This free Lunch & Learn presentation will explain how, in the world of branding, what you say and how you look go hand-in-hand. Find out how using both together can take your brand to the next level.
4. What is Content Marketing?
• Communicating with your customers and prospects without selling.
• Focus on delivering information that makes your customer
(or potential customer) more intelligent.
• Telling your story in a way that is easy to understand, and creates
a basic need for your services.
7. Who needs a content marketing strategy?
• Businesses with a distinct mission
• B2B organizations looking to create long term client relationships
• Organizations looking to make changes to industry status quo
10. Developing a content marketing strategy
The image audit
• What image are you currently giving?
• Does it work with the content message?
• Objective evaluation
• Internal vs. external perception
12. Finding your audience
Who is your audience?
• Who is your target audience?
• Who is your current audience?Who are your visuals appealing
to?
• Where can you expand?
16. Delivering the key message
With visuals
• Visuals should match the message
• Visuals should be consistentDoes the audience know it’s you
without your logo?
19. Communicating effectively
Keeping to your core brand
• Establish your identity
• Carry it through
• Stay true to your core brandAppeal to target audience, but don’t
alienate your current customers
24. Developing new materials
Deliberate visuals
• Intentional DesignDon’t just look pretty, have an end game, a
strategy
• Develop visuals in advance - give them the time they need
• Visuals should enhance the message, not detract from it
27. Takeaways
• Look for content across your organization – subject matter experts do not
only reside in your marketing department, nor can content only be found
in your active projects.
• Take an objective approach when analyzing your current marketing
materials. Are they really accomplishing your goals? Do they enhance
your content or fight with it?You may have different audiences, and
different channels for those audiences. Make sure to match your content
with your audience & channel, and don’t try to send everything out to
everyone all the time.Planning is key. A content calendar will help, should
use resources from across the organization, and need to be kept on top
of to ensure you push out your content on time.Visuals should be planned
out and intentional.
They need to match your message and be consistent.
28. A creative agency that helps organizations
brand & market themselves through
web, print,
social media marketing
Editor's Notes
Corrie / Dawn
And I’ll be talking about how to
-incorporate that message into your current marketing materials, and
-make sure that the visuals you’re using match the message you’re trying to send.
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Dawn
In addition to auditing content, it’s important to determine a few things about the visual image you’re portraying
-What image are you currently giving customers?
-What image do you want to be giving?
-These may sound like the same question, but usually it’s not.
- Does your current image work with the content message you’re putting together?
- Be objective when evaluating
- may be too close to have perspective
- consider enlisting an outside party to help
- Objective party can also help you evaluate the internal vs. external perception of your message
- often a message seems stale internally, when it is just catching on externally
- another issue may be that while internal experts understand the message, customers unfamiliar with your company may be missing it
- avoid industry jargon or abbreviations
Dawn
Dawn
- Finding your audience can really be broken into a few different areas
- first, who is your target audience? In a perfect world, all your customers would be _____?
- secondly, who is your current audience? Are these two the same? How do they differ? Can they be combined?
- example: maybe your visuals are currently appealing to teens, while you’d prefer to appeal to women in their 20s with more disposable income
- finally, where can you expand?
- assuming you can’t survive forever without attracting new customers, where can you expand your current market?
- example: if you’re currently targeting single women in their 20s, can you expand to include mothers in their 30s as that group ages?
-- example: If you’re a bakery, can you expand to offer gluten free products?
- maybe, maybe not. Depending on the industry
- example: Baby Gap opened almost exactly 20 years after the Gap - began to capitalize on it’s initial target market as they started having children
Introduce Corrie: Where is your audience?
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Dawn
Extremely important
- visuals should match the message and target market
- if your targeting rough and tumble middle aged bikers, probably won’t use pastels and soft organic curves in your visuals
- visuals are consistant
- If done well, your brand will come to mind even before the user sees your logo
Dawn
Dawn
Dawn
You’ve developed a strategy, found your audience, and determined your key message
- now how do you effectively communicate that message?
- First, you need to establish your identity
- how will your audience know you?
- it might be helpful to think of a few adjectives you’d use to describe your brand and keep them in mind throughout all your visuals
- Second, you need to carry it through
- by that we mean that visually your graphics need to be consistent across all your delivery platforms
- Stay true to your core
- while you may need to tweak your visuals slightly to fit your message and attract the target audience, you don’t want to go to extremes and lose current customers
- the goal is to convert them and keep them
- example: Levi’s jeans
Dawn
- example: Levi’s jeans
- once reputation for hardworking, farm brand, mens jeans - whether intentional or not
- image can be seen in their old logo design
- sharp turn to youth brand
- edgy, non-conservative
Corrie
Corrie
Corrie
Dawn
With so much planning and effort put into the content message, the visuals have to be just as strong
- deliberate & consistent strategy
- we call this intentional design
- give yourself the time needed to develop your materials thoughtfully
- what looks simple may take hours to develop correctly
- throwing together a ‘good enough’ image to post at the last minute can detract from the message you’ve worked to communicate
- the package should enhance the message, not detract from it
Dawn
I mentioned that we call this ‘intentional design’ and here are a few examples of what I mean by that in practice
- This first one is the new website we just rolled out for Godfather’s Pizza
- over a year in the making, the visuals for the site were very deliberate
- we start with a content map, outline goals and hierarchy, and only then move on to an actual design
- Design documentation is able to show each piece of the site layout with accompanying text explaining how each element of the design is accomplishing specific goals
Dawn
Similarly, when designing a logo, a lot of people think it is a simple process, when in reality we go through dozens of concepts before narrowing down and focusing on a few that best accomplish the company goals
- we then, again, provide documentation illustrating the detailed elements of the logo, the thought process that went into it, and the correct and various ways it can be used while still accomplishing those goals