Hone Your Brand
When it comes to startups, no one knows the voice of the company and the needs of the customer quite like the people at its core. When outside marketing is brought in to lighten the workload, it’s easy for your ethos to get lost. Digital marketers can get a bad rap. So many companies large and small have invested thousands only to be let down by dismal traffic numbers and fewer conversions. And it may not be the marketer’s fault. So whether you’re taking on the task of marketing yourself or you’re ready to hire outside of the company, the best thing you can do is refine your brand message as much as possible now. Here are some tips to hone your brand message so you can reach customers effectively and most importantly, genuinely.
Get to the Heart of Things
The old adage ‘write what you know’ applies so perfectly to the constant brand question “Who am I?” Success comes with hard work, and hard work requires passion. What are you passionate about? More importantly, what are your customers passionate about? If you sell mops, you can be sure your customers aren’t passionate about mops. But the conversation doesn’t have to stop there. Your customers are passionate about the beauty of their homes, about their families and about the cleanliness of the floor their children wriggle across as they learn to crawl. All your marketing efforts need to have one thing in mind, and it’s not selling mops. It’s your customers and what they care about that is the heart of your brand message. Stick with that and you’ll always have a captive audience and dedicated customers.
Bring Value First
When you’re talking to your audience, you never want to feel like you’re selling something. In fact, just the opposite, all your efforts should be to give something. You want to provide your customer with value before they ever give you a dime. Look back at the heart of your brand message and ask what you want to bring to the table. It can be as simple as joy, humor and original content.
Captain Morgan’s Instagram page is hard to beat, with custom pirate emoji art, clever memes and real life pictures of people having a good time that you won’t see on any of their other media outlets. It’s an exclusive party, and only Instagram followers are invited. Party people can Snapchat photos of themselves with the custom Captain Morgan face emoji or take cheeky pictures with the new cannon ball bomb-shaped bottle. You can’t buy that kind of excitement. Making your brand message feel real and relatable through digital media is different for everyone, and Captain Morgan is a great example of hitting the nail on the head.
Branch Out Wisely
It’s tough to figure out where and when to get the best return on your social media time and money investment. But here is a simple trick to getting at the heart of your audience and your industry: identify your tribal leaders. Your tribal leaders are people who are tastemakers, influencers, movers and shakers, whatever you want to call them, in the circles that you and your brand deserve to be in. Find 10 of them. Real people who you admire and aspire to be like in one way or another.
Then, learn everything you can about them and write a list of three poignant, insightful questions you would ask them if they ever stepped onto an elevator with you. That exercise will entail, first and foremost, finding out what social media outlets they use most frequently and studying their feed to learn more about them will also show you a great example of what you want your feed to look like.
