Why do you think the brand is important?
A logo is one small step in developing a Brand.
Brand also consists of
The sales experience a customer has.
The experience they have paid.
The files and documents you share with them.
The account managers/sales folks/owners.
The social media post a customer reads online.
The perceived value of the product.
A ‘brand’ is all customer-facing parts of a business.
A company does not determine its brand; its customers do.
But companies can do things to influence how consumers perceive their brand.
Logo and colours are not the brand (they are a part of it)
Effective branding ensures that all marketing materials, from logos to advertisements to packaging, are consistent in design and messaging.
A strong brand conveys trust and credibility to consumers. This trust can lead to customer loyalty and advocacy, driving long-term success.
Branding helps a company stand out. It gives a unique identity to a product or service, making it easily distinguishable from competitors.
People don't just buy products or services; they buy into the story, values, and lifestyle that a brand represents.
Consumers often pay more for products or services from brands they trust and perceive as higher quality.
– Audi: https://www.audi.com/ci/en/intro/brand-appearance.html
– Mailchimp: https://styleguide.mailchimp.com/
– Hulu: https://assetshuluimcom-a.akamaihd.net/thisishulu/images/pdf/Hulu-Brand-Guidelines.pdf
– UWinnipeg: https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/branding/
Why do you exist?
What are you trying to achieve?
What is our culture like (internally)?
What do we sound like (tone of voice)?
What do we look like (visual identity)?
Who is our Ideal Consumer?
Who are our competitors?
What is our value proposition?
How does the public describe us?
How do we want the public to see us?
How do customers interact with us (on/offline, do we make it easy?)?
What experience do they have?
What do we do better than our competitors?
There’s less competition when you niche down.
You can become the leader faster.
You can create a deeper connection with consumers.
It’s easier to create content for a smaller group of people.
Solutions became more straightforward to find for your audience.
Target market: an identified broad group of consumers to whom you want to offer your product/service or who could use your product/service.
This is the most extensive segmentation for a business.
This is usually identified through research, data points, and high-level demographic segmentation.
Example:
Fitness Company in Winnipeg
Health-conscious individuals between the ages of 30-60 in Winnipeg who are looking to improve their physical fitness and wellness. They have a higher income level and are willing to spend more on fitness and wellness plans.
Target audience: is a defined audience within your target market that you want to focus your marketing and advertising efforts. You can have more than one target audience within your target market. The target audience is meant to help formulate marketing messages.
Example:
Professionals between the ages of 30-35 who live/work in the Sage Creek area. These people work high-stress jobs with long hours. They value staying fit even if they have little time in their day to fit a workout in. They appreciate quick yet effective workouts.
Buyer persona: a fictitious person (B2C)/company (B2B) who you’ve identified as the most likely to need and purchase your product or service.
Example:
Name: Sara
Age: 33
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Sara is a working professional who has a highly stressful job as a lawyer. Sara works long hours at her firm in downtown Winnipeg. She sits a lot in her car during her commute home to the Sage Creek area, where she lives with her partner of 8 years. Sara values her health but finds it difficult to keep up a consistent workout regimen.
What is your target?
When we know who are target audience is, we can then determine where they spend their time online.
After we have an idea of who our target audience is, we can then build out a persona.
Once we know our target audience and have a buyer persona, we can tailor our messaging to resonate with those people.
When we know our target audience we are not wasting time talking to people who are not our customer.
Knowing who our target audience is allows us to look at campaign performance and compare it to our expected outcome.
Use a combination of internal and external research to understand your target market, target audience, and to create your buyer persona.
Internal research inside your company means tapping into knowledge and information in other departments, usually customer service, training, sales, or IT.
External research gives you access to broader consumer trends and behaviours that affect companies in today’s marketplace.
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a targeted audience into subgroups based on commonalities, ranging from age, gender, or location to priorities, values, and behavior.
Market segmentation is important because:
We segment markets in four different ways:
We segment the market by:
Both men look the same on paper when we look at only their demographics.
They are wildly different when we look at other ways of segmentation.
All four segmentations must work together.
Geographic Segmentation:
When we segment the market by:
Behavioural Segmentation:
When we segment the market by:
Review the brand guidelines: Some examples are large, so focus on which sections are included rather than trying to dive into each section.
The objective is to get familiar with what a brand and style guide looks like and what rules are outlined.
A creative brief is a document that outlines the key objectives, strategies, and requirements for a creative project, such as a social media campaign, advertising campaign, or branding initiative.
The client or project owner typically develops the brief and provides guidance and direction to the creative team responsible for executing the project.
Have you created a Brief before? Where? Why did you need one?
Some prompts that can help:
The content is given away for free in exchange for a potential customer’s email address. The key to creating valuable lead magnets is understanding what your customers value and creating content they desire.
A concept that describes how companies move prospective customers through the funnel stages is often phrased as “lead nurturing.”
A method of paid digital marketing that is used to target website visitors who have visited a website. These ads are often used in social media.
A term to describe breaking down target audiences into smaller subsets with common characteristics. Specific marketing strategies are often applied to segments.
The amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website
An individual or organization with an interest in what you’re selling
A potential customer that has been qualified fits specific criteria.
An action that occurs when a visitor to your website completes a goal (purchase, download, fill in a form, subscribe)
“Saying hello doesn’t have an ROI. It’s about building relationships.”
—GARY VAYNERCHUK—
Have you worked in sales? What KPIs did you use?
Influence is your ability to persuade others to adopt your perspective.
• To influence people, you have to appeal to their emotions.
• The reason influence is so compelling is that it can increase the perceived value of your offer to your target audience. As a customer, it’s that feeling of “they get me.”
• Influence is not the same as popularity and is easily confused with influencer marketing; anyone can have influence, regardless of the size of their audience.
• People buy from companies they know, like, and trust.
• It’s why we often look for recommendations from friends or family or check online reviews.
• You believe in your product or service and want your audience to believe in it like you do.
• The fact is, they don’t, and it’s up to you to convince them
Your customers want to connect with you by seeing themselves in your product or service.
• You (and your company) are your brand; people want to connect with people.
• Show you’re as passionate about your product as you want your customers to be through the visuals you share and the words in your marketing.
• Share content that inspires, educates, or informs your audience; balance the “sell” call to action with providing valuable content your audience craves; not every blog article needs a sell CTA.
• People don’t like being blatantly marketed or sold to at the best times.
• Be helpful first, especially if your product, service or market is complex or misunderstood.
Products and services don’t sell because of their great features, but because of the benefits they provide to their customers.
• A feature is how it works, a benefit is what it delivers (feeling or fact)
• Start with the strongest benefits.
• Apple is an example of a brand that sells based on messaging that expresses the benefits and creates desire, even this really old example.
Research your competitors or other people talking about the same thing.
• Look at the words on their website, the way they speak to their customers.
• Check Google and Social media reviews.
• Find out what their customers say.
• This can help you understand where the opportunity lies.
• It’s not about good and bad.
• It’s about a factual discovery of who else is out there.
• This information will provide the basis for you to develop your own messaging and content.
• Do not duplicate other content you find.
Segmenting your market involves dividing it into smaller subsections.
• For example, if your target market is Canadians age 25-45, it’s still too broad of a group.
By segmenting the group, you can develop more effective marketing messages, campaigns and measurement strategies.
• Demographic; factors like age, gender.
• Geographic; where they live (urban/suburban/rural), specific cities or provinces.
• Behavioural; habits or behaviours in common.
• Psychographic; values, thoughts, or beliefs.
Inbound marketing is marketing focused on getting found by customers.
This course focuses on using Inbound marketing to create attention and action from your target audience.
• Examples: Video, blogs, ebooks, whitepapers, webinars.
Outbound marketing is focused on finding customers by pushing messages out to a wide audience.
• Examples: Trade shows, seminars, TV advertising, junk mail, and cold calling.
• It’s more expensive and has a lower ROI.
