Attract and engage users using helpful and interesting content that empowers your customer to find success with their purchase. Inbound marketing helps you keep your customer as your primary focus in order to build lasting relationships with them that will increase brand awareness and loyalty. The goal of inbound marketing is to attract and engage your audience. Draw in the right customers with valuable content and conversations that establish you as a trusted advisor with whom they’d want to engage. If your company isn’t utilizing inbound marketing, you’re missing out on valuable leads and connections. But first, do you know what inbound marketing is?
What is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a business strategy that attracts customers by creating valuable content, social media content, search engine optimization (SEO), and branding tailored specifically to them. Its primary goal is to form connections with your audience and position your business as a though leader.
Why You Need Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing helps you keep your customer as your primary focus, and more importantly, engage your audience every step of the way. Inbound marketing helps grow your organization by building meaningful, lasting relationships with consumers, prospects, and customers. It’s about empowering these people to reach their goals at any stage in their journey with you.
Building lasting relationships between your brand and your customers can also help build brand loyalty. If you want to engage your consumers, build lasting relationships with them, and increase brand loyalty, try these inbound marketing strategies.
Inbound Marketing Strategies
Create Meaningful Content
Start by creating and publishing content that provides value to your brand, this could include blog articles, content offers, and social media posts. This is a gateway to letting your customers know who your brand is. Include content such as; how to use your products, information about how your solution can solve their challenges, customer testimonials, and details about promotions or discounts. The goal is to communicate your brand story and how it can help your customers or clients.
Build an SEO Strategy
Optimize all of this content with an SEO strategy. Targeting specific keywords and phrases related to your products or services, the challenges you solve for customers, and the ways you help target audience members will help get your content noticed through search engines.
Assist Customers
Ensure customers are happy, satisfied, and supported long after they make a purchase by incorporating thoughtful, well-timed chatbots and surveys to assist, support, and request feedback from customers. Chatbots and surveys should be shared at specific points in time throughout the customer’s journey to ensure they are of value to your company. These strategies involve your team members becoming consultants who assist customers at any point in time.
Utilize Social Media Listening
Social media listening is another important strategy when it comes to engaging and supporting customers. Social media followers may use one of your profiles to provide feedback, ask questions, or share their experience with your products or services. Regularly responding to these interactions with information that helps and supports followers shows you hear and care about their thoughts, ideas, and concerns.
Any of the above strategies can aide in adding value to your content, in turn adding value to the relationships you build with your customer. Millennium Agency provides content, social media, PR, and SEO and digital strategies that can help bolster your inbound marketing campaign.
About Millennium Agency
Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!
What do others say about your business when you’re not there? The answer to this can be the difference between a business that’s constantly stuck and a business that grows exponentially through word-of-mouth. A memorable brand helps with awareness, PR opportunities, word-of-mouth, and a list of major benefits. Additionally, branding can also boost click-through rates and subsequently drive down costs of paid acquisition channels such as ads on Facebook, Google, Snapchat, or LinkedIn.
Overall, investing resources into creating a memorable brand will provide returns for your business for years to come and in more ways than you can measure. To help you create a memorable brand for 2021, we compiled this list of the top 9 tips you can use.
1. Create Your Buyer Persona
Yes, creating a buyer persona is extremely basic and marketing 101.
Unfortunately, too many businesses rush through this and think it’s a one and done process. Buyer persona’s should constantly evolve as you gather more data and insights on your market.
With that said, the first step in branding is to create a buyer persona. This is a representation of who your target customers are. Once you know everything about your buyer persona, you can create a memorable brand that reflects their core values and beliefs. This allows your target audience to have a shared worldview with your brand and develop a sense of belonging.
One common mistake business owners make when creating their personas is trying to appeal to everyone. A memorable brand will have a natural divide between people that resonate with you and people that don’t. Instead of wasting efforts trying to appeal to the wrong people, concentrate your resources into sharpening a brand image for the people that resonate with you.
2. Determine How You Want Your Business to Be Perceived
Do you want your brand to be a tough authoritative figure? Or a fun and easy-going friend?
Of course, those aren’t the only two options as there are many facets to a brand’s identity. A concept introduced by J. Kapferer, an MBA marketing professor with over 100 published scientific articles on branding, is the ‘Brand Identity Prism’.
The brand identity prism consists of 6 elements:
Physical
What design elements do you want to represent your brand?
This will be reflected in your logo, colors, website, store, and everything you can see or touch.
Determining the unique physical aspects of your brand early will help bring everything together into a cohesive image and inform everything you create for your business moving forward.
Personality
Is your brand playful, kind, exciting, or sophisticated?
If you personified your brand, what type of personality would you want it to have?
You can then portray this personality through design and copy.
Relationship
After your market interacts with your brand over time, a consumer-brand relationship will be formed.
But what type of relationship do you want to have with your customers?
This is influenced by your marketing messages, how you interact with customers, and how you support them.
Culture
What is your workplace culture like? People buy from brands they like.
A major factor that determines whether someone likes a brand or not is their culture.
You want your workplace to reflect the brand you want to portray.
Reflection
Reflection refers to your buyer persona. Depending on what your ideal customer is like, how you portray your brand will change.
For example, Nike has a buyer persona that includes a young adult with an interest in sports and fashion (this is a very simplified version of one of their personas).
This influences their messaging, creatives, and even the music they play in-store.
Self-Image
How does your customer perceive themselves?
What do they consider to be their values, goals, and image?
Once you know who they want to become, you can position your brand as one that can help them achieve this.
3. Create A Brand Voice With Writing Guidelines
Once you’ve determined the personality you want your brand to have, the easiest way to portray it is to create a brand voice and use it in all your writing. This includes the content you post on social media, brochures, websites, and more.
However, ensuring that this is consistent is key as you want your brand to be instantly recognizable and distinguished.
One way to ensure your brand voice is consistent is to create writing guidelines for your brand voice. For example, you can create a chart that lists the characteristics of the voice, a description of it, and what to do or not do.
For example, you can have a quirky brand voice that takes unordinary viewpoints and doesn’t over complicate things with industry jargon.
4. Tell A Brand Story
What is the most memorable way to convey a message?
Some people may answer videos or images, but the real answer is effective storytelling. When told effectively, a story can lodge itself into your memory and form connections with other pieces of knowledge, further solidifying the message.
But a memorable brand story serves another powerful purpose…
Storytelling is inherently viral and manufactures word-of-mouth. Once someone hears an exciting story that tugs at their emotions, they can’t help but share it with the people around them.
However, something even more powerful than your brand story, is your customer’s story. When your audience hears about an experience someone just like them had with your brand, their level of trust skyrockets because of social proof.
An exceptional example of leveraging customer stories is Airbnb’s ‘Community Stories’. These stories explore the experiences their customers have as they travel the world and experience new cultures. As a reader, you’re able to dive into a real-life experience that another person just like you had with Airbnb.
5. Create A Brand Awareness Strategy
If your market doesn’t know your business exists, do you really have a brand?
There are 2 main categories of strategies you can use to build brand awareness online, those are organic and paid channels.
Organic channels include:
Posting on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube), content marketing (blogs, podcasts, videos), SEO (works well in-conjunction with content marketing), and email marketing (this is usually to keep top-of-mind for people who already know of your brand).
Quick tip: One piece of content can be transformed into new pieces to post on each platform. For example, a blog post can be turned into a podcast episode, YouTube video, and several social media posts.
Paid channels include:
Advertising on Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and display networks. However, to effectively utilize paid media, it’s important to have analytics in place to measure the ROI of your investments.
Offline brand awareness:
If your business is mostly offline, some ways you can build brand awareness offline include: flyers, events, networking, and direct mail. However, even primarily offline businesses can take advantage of the online brand awareness strategies described above.
6. Engage With Your Audience Consistently
With social media and the constant need for instant gratification, customers want to engage with brands directly online and in real-time if possible.
By responding to comments on your social media, blog pages, or even reviews – you give the customer the opportunity to start a conversation. This can improve their perception of your brand and will indicate to others that you care for your customers.
An easy way to give your audience the chance to speak with you is to use customer support software that allows for live chat, such as ZenDesk or the Facebook Messenger chat plugin.
7. Monitor Brand Mentions
Have you decided to give engaging with your audience a shot? If so, you’ll quickly find yourself facing this problem…
Where are people even talking about my brand?
Responding to social media comments or tags is easy. But to find the little communities that feel strongly about what you sell, that’s where significant results can be found. If you’ve done the proper buyer persona research, you should know where your customers hang out but there will always be small pockets of people that you haven’t found yet.
Using brand mention tools can automate the process of locating exactly where people are talking about your brand. This includes mentions on social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, and more.
After using these tools to find where people are mentioning your brand, you can then create accounts to post in these communities. This way, you’re able to engage with audiences who are on the edge of becoming paid customers. Plus, the contributions you make will drive awareness to your brand for years to come.
8. Build A Community
Want to know the ultimate way to create a memorable brand?
Create a community.
If you can help your target market bond together, with your brand in the center, you can become such an integral part of their lives that they can’t live without you. Some brands that built communities include Airbnb, Nike, GoPro, Harley-Davidson, and Apple.
The easiest and cheapest way to begin building a community for your brand is to utilize Facebook groups. Unlike Facebook pages, which have extremely low organic reach, Facebook groups can allow for exponential community growth.
However, the key is to ensure the community is about their passion, problem, or desire. Not simply your brand itself.
9. Refresh Your Brand
Over time, market conditions change, and your brand needs to change with it.
If your branding efforts aren’t delivering the results you want, it might be time to refresh your brand. This allows you to re-evaluate your target audience, brand voice, visual assets, and even your logo.
For example, the current trend for logos in 2021 and beyond is to have an extremely simple typography-based design. Brands like Yves Saint Laurent have joined this movement, changing their logo from intricate typography to simple block text.
When deciding to refresh your brand, it’s important to collect all the data and insights gathered from your customer base. This allows you to make a better-informed decision on how you position your brand.
About Millennium Agency
Millennium Agency is a national, award-winning, digital, creative, content/PR, and video marketing firm. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, our team unites creative branding and data analytics to accelerate our clients’ growth, while combining our clients’ vision with our marketing expertise to increase sales opportunities and drive brand success. From video advertising and web design to social media and PR, Millennium can guide your marketing efforts every step of the way. Contact the professionals at Millennium Agency to learn more!
Elevate your overall brand image with a new website. Your website should bring your brand’s unique and compelling story to the market, bringing messaging and visual assets together into one memorable, influential, and engaging brand. Millennium Agency’s team create a feeling and experience that transcends a normal brand. Where your website will be visionary, modern, and stunning. But first, why should you update your website? We outline our top 3 reasons you need a new website.
Your Website Looks and Feels Outdated
Your website should be engaging, pleasing to the eye, and put your brand’s best foot forward. If you don’t like the current design, it’s more than likely your users don’t either. Your business should stay up to date with current trends and styles. You won’t be able to sell your products and services if your consumers think you’re stuck in the past. Your website should be simple and clean while giving your customers the information they’re looking for.
It should also include links to any social media accounts and a blog to put more information on the website that will make you seem credible and modern. Calls-to-action should be included throughout the navigation, especially on the homepage so that your customers know exactly what to do/where to go. All of these will enhance the user experience, make your website easy-to-navigate, intuitive, and engaging.
Difficult to Navigate
Are your visitors able to find what they need in two clicks or less? Is your navigation menu simple and straightforward? If not, it may be time for an upgrade. As the web has evolved, so have people’s expectations for user experience and functionality. The User Experience and User Interface (UX/UI) of the website should embody your brand’s story.
A website can also be difficult to navigate if it isn’t mobile-friendly. We recommend testing your website across the latest two versions of all major web browsers (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) and mobile devices. With the ever-increasing variety of device sizes and capabilities, testing is of critical importance to ensure total accessibility of your website for all users. If your website doesn’t work on these browsers or isn’t mobile-friendly, it could lead to higher bounce rates.
Doesn’t Represent Your Brand
Has your company grown or evolved? Have you recently decided to rebrand? Have you added new products, services, or employees? If so, it may be time for an upgrade. Your website should bring your brand’s unique and compelling story to the market and give them the information they will need to make an informed decision about your brand. Your website should accurately represent your company as it can accelerate awareness and your brand’s overall growth.
A new website can offer a new avenue for your consumers to engage with and experience your brand. Millennium designs, develops, and executes highly interactive, low friction and engaging websites with a dedicated team of trained professionals. We will create the “wow” factor, building a web design that elevates your brand to the forefront of its market. Contact us today for a free consultation!
About Millennium Agency
Millennium Agency is a nationally recognized, top woman led B2B branding, positioning, and digital marketing firm who knows how to create value that emotionally influences your customer’s buying decision, giving you the competitive advantage. As your trusted partner in B2B software technology and manufacturing, we provide the branding and positioning framework that make an impact – so you can focus on what you do best – run your business successfully. With offices in Boston and New Hampshire, and a worldwide presence, the professionals at Millennium Agency would like to learn more about your business. Visit www.mill.agency or book time here.