genuine while to others, it would cost effort. You can identify this by asking 2 questions:
What are the collective values of the founding team? How are they perceived by others when they interact in the world? What would that look like if they were to represent the company brand?
What are some unique assets that can fuel your brand narrative at a relatively low cost and effort?
By answering those two questions, we identified a solid foundation for the Nova brand's genuine positioning. The founding team’s values were centered around genuine, empathy, kindness, and meritocracy among others. Many of us were first-generation graduates and all of us thought that hard work and determination could change the world. We knew that all of us in society would be naturally communicating those traits.
As a concrete example, we can think of Elias, our first employee, whose values stemmed from authenticity, dedication to elite sport, and strong warmth to people. Today it’s easy to think of the brand persona as the result of a detailed analysis, the reality is that naturally, it embodied the people who were shaping it from the start. Running a workshop on team values though can significantly help.
When it comes to the asset part, this one was very easy, we realized immediately that our unique asset in building a brand that stood out from the crowd was our community. The community has been our brand foundation and accelerator, very early on we decided to leverage our member's stories and achievements to personify the Nova brand. Those stories and resources would be very easy to access for Nova versus other companies in the same sector and they would perfectly reinforce our brand identity over the years.
Insight 3: Your brand and company should not be the main characters, but the enablers
Based on that assessment, we decided not to write too much about Nova but rather showcase our value proposal through our members’s stories personifying our values much better than words.
We wanted to position Nova as the enabler, not the main character, we were in the background while the light was shining on our member's successes and failures. By showcasing these life stories, we've not only celebrated their achievements but also ignited conversations around the value of being part of Nova. This approach turned our members into ambassadors, organically growing our reach and establishing Nova as a coveted community.
One of the very first initiatives that started to generate organic virality was the Nova of the Month. Every month we would do a post highlighting the newly joined Nova member who had reached the highest score during the application process. This meant inspiring the world through stories of merit and excellence, two core values that over time became foundational to our brand. The selected members were very proud of this achievement and spontaneously shared it in their networks, helping us raise awareness about Nova’s existence and value from a personal and genuine angle.
Insights 4: The most brilliant ideas are already in front of you, keep looking
As we grew in new markets and as the community reached a significant size, we started to see the power of network effects in action. Suddenly, every day, our LinkedIn feeds were filled with posts of newly accepted members who were taking screenshots of their acceptance emails. Those screenshots were a missed opportunity.
If on the one side, they were showing the genuine excitement we brought into people’s lives (when is the last time you took a screenshot of an email and shared it with the world?) on the other hand they didn’t showcase our brand and educate the world about Nova. This is when we had a simple, and today obvious idea: crafting a membership certificate.
We have been lucky to count on Miguel Angel's eyes for beauty from the very beginning, he is the one behind many of our major brand projects, and the certificate was one of those elegant creations that quickly took over LinkedIn’s feed. Members started to share very proudly their certificate on the day of their acceptance, educating the world on our behalf and inspiring others to join and learn more about Nova.
It was one of the simplest yet most powerful initiatives that educated the entire team on virality and catapulted our brand to a new height in terms of organic presence. We automated the process using no-code tools. In 2023, we decided to make it more robust, and now has a unique ID that verifies its authenticity.
Whenever you build a customer journey, always ask yourself if you are overlooking natural viral loops that allow you to amplify your reach by leveraging current users/customers.
In our case, we have leveraged nominations and references as viral loops that increased the visibility of our brand organically. Members applying to Nova have to select 3 references that vouch for them as top talent. During this process, we decided to explain in the vouching email request what Nova is and invite references to learn more. This loop increased the traffic to our website and the brand awareness of Nova by 3x, and it did not add any additional burden to us or our members.
Insight 5: Build a brand that ultimately satisfies your audience’s basic needs
There are plenty of basic human needs that you can identify and that naturally relate to your company, make sure to ask yourself which need can I use to amplify my reach? How do I creatively tap into that?
In the case of Nova, we took inspiration from Maslow’s pyramid of needs. It’s common knowledge that people have an innate need to be recognized for their worth. It’s part of our tribal instinct, recognition equaled more chances to survive.
To make our members feel recognized and contribute to their sense of self-actualization, we knew that the Nova brand had to be associated with prestige, excellence, and merit.
We have nurtured and cared a lot about Nova’s reputation from the early days. We only worked with leading employers, and the concept of Nova itself was to only accept outstanding professionals. While this initially sacrificed our growth speed, as we would reject a significant number of applicants and potential customers, it gradually shaped Nova as a brand that stood for the highest personal and professional standards.
The slower start has been compensated in the long run. The reputational component has quickly fuelled our organic growth, today +60% of our members include the Nova stamp on their CVs or Linkedin, reinforcing the credibility of our selection process and brand.
All those insights shared above led to the launch of the one project that represents the turning point of our brand story. Our acceleration from 50K followers on Linkedin to +100K is mostly due to the compounding effects of the Nova 111 list, to date one of the most transformative projects Nova has ever launched which has positioned Nova’s brand in a new league. This story is for another time and deserves an edition on its own.
🌟 As we promised…
Our Head of Product has written a great guide on 👉 How to Hire Great PMs (It's in Spanish… but luckily translators can do the work).
If you are not a Nova member, we reward you with a direct nomination to the network where you can test yourself by completing the assessment process.
Thanks for reading Talent First. If you liked this issue, don't forget to hit ❤️
We would be grateful if you share it by email or social media with other people who might like it or who might be looking to hire top talent.
 | A guest post by
|