Online marketing is moving at a fast pace and in order to be noticed and to be seen as business owners we need to make sure that we are doing everything we can to stay up to date and inline with what is happening. Social media channels are evolving, new initiatives are being added regularly and it’s vital that we stay on the pulse when it comes to social media marketing.
Any form of marketing strategy needs to ensure that it attracts the right audience and is speaking to the relevant people for that market. It’s all well and good having a fantastic marketing campaign if you’re targeting the wrong people. As a business reaching out to consumers, you need to be right where they are and speaking the same language as them.
A Customer Journey
We all know that customers research before they buy and what your brand looks like across all its platforms will sway a customer to pursue or to move on. This ranges right from your website, social profiles, LinkedIn staff profiles to your listing on the search engines; Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. Everywhere that a customer will see your brand, it needs to be consistent and providing a clear message throughout.
The first contact a customer has with your business will be the first impression they have of your brand. You can’t guarantee where that will be, will they land on your website, on your Facebook Page or stumble upon you in LinkedIn? Whichever place they see you first will be their first impression of you. What does that look like? Is it professional? Does it speak of you and your brand personality or tone of voice? Does it showcase what your business has to offer?
If you’re not sure as to whether they all give the same, clear message – they probably don’t!
Getting Started With Your Brand Identity
But don’t worry, now you’ve established that there needs to be some changes, you can get started. Putting effort and thought into your branding is important. You might have started your business on a whim and whizzed ahead in order to fulfill a purpose and that’s fine but if that’s the case, it’s now time to stop, put your thinking cap on and to get creative.
Spend time giving thoughtful and meaning answers to these questions:
Who/what is your target audience?
What are their needs?
How can you provide a solution?
What message do you want to give and be known for in your business?
What style and tone of voice represents your brand?
Your brand is your identity. Your brand is who your business is and it needs to reflect your mission and your purpose, telling a visual story along the way.
It’s about getting down to the nitty gritty of your business and the values and personality behind it all. It’s about understanding what the customer is really looking for and providing a solution to that which is full of value and substance.
Having a clear branding strategy and plan differentiates you from the crowd and other competitors.
Making Your Brand Unique
Your branding needs to be memorable and unique
Your brand needs to give your business a personality
Your brand will enable you to build relationships with customers and help engagement rates
Your brand will add value to your marketing strategy giving your direction
Once you have your clear brand guidelines in place, it will be much easier to keep everything consistent and brand all your marketing material as you go alone.
Keep a shared folder that all team members can have access to which provides templates for all common-used material. This can be set up for all social media posts, for each platform, along with reports, stationery, email signatures and any other material that you may using for customer’s eyes.
It’s important that your clients see your professionalism and consistency in anything that comes their way, it’s all part of their customer experience and journey with you. And also leads the way in them recommending or referring your business to people within their circles. If they like what they see, they’ll recommend you.
If you’re looking for guidance on branding and advice on putting together an online marketing strategy, then we’d love to help. Use our Contact Page to get in touch and let’s take your business to the next level.
How do you keep your business in the forefront of everyone’s mind or ahead of the game in the most effective way?
The most important tip we can give is to ensure that your marketing strategy is kept up to date and that you are reviewing and tweaking it every step of the way. If something doesn’t work – change it! If something is out of date – update it.
This is where your content marketing strategy will come in. Content marketing covers everything from your Facebook posts and advertising to the text on your website. Ensuring that everything is up to date all of the time.
What is content marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute: Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.
Therefore content marketing is a planned and strategic marketing aim that concentrates on producing valuable and relevant material with a goal of attracting a clearly defined audience. Social media is an integral part of content marketing.
The most important word within that explanation is ‘valuable’. This means that anyone can write copy or produce social media posts and articles, but the vital component is the value that is produced within that content.
Why content marketing
When planning a marketing strategy, there are points that must be addressed in order to reach the audience you are trying to target. Writing content for the sake of writing will not only give you burnout but it will become a pointless exercise that has no meaning whilst taking valuable time from your business.
So what points can we address to ensure that our content marketing strategy has the correct structure? First let’s understand the buying cycle of your potential customers:
Awareness A customer may have a problem or a need but not be aware that there is a solution for them. This is where awareness of their need begins and what triggers the rest of the cycle.
Research A potential customer is out there researching what product or service will provide a solution to what they are looking for. They will be searching Google for all types of keywords related to that problem. For example, if they are looking to change their hairstyle, they will be searching for hairdressers local to them who meet their requirements. They will also be thinking about the new style they may want by searching for inspiration or examples they can take to the hairdressers.
Comparisons By now, the customer is aware that there are services out there to help them, so they start to compare products or services that tailor to their requirements. They will whittle down services and compare prices against other companies who offer the same deal.
Buy Finally the customer will make a decision to purchase the product or service based on the results of their research and comparisons, completing the buying cycle.
How can I use content marketing for my business
With the buying cycle in mind, it’s necessary to fill in the blanks for the customer as much as possible. If they come across YOUR brand first and like what they see, they will come back to you when they make their decision.
Therefore, you need to make your content:
attractive
to the point
easy to access
In everything you do, ensure that these 3 things are met and the customer has a clear route to purchasing from you.
In order for the client to want to buy from your business, you must ensure that you are solving their problem, which is where YOUR research comes in. You need to understand your customer and target audience and work your material and content into being attractive to them. It may look good to you, but does it look attractive and relatable to the people who are buying? If not, you need to think again. Good and accurate content is key, up to date information, relevant to the now, and in line with the core values of your business which your audience is already starting to get to know and love about you.
Once they start to follow your content and they feel that they have a connection with your brand, you need to make sure you’re providing value in everything that is produced. That is everything from your social media posts, to your newsletters, to your website copy and beyond. Everything needs to give a clear and concise message of a solution for that audience.
Going straight to the point and not beating around bush will enable your audience to know exactly what you are about and that you have nothing to hide by not over-complicating things. If your audience love your business – they will be following everything you say and do – therefore make it worth their while engaging with you.
The final point to help push the buying cycle through is by making everything easy to access and easy to follow. If you’re asking someone to ‘Buy Now’, give them a button to click right underneath your content. Don’t hide it away at the top or bottom of a page where they might not even see it. Ask people to make an action by directing them to where you want them go. Make every step easy for them to follow so they don’t get bored or lost and close your content down. Once they’ve switched off, it will be harder to get them back.
Brand Awareness
Content marketing is all about brand awareness and raising your brand profile – engaging with an audience to provide a service that they need. By keeping your marketing efforts as straightforward, clear, regular and up to date as possible, it gives your brand more chance of being noticed.
When your brand becomes known and loved, your following will start to grow. This in turn will generate leads and then you will start to see business growth.
By pushing your brand forward and providing value in your content, you are showcasing yourself as an industry expert and are expressing your desire to be known within the your niche. Don’t forget that online marketing has a global effect, you never know who you are reaching on the other side of the world!
Conclusion
Remember that you are only trying to reach those interested in your target audience. Don’t spread your wings too wide or try to reach everyone – it won’t work! Be unique and specific in your research and content writing. Write FOR the people that are searching for you. Provide value FOR the people are needing your service. Don’t write for your family or friends, yes they may share your content, but they’re not the ones buying the product. You need to aim DIRECTLY to the people who need to hear what you have to say and provide value and something that’s of worth in everything you produce.
If you’re looking to get ahead of the game in your content marketing or you simply don’t have the time that this needs to put into your business, we’re here to help at the click of button – get in touch today!
Identifying what the fundamental values are in your business and what you determine as your business ethics is VITAL for your brand awareness and shaping the essence of your brand.
Therefore, identifying what those core values are in your business will do two main things:
a) Give you a platform for everything your business stands for to be based upon, enabling a strong foundation for growth.
b) Educates your customers into understanding what your company is about.
Your core values are the most important things that matter in your business – the things that you focus on from the ground up and what you want your clients to know about. You are providing a set of guidelines for you and your business.
It can be a challenging exercise to decide upon core values but so very valuable in the long run. Establishing a foundation that your WHOLE business runs with gives your brand its identity and enables you to stand out from the crowd.
When putting a strategy together for your business and in the initial stages of thinking about direction, it’s important to put values in place that you want your business to stick to. This gives your business direction and allows you to have rules in places that guides the way that your business runs.
Deciding on your core values and understanding those values contributes to your brand identity and this in turn will enable people to know who you are and what your business stands for.
Brand awareness is so important when it comes to being known with your target audience, identifying who it is that you are trying to target and then using everything possible to get your voice heard in a busy and chaotic digital world. Without a brand strategy or a marketing plan in place, it’s so easy to drift away in directions that are outside of your initial goals and although this may not be a bad thing in terms of reaching out, it’s good to stick to a plan and to reach those people that you can truly add value to.
Add Value
Add value and you will gain respect, become known within your industry and see business growth. It may take time to establish a good business reputation but with effort, dedication and strategy it is possible.
However to achieve this you need to be clear in your thinking, clear in the way that you showcase your business and clear in what your business stands for. Having core values that people are instantly able to relate to a) makes good business sense but b) allows people who are on board with your values to connect with you.
Your core values speak about you personally and not only your business so live those values. If you’re a small business or a startup who is just getting a business off the ground, make sure that you live by those values and in everything that your business does, do it in line with your core values.
Get Started
So, get your thinking caps on and really spend time investing in your business. What do you truly believe in, what values do you base your business upon? When you get your values in place – then your business will start to move in the right direction.
We’d love to help if you’re looking to work on your brand identity and putting a strategy and plan together for business growth. Get in touch today to find out more.
The word strategy might sound a bit daunting but putting together a business strategy and a marketing strategy is a vital part of any business success. To see business growth and success over a period of time, it’s vital to plan out everything that needs to be done in order to achieve this.
The same goes with a social media strategy. This will fall into your marketing planning but social media is such a large part everyday life that it needs to be incorporated into the mix. People are mobile and people carry their mobile devices with them wherever they go. In order to reach a target audience directly – you need to be at the heart of where they are.
What is a social media strategy?
The basis to a strategy is a summary and plan of everything that you plan to do in order to see a result or achieve a certain goal. It will guide the way that you manage your social media, the way you engage with the audience and will allow you to see if you on track or need to change direction.
This will play a part in every post, tweet or comment that you do within all your social media platforms, keeping the same tone of voice throughout.
Here are 5 ways to get you started with a social media strategy:
Get SMART
Each of your goals should be:
Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Relevant
Time-bound
This is the smart framework that will align your goals with real achievements, rather than guessing or taking things by chance. Every goal or action you take should be measured against the smart framework knowing that you will keep everything tied together – with a plan for how to execute details.
The social media plan needs to align with your overall marketing strategy. This can be started by establishing 3-4 goals that you want to achieve and then working out a plan of how to achieve these.
Love your audience
The most vital stage of your social media plan comes down to understanding your audience. In order to meet their needs and provide a service that they will actually want to buy into, you need to fully understanding them. When you start to understand and love what they love, sharing tips, advice or general information that they are actually interested in – then they will start to engage, share and comment – giving you ground to be able to give great customer service and to build working relationships.
If you love your audience and they know it – they will start to love and trust your brand, making it so much easier to build your business and see growth for the future.
Conduct a social media audit
If you’ve already been using social media for your business but are finding it difficult to grow or establish a connection with your audience, then perhaps it’s time to do a social media audit in order to find out what’s going on.
What does this entail? Try answering these questions…
Look through all your social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, instagram, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, Quora and make a list of all of them.
Next to each one, write down the number of followers
Who is connecting with you on your social media platforms?
What is working – what is not working?
Is your target audience present on these channels?
Do text or image posts create the best engagement?
Am I providing a level of customer of service on every channel?
Are all my profiles branded?
How does your social media compare to your competitors accounts?
Answering these questions will give you a good overall analysis of where you currently stand within your social media marketing. You can then use this to better plan out your social media strategy as you now know what is working and what’s not. You now know where you main target audience is based and which channels will help you reach them quicker and more effectively.
Create engaging content
Work out what works for your audience in terms of content. Does their demographics determine what type of posts they would like to see?
In most cases, visuals catch the attention of the target audience. If they are presented with something that is eye-catching and immediately says ‘wow’ to them, they are more likely to engage or to share your content.
Depending on what social media platform you are using, see what works best by testing different mediums, the posts that create the most amount of feedback and engagement are the types that you need to build into your social media strategy. You could be the best copywriter in the world but if your posts are not grabbing the attention of the audience, they are not going to be effective. Test, test and test again to see what works. Create images that are powerful and have impact. Create images that speak directly to the customer – giving them solutions or advice that they want to hear. Text can be incorporated into the images and of course any text or wording alongside these images need to be just as impactful as the visuals. Give depth and knowledge, provide value in every post you create.
Learn from your competitors – find inspiration
Yes your business is unique and you need to come across as providing a unique service to every customer you come into contact with. But this doesn’t mean that you can’t learn from other experts in your industry. Establishing your audience and finding what they engage best with will give you grounding for your strategy. Finding inspiration from others can provide you with valuable insights that will help boost your brand awareness. Don’t forget that the key to social media is engagement – it is SOCIAL for a reason!
If you’d like help in putting together a social media strategy for your business or brand, we’d love to chat with you. Get in touch to find out more.
In a busy chaotic world there is so much competition with brands trying to be heard, that it’s vital you offer something which is unique and engaging to your audience.
If you provide a service or a product where there is a lot of choice to obtain that particular service, then YOUR brand needs to stand out and be seen. You could have the best product in the world but if you don’t have an audience, you won’t see the sales.
1) Understand
Understanding your audience and truly getting to know them will give you edge in the competition. Find where they hang out, what their interests are, where they engage the most. Speak to people in those areas and ask questions (we would call it research!) and all the time learning more about them.
If you can understand what would make a client purchase from you rather than another brand, then you can work towards achieving that and providing a service that is 100% accurate.
2) Address the needs
What are the needs of your ideal audience? Are you able to fulfill that need? If so, that’s where you need to start. Understand the audience and address their needs. Once you understand what they need, you will be able to provide a better level of service targeting exactly where they need it the most.
3) Be honest
The worst thing that a business can do is promise something that they cannot deliver. Therefore, always ensure honesty and transparency. If you’re clear from the start in what you can provide and how you can provide it, people will know where they stand.
If you’re struggling to meet a deadline date – let the customer know.
So many businesses fail because they are not upfront with their clients. Just be honest and clear in all your practices and your clients and potential clients will thank you for it.
4) Provide excellent customer service
Customer service can make or break a brand. And people remember from experience once they’ve had a bad one! Therefore your customer service is so important to ensure good client retention. Always be on hand to help. Always be on hand to answer questions. Always be ready to get stuck in and solve a problem. Your customers will see what you do for them and whether you care and this will result in them purchasing from you or going elsewhere.
If you provide a memorable and reliable customer service experience, people are more likely to recommend you to others.
5) Be personal
At the end of the day, what’s going to make your brand unique is by being personal. Just be yourself. People learn to trust and like a brand that they can relate to and can engage with on a personal level – a brand that makes them feel special and unique and gives them time and energy to communicate. When you offer a service like that where people can rely on your service, THEN you will see your business grow.
When you get down to the details of what your business is about and what you have to offer, this can really be broken down to a human level. You can use your personality and strengths to provide a 1st class service that people won’t easily forget!
How do you get your brand to be known? Get down to be being personal!
Love your business, love your brand, love what you can be and show it off – and let people learn to trust and respect the real face behind your business. Be true to what you believe, don’t go with the flow because you think it’s the right thing to do, but stand out and be different and follow your dreams and the plans that you have for your brand. Every step you take is a step in your journey. You can make the choice to either make that step count or to get lost in the crowd.
We’d love to help you get noticed in a busy digital world where every post or comment matters. Let us help you get the engagement and reach you need to target your specific audience and don’t waste time doing an ‘ok’ job – do it right and do it GOOD!
Get in touch if you’d like to find out about our social media marketing packages.
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