You have a brand, let’s call it The Awesome Company. You’ve got a product you’re proud of and ready to promote, but just how do you do that? Marketing connects your brand to the people, showing them that the Awesome Company is, well, you get it.
But you’re not the Awesome Company. You’re a real, sweat and tears-built business trying to get the word out. Word of mouth isn’t what it once was and town criers have long since gone out of fashion. A pity, we know. You need to harness the power of a digitized world, take control of the interwebs, and make your online presence work for you.
How exactly does that work?
It all starts with people. Marketing, at its core, is about human beings being human. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. In essence, brands want to identify their target audience and craft strategies to get them connected and keep them engaged. A proper marketing strategy is the difference between a disinterested scroll and a curious, or dare I say, enthusiastic click. If you’re wondering why your marketing isn’t working, it probably has to do with a misidentified or neglected target audience.
Identifying the target audience isn’t as technical as it sounds. It’s a matter of understanding who your product is intended for and designing media to capture their interest. The Hey Baby Baby Food Company will target parents using soft color pallets, childlike fonts, and a social media chock full of adorable babies. Target may be too aggressive of a word, it’s more like anticipating what the prospective buyer wants to see and emulating it. A biker bar, for example, wouldn’t use that branding scheme. Or maybe they would… We say to each their own!
Of course identifying the audience is made possible through analytics and research conducted by marketing professionals (ahem Buena Marketing). Essentially, we’ll ask who is actually using your product? It might surprise you! How do we connect to them? What values and differentiators are they looking for?
Once your marketing team has answered these questions, they’ll set to work building branding around the results. Let’s talk about the Hey Baby Baby Food Company. They need to tackle branding. Branding concerns all outward facing media. It deals with everything from front choices, to color scheme, to tone. Buena Marketing, for example, uses Balota font, orange and blue, and tries to give off that lovable goof-ball vibe. We know we’re goofy and we like to think we’re lovable, too.
Once branding is decided upon, your website and other outward facing media can be implemented. This includes your socials which should be an extension of your website, but often less formal. Who doesn’t love a good brand clap-back?
But let’s go back to the website. The style of your website is as important as its navigability and user experience. A marketing team should always consider two very official-looking acronyms: UI (user interface) and UX (user experience but with an “X” because it’s cooler). UI/UX, as you’ll often see them paired, are critical factors in helping potential consumers easily find what they’re looking for on your website.
But even with all of these increasingly technical considerations, how do you attract people to your site in the first place?
Any good marketing company is staffed by SEO wizards. SEO, or search engine optimization, does just that. It optimizes your website by adding key terms and heavily searched words so that your brand pops up under more browser searches. From there, your brand practically sells itself, with the help of gorgeous branding, an easy to use website, and a little seo guidance. And hey, if that doesn’t work, you could always try bringing back the town-crier approach.