Digital marketing is a powerful and cost-effective way to generate more leads, close more sales, and acquire more customers as you grow your business.
The tools and tactics are new, fast, and exciting, but strategically, digital is a lot like traditional marketing in one critical way: Success begins with a strong, clear brand.
Put your brand first—but first establish your brand.
At StitchDX, we believe that digital marketing should optimize your brand across three strategic phases:
- Define & Align
- Clarify & Amplify
- Land & Expand
In this post, we’ll explore the first phase.
Define & Align Your Brand
Defining your brand and aligning your messaging across all business units helps your organization bring in more highly qualified leads and build trust with customers. Be crystal clear about who you serve and how you help them—it makes strategy, marketing, and sales all easier to develop and execute [1] [7].
To define and align your brand, optimize these essential elements:
Core Messaging: Marketing success starts with a well-defined brand. This definition starts with honestly answering three questions:
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Whom do you do it for?
The answers form your brand’s foundation and inform your marketing and overall business strategies.
Brand Voice: The way you express your brand’s message is a critical element of defining your brand and reaching your target audience. Your tone and word choice show your organization’s personality, which will help draw the right leads into your orbit. Examples of strong brand voice include MailChimp, with its casual tone and pop culture references [2]. Sephora’s informative, professional approach; and Taco Bell’s quirkiness [3].
Elevator Pitch: You only have a short amount of time—as little as twelve seconds [4]—to capture the attention of a potential customer. An elevator pitch is a very brief overview of your brand, designed to fit into a 20-to-60-second elevator ride (hence the name). It should clearly answer the three core messaging questions listed above, as Tesla does in this example:
Why does Tesla exist? We have record high CO2 levels in the atmosphere resulting in a steadily increasing temperature. And, it’s still climbing. Combustion cars emit toxic gases, too, killing 53,000 people per year.
How can we make a difference? What we’re trying to do with Tesla is accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable transport.
What can we do to change this? At Tesla, we make great electric cars. This is really important for the future of the world.” [5]
Logo and Brand Assets: Visual brand elements can be even more powerful than words. A thoughtfully designed logo and visual brand elements such as color palette and typography are often the first things audiences will notice (and remember) about you. They can make the difference as you seek connections with your target audiences. Think UPS brown or T-Mobile hot pink.
Web Design and Development: Your website is the heart of your digital presence. It’s the primary destination for your customers and the center of your inbound marketing activities. Your website design, navigation and content absolutely need to be aligned with your brand identity and can instantly help or hurt you as a business.
Audience Segmentation: Just as a better understanding of your brand leads to clarity in marketing activities, a better understanding of your audiences brings better results from your content and offers. Using buyer personas [6], you can craft and deploy audience-relevant messages to specific customer groups, connecting with particular interests, needs, and pain points. Bottom line—more targeted leads that are more aligned with your brand are more likely to close.
What’s next
Each of these elements is essential to a brand that is clearly defined and aligned to connect with your prospects and customers. This brand clarity will bring simplicity and cohesion to not only your digital marketing strategy and execution, but also initiatives within your organization. Once you’ve defined and aligned your brand, now it’s time to clarify and amplify. Keep an eye out for our next blog on that part of the overall process.
If you’d like to jumpstart that process, check out our 60-day marketing accelerator prospectLAB. If you have any questions in the meantime, feel free to contact us at hello@stitchdx.com.
Sources
[1] https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33820/5-major-challenges-marketers-face-and-how-to-solve-them.aspx.[2] a href=https://www.b2bmarketing.net/en/resources/blog/3-examples-mailchimps-brilliant-tone-voice.
[3] https://marketingland.com/20-great-social-media-voices-and-how-to-develop-your-own-18057.
[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/03/12/humans-have-shorter-attention-span-than-goldfish-thanks-to-smart/.
[5] https://roadtofunding.com/elevator-pitch/.
[6] https://stitchdx.com/audience-segmentation/buyer-personas-for-lead-nurturing.
[7] https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/281523.