Branding Archives

Before fully diving in with designing your visual identity in order to build your brand strategy, you need to figure out how to express who you are as a brand and speak to your audience accordingly (brand essence). This is because, ultimately, your logo, images, and slogan are a visual translation of your brand messaging. To ensure that your roadmap, brand messaging, and visual identity aligns, you must take the following steps.

Examine Your Brand

View your brand from the outside with a customer-centric approach. Get inside the minds of your customers through surveys or other forms of market research. Next, examine your brand from the inside out. What’s the vision of your brand? Where do you see the future of your brand going in the next year? In the next five years? Finally, consider the outside marketplace. Becoming in tune to what your competitors are doing will help you stand out. Remember to be unique and authentic.

Create a Brand Essence (Personality, Voice, Tone)

Your brand essence is your brand’s personality, attributes, and a reflection of your roadmap and how you infuse it into every aspect of your brand. This could be in the form of customer service, sales, marketing, etc. Your brand voice and tone reflect the way you sound to your audience.

A brand’s essence includes the words, phrases, slang, and jokes you use to interact with your audience, as well as the tone you use to deliver your message (formal, informal, joyful, sad, optimistic, or sincere). Ask questions like: what type of relationship do you want to have with your customers? Is your brand playful, kind, exciting, or sophisticated? What is your workplace culture like? These questions will help you determine your brand’s essence and will be helpful in formulating your brand messaging.

Value Proposition

The value proposition is the promise of value your brand delivers, acknowledges, or communicates to your audience. It explains how your brand solves problems and improves situations, what specific benefits your customers can expect, and why customers should buy from you over your competitors.

Creating a value proposition can happen in 3 easy steps.

Identify customers benefits. What benefits does your product offer to customers?
Link the benefits to your value offering. Identify what value your product brings to customers.
Differentiate and position yourself. Make it clear who your target audience is, what you offer to them, and how you’re different.

Tagline

A tagline is the sentence, phrase, or word that businesses use to summarize their market position. Consider your product positioning, key benefits, brand pillars, value proposition, audience, and tone when crafting your tagline.

Examining your brand from different angles, creating your brand essence, developing a value proposition, and introducing a catchy tagline are all ways that you can build your brand messaging and, eventually, capitalize on your brand strategy.

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!

“A brand is a voice, and a product is a souvenir.”

– Lisa Gansky

The world’s most popular companies all have one thing in common – powerful brands. Pepsi Cola, Google, Facebook, McDonald’s, Lamborghini, Amazon, Nike – everybody instantly recognizes these names and what they stand for. These brands have so effectively mastered their proprietary formulae for how to create a brand strategy that resonates so well with customers that people can recognize them from the content, language, emotions, and the ideas they use and promote without making the association overt.

Modern customers demand authenticity and values they can relate to. Therefore, brands must be crystal clear on what they stand for because there’s no place to hide in the digital age. To ensure your business performs and stands out from the competition, you need a genuine and distinct brand strategy.

In this guide, we’ll share sequential steps you can use to create a functional brand strategy that grows with you as your brand evolves.

What Is a Brand?

“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”

– Jeff Bezos

There’s more to a brand than a logo or a color palette. A brand is almost entirely subjective because it encompasses what people think, feel, and say about your business, forming its reputation and perception from their experience. In contrast, marketing is what you think, feel, and say about your business.

What Is a Brand Strategy?

In a nutshell, your brand strategy explains why your business exists beyond making money. It helps you understand who you are, what you stand for, the promises you make, and the personality you convey. While creative elements, such as your logo, color palette, and slogan, help convey your brand, it’s your everyday interactions with your audience that make the biggest difference. These include:

The messages you deliver on your online channels (social media, website, etc.).
The way your employees interact with customers.
Your customer’s opinion.

Purpose of a Brand Strategy 

The purpose of a brand strategy is to find your identity and form a culture around out. By doing so, executive leadership, marketing, sales, operations, and other departments in your organization can all align and mature collectively. When you have no brand strategy:

You don’t fully understand your vision, mission, and purpose. As a result, you make inconsistent business and marketing decisions.
Your plans will be based on instinct or gut feeling.
You’ll have an unorganized, confused, and disunited team.
You can’t clearly or consistently engage with your audience.

What Team Do You Need to Create Your Brand Strategy?

You need a team to build your strategy, bring it to life, and put it into action. Without this team, you’ll lose track of your work or prolong tasks unnecessarily. The five members you need in your brand strategy team are:

1. Brand Shepherd

The role of a brand shepherd is to align all your brand and business goals, oversee marketing, and communicate with higher-ups.

2. Creative Lead

The creative lead often shares the same responsibilities of a brand shepherd. Their main role is to preserve brand identity by overseeing and enforcing brand guidelines.

3. Marketing Lead

The marketing lead aligns marketing to the brand strategy by overseeing content creation and coordinating teams and resources.

4. Culture Lead

The role of a culture lead is to cultivate a culture that reflects brand values.

5. Communications Lead

The communications lead shares brand knowledge by documenting information, building a brand library, and educating anyone who needs the information.

How to Build Your Brand Strategy

The following are three sequential steps you can use to build a comprehensive brand strategy and share your story effectively:

1. Create Your Roadmap

First, you must decide where you want to go and create a roadmap of how to get there. From an organization’s perspective, this means focusing on what you want to achieve and how you will achieve it. Your roadmap is comprised of four elements:

Purpose

Why do you exist?

Vision

The big picture of what you want to achieve.

Mission

How do you achieve that big picture?

Values

The principles that guide your behavior and actions.

2. Formulate Your Brand Messaging

Before you get into designing your visual identity, you need to figure out how to express who you are as a brand and speak to your audience accordingly (brand essence). This is because, ultimately, your logo, images, and slogan are a visual translation of your brand essence. To ensure that your roadmap, messaging, and visual identity aligns, you must:

Create a Brand Essence (Personality, Voice, Tone)

Your personality is your brand’s attributes and a reflection of your roadmap and how you infuse it into every aspect of your brand, such as customer service, sales, marketing, etc. Your brand voice and tone reflect the way you sound to your audience. You can see this by observing that a perfume brand doesn’t speak the way a fast–food brand speaks.

Value Proposition

This is the promise of value your brand delivers, acknowledges, or communicates to your audience.

Tagline

Your tagline is a sentence, phrase, or word businesses use to summarize their market position.

3. Design Your Visual Identity

Finally, it’s time to build up your brand’s visual identity. Since this isn’t a one–time process, you need your identity to be flexible so it can grow with your brand and intuitive so that each element complements the other.

Logo

A good logo reflects your brand and makes a powerful impact. The idea is to make it as simple and memorable as possible.

Typography

Typography is just as important as your logo and is used to convey feelings of exclusivity, intelligence, and style.

Color

Colors are one of the most powerful elements of your brand strategy. For example, did you know that orange is a color of adventure which inspires excitement?

Bringing Your Brand Strategy to Life

Now that you understand the basics of how to create a brand strategy, it’s time to put your knowledge into action. To make things easier, we’ve even created a free Brand Toolkit to guide you through. We hope you find it helpful.

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.  

In order to create a memorable brand identity and stand out against competitors, you have to determine how you want your business to be perceived. Essentially, how do you want the public to view your brand?

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’. Kapferer introduced what he believed six elements of a brand’s identity were. By building a memorable brand with these brand identity elements, a business can communicate clearly and transparently both internally and externally.

The brand identity prism consists of 6 elements:

Physique

What design elements do you want to represent your brand? The physique element represents all of the physical qualities that will be seen by customers. This will be reflected in your brand’s logo, colors, website, store, and everything you can see or touch. This evokes a visual image of your brand in the mind of customers that they will recall when talking or thinking about your business. Create a brand physique that is easily recognized and remembered.

Personality

What is the overall character of your brand? 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. This helps consumers know what to expect when interacting with your brand.

Relationship

The relationship between your brand and the consumer shows how the brand fits into the customers’ lives. Over time, as your marketing interacts with your brand, a consumer-brand relationship will form. 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

Your brand’s culture signifies a deeper understanding of what the brand stands for as far as values, principles, origins, and behaviors. 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. Start by identifying your company’s culture internally so that you can accurately portray it externally.

Reflection

Reflection refers to your buyer persona: the demographics and other characteristics of the ideal consumer of the brand. 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, creative, 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. Understanding this aspect is essential in relation to other aspects of the brand identity prism because it forms the brand personality as a whole.

How you want your brand to be perceived starts from within. By going through the six elements of the brand identity prism and utilizing the expertise Millennium has to offer, your business will be one step closer to being memorable.

About Millennium Agency

In today’s fluid and diverse market, there is a huge focus on customer loyalty as companies discover that it costs less money to keep their current customers than it does to find new ones. A customer’s loyalty to a brand or company is tested every day on social media, online product reviews, and news stories of a company’s social responsibility, or absence of it.

In this blog article, we examine how to best utilize your brand values to drive 100 percent customer loyalty. Brand values must be clear, well-researched, consistent, and trustworthy.

Be Clear and Focused with Your Values

The first step toward customer loyalty is to have concrete values that serve as the foundation for the brand or company’s success.

In her article How to Use Brand Values to Drive Unwavering Customer Trust and Commitment, Lorraine Carter at Irish Marketing Company Persona Design, explains how clear and focused brand values should be the roadmap for future decision making. Choosing a company’s brand values is not a decision that should be taken lightly, and brand values should not be chosen simply because they are trendy.

Superficial and vague brand values will be problematic when tough decisions need to be made. It’s important to take the time to carefully consider the brand values so there is a clear stance on the issues they address. “Brand values are no different to human values. They guide what you will do and won’t do as a brand. Brand values are the pillar that the brand is built on even before you have a product or service,” Carter writes.

Carter suggests that when developing brand values, business professionals should first think about what is important to them and review that list. Then they should think about what they absolutely will not stand for, and then focus on the brand value that is the opposite of that. It’s important that these decisions are made early on before issues arise. Business professionals who appear to compromise their brand values lose customer trust and customer loyalty.

In her article, Carter lists types of brand values:

Core values: These are the heart of the brand and what sets it apart from other brands
Aspirational values: These are related to the company’s goals. These are usually developed when the company is making changes or introducing new products.
Permission-to-play values: These are different from core values because every business must agree to these values to do business.
Accidental values: These are based on the values of the company’s employees and it’s important to make sure these don’t conflict with the company’s core values. When the employees’ values do not match the company’s core values, this impacts the consistency of the brand values and decreases customer loyalty.

Do Your Research

After carefully establishing your brand values, it’s important to do some research on your target customers in the quest for 100 percent customer loyalty.

This includes researching your target audience and what they want as well as researching your customers’ values. This is related to our last blog post, 9 Tips for Creating a Memorable Brand in 2021 and creating a buyer persona. Having an in-depth understanding of your customers is as important as establishing solid brand values. Customer research can be done by soliciting input directly from customers whether on social media, other online platforms, over the phone, or in-person.

A thorough research on your target customers includes researching these customers’ personal values. Carter describes the connection between brand values and customers’ values as a love connection. She explains how customers may be interested in a product, but they will not complete the purchase unless they feel safe knowing their personal values and the brand values are in sync.

When these values are in sync, consumers will continue to purchase from a business. A 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report shows that customer loyalty is tied to brand trust, which includes both the product and the company. This study was conducted across Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Seventy-two percent of those surveyed said they will not purchase from a company if their personal values do not match the brand values.

Be Consistent with Your Values and What You Deliver

Once you have established your concrete values and learned about what your customers value when making purchasing decisions, it’s important to be consistent in every step of the process to obtain 100 percent customer loyalty. It’s not just the brand values that need to be consistent; it’s the whole buying process. Marketing executives stress the consistent quality and excellent customer service drive loyalty. Consumers need to see that they will repeatedly get quality products and services from the brand. In an article for socialnomics.net, marketing blogger Ariana Smith writes that “Customers rely on convenience, so be sure that the company will deliver on its promises every time. Under-promising and over-delivering is an excellent strategy of developing brand loyalty.”

In today’s world, large companies are called upon to be socially responsible. In the Edelman report, 81 percent of those surveyed said that they must trust the brand to do what is right. Fifty-three percent said that every brand should be involved in at least one social issue. With this mindset and continuous news stories of companies failing to be socially responsible, many business leaders are shifting their brand values.

However, these changes may not be impactful if there is a lack of consistency. Forbes Communications Council Member Sylvie Tonco talks about the importance of companies being able to put into action their brand values of social responsibility and not just jumping on the bandwagon. She uses the example of how ice cream brand Ben and Jerry’s has always had a consistent brand value of social justice even before it was trendy. Customers may view Ben and Jerry’s long history of valuing social justice and social responsibility as more meaningful than another company who announces that they are now championing social responsibility.

The Edelman study addresses the importance of brands who back up their values of social responsibility with definitive actions. Some of the examples included in the report are the Dove Men+ Care paternity leave initiative and Heineken’s push to discourage drunk driving by making changes in bars.

Dove has set up the Dove Men+Care Global Leave Standard in partnership with MensCare, an organization helping to promote gender equality in caregiving. Dove Men+Care male employees are assured paid paternity leave and provided resources to help them. As part of this new standard, the company is working to break down stereotypes associated with non-traditional caregivers.

Heineken has developed a pilot study to test reducing drinking and driving through a series of behavioral interventions. The study was conducted at 10 bars throughout England, which were specifically redesigned for the purpose of encouraging customers not to drink and drive. Signs both inside and outside the pubs encouraged patrons not to drink and drive. At the bar, patrons were encouraged to sign a pledge not to drink and drive and they were rewarded with free food. The study found that these interventions reduced drinking and driving by up to half.

These social responsibility actions help these brands earn customer trust, which is also essential for customer loyalty. This further validates the Edelman report, which found that 81 percent of those surveyed said they had to trust a brand before they buy from it.

Continuously Work to Earn Customers’ Trust

The work is not over once trust has been established and customer loyalty is developed. It is a process that must be continuously worked on by continuing to act on those brand values, re-evaluating systems and procedures when faced with customer criticism, and responding to customer feedback and online reviews.

In the Edelman Report, 67 percent of those surveyed agree that they will stop buying from a company that they no longer trust. Amazon has been the spotlight for criticism of how the company treats its employees. Marketing expert Denise Lee Yohn explains how Amazon needs to focus on its employees after various reports of employee mistreatment. She said that Amazon should be transparent on how they move forward with improving employee engagement. If Amazon is not forthcoming on how employees are treated, the company’s loyal fanbase could start to dwindle due to a lack of customer trust.

Meaningful customer engagement also helps to build trust. Engagement can be created by asking customers for feedback on products and service delivery. However, when companies ask customers for feedback and do not act on it, customers do not feel valued. When customers see changes made based on their response, they will feel that the company is trustworthy and then continue to be loyal.

The Edelman Report also states that trust is built on brands’ impact on society including influencers. The report found that 63 percent of those surveyed said that they trust an influencer’s take on a brand over what the brand is saying about itself. Therefore, it’s important for companies to respond to word-of-mouth comments on a brand-whether positive or negative. Companies should also address customer complaints in online reviews.

Forbes Communications Council member Elizabeth Edwards explains the importance the “Noble Edge Effect” in the Forbes article 15 Ways To Increase Brand Loyalty And Retain Your Customer Base. “This is when an independent source shares the socially responsible or charitable work your company does. Be authentic about giving back and let others tell your story,” Edwards writes. Learning about your company’s positive actions from an independent source further increases your customers’ trust and loyalty.

In conclusion, having solid brand values, doing thorough market research, being consistent with those values, and continuing to build trust with customers will ultimately drive 100 percent customer loyalty. And in today’s world, customer loyalty is a commodity that is as valuable as an influencer’s positive comments on your social responsibility.

About Millennium Agency

President & Founder

Linda Fanaras is the CEO and Founder of Millennium Agency (www.mill.agency) located in Boston and Manchester, NH. She can be reached at 877-873-7445 or [email protected]

Your brand’s buyer persona is an important step in building a successful brand. Creating a buyer persona may seem extremely basic and a little Marketing 101, but too many businesses overlook this important step in building a memorable brand. In fact, only 44 percent of B2B marketers use personas, so by building a detailed and data-driven buyer persona you’ll be able to shine in comparison. A buyer persona allows your target audience to have a shared worldview with your brand and develop a sense of belonging. But first, what is a buyer persona?

What is a Buyer Persona?

HubSpot defines a buyer persona as a “semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” Essentially a buyer persona allows you to understand what your customers need, how they think, behave, and how you can address them accordingly. The more details you can outline, the more successful the persona will be. Once familiar with your buyer persona, you can create a brand that reflects their core values and beliefs.

Nail Down Your Key Demographics

Buyer personas should constantly evolve as you gather more data and insights on your market, so the first step in building your brand’s buyer persona, is to nail down your key demographics. Demographics can include: age, sex, income level, marital status, education level, geographic location and any other characteristics you think are important for defining your target audience. Once you’ve narrowed down the key demographic factors, you can begin to build a consumer profile.

Build a Consumer Profile

Understanding the attitudes, aspirations and values of your target audience is also necessary to ensure marketing efforts are worthwhile. To further develop your persona, answer these questions:

Why would a shopper prioritize my content?
How would a consumer benefit from my content?
What hindrances might prevent a user from paying attention to my content?
How can I influence a user to take an actionable step?
What criteria will influence whether or not a shopper decides to make a purchase? How can I prove my products or services are superior to alternative options?

A common mistake business owners make is trying to appeal to everyone. Powerful, memorable brands will have a natural divide between people that resonate with your brand and people that don’t. Concentrating your resources into sharpening a brand image for the people that resonate with you will help you stand out against the competition.

About Millennium Agency

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

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?

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 

Marketing in healthcare is an ever-evolving field. To be successful, you have to implement new and creative ideas on a rotation. This is because healthcare is like any other field, and medical advertisers have to take exceptional sensitivity in their marketing approach.

This article is comprised of five creative and innovative ways to shake things up and successfully create healthcare marketing strategies that works.

1) Direct E-mail Marketing

Direct email marketing is a great way to connect with your clients and share offers and promos with them. You can send them tailored weekly email newsletters. Here are a few tips to employ when advertising to clients via email marketing:

Think about the needs of your various market segments; then craft offers to them according to their needs. For example, if you run a dental clinic, you can provide new referrals’ or first-timers discounts.
Send out reminders on appointments and free checkups clients are due for according to their insurance policy.
Tell clients about the cutting-edge technology your clinic has over other clinics in the same field.
Make sure your message is relevant, and your offer provides excellent benefits.

Get a professional to craft email newsletters to attract the right audience. The professional copywriters at Millennium Agency can tailor your message to the audience you need.

2) Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another excellent advertising idea to implement in your healthcare marketing strategy is to optimize your website for search engines. Optimizing your website’s SEO is a perfect way to get patients on your site without having to pay for advertisements.

A properly optimized website can increase your site ranking and can even help with your targeted ads.

Other tips for ensuring search engines rank your site high are:

Ensure you have a professionally designed and engaging website, so patients don’t click off your site immediately. This will reduce your bounce rate.
Ensure your website offers valuable and concise information about your services and whatever packages you offer.
Make sure your credentials are strategically placed on your website – to build trust in your audience’s mind.
Create a blog on your website to draw your audience through healthcare content marketing. You can get qualified writers from platforms like Writing Judge to help you create content for your blog.

3) Create Tailored Promotions for Remarketing.

Do you know that your conversion rate can rise by as much as 161% through remarketing? Remarketing/retargeting is an expert way for medical advertisers to reach past and current patients with their promotions. Also, healthcare practices can increase their revenue by remarketing to current and past patients.

Marketing to current or past patients is an excellent advertising strategy because you are marketing to patients who have used your services before and are confident in your capabilities.

Here are some tips on using remarketing to target current or past patients:

Send targeted marketing promotions to your current or past patients on procedures they haven’t tried from your practice. Some patients may have used certain of your products before, but not others, so telling them about the benefits of other services you offer and running promos on it can be an excellent way to get them to try them.
Build loyalty within your patients by offering them unique and exclusive promotions.

4) Attract Local Patients via Digital Advertising

Digital advertising is a strategic way to market your healthcare practice to patients in your area. By advertising your practice on platforms like Google Ads, you can strategically target patients through: their age, income level, sex, geographical area, etc.

Some tips on running a digital ad:

Clearly define the goals of the ad you are about to run. Is your goal brand awareness, get more walk-ins in your clinic, drive traffic to your website? Whatever it is, state it clearly before running your ad.
Next, get creative with your digital ad to attract patients to click.
Next, create a funnel to guide patients through their decision-making process once they click on your digital ad.

Pro-tip: You can carry out an A/B testing to see what kind of ads work for you when marketing in healthcare.

5) Team Up

Lastly, you can form a partnership with other healthcare specialists and provide joint services to patients. The keys to a successful collaboration are;

To partner up with people who aren’t direct competitors with your practice.
To ensure that everyone benefits from your partnership. This includes you, your partner, and your patients.

Takeaway

Healthcare content marketing doesn’t have to be stressful, but it does have to be creative. And, while not all healthcare marketing strategies will work for your business, the five advertising ideas shared in this article should inspire you to create ideas to attract more patients.

About Millennium Agency

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, everything has shifted towards digitalization. This also includes the purchase of products and how they’re being purchases — putting pressure on businesses to have a stronger e-commerce branding strategy.

Mentalities change as well. People have started to be more focused on protecting themselves, their families, employees, and customers. But, at the same time, communities have started to stick together to face the crisis. Additionally, since we spend so much of our time at home, there have been major changes in behavioral trends. People are spending more time on social media, looking for new ways to escape and entertain themselves.

However, the need for physical goods puts pressure on businesses — the demand for e-commerce is rising. Even if people still venture out to shop for essentials in stores, the supply is inconsistent.

So many changes have happened so fast in a short amount of time. But slowly, people are moving past the survival mode and allowing this digital experience to settle in. What actions can you take so that your brand grows its customer base and takes care of its people?

Can You Do “Business as Usual” During a Pandemic?

You could. But that might make you come off as insensitive and unadapted. However, you don’t have to change the entire idea around your e-commerce branding strategy – though you should be focused on these important tips:

1. Don’t Target Fear

The worst thing you can do is take advantage of people’s fear during these times. Sure, manipulation can get you an increase in sales in the short term. However, in the long run, it will damage your business.

Just think about what side you want to be on when this pandemic is over. Do you want people to see you as a toxic, manipulative brand? Or do you want them to remember that you actually did something to help them through tough times?

2. Show Empathy

Everyone is vulnerable in times like these — from entrepreneurs to employees. Many companies offer essential services for free. This kind of conduct shows humility and decency in the face of a crisis.

You should use this time to shift your focus and your voice to positive messages around staying safe. Alternatively, give people ways in which they can improve their current situation — be it services or entertainment ideas.

The whole point here is to show that you understand what people are going through — and that you care. The time of being commercially exploitative has passed.

3. Improve Your Digital Presence

If people can’t find you, how will they buy from your store? It’s not as easy as it sounds, though. Before the outbreak, most small businesses generated only a minor part of their profits from a concrete e-commerce branding strategy. This means it will take more effort to generate more online sales.

First of all, aim to grow your website and your blog, if you have one. Use it as an opportunity to add value to people’s lives through your content. Start learning about SEO and link building if you are unfamiliar with these concepts.

If your social media game is not on point, this could be a great moment to work on it. Adapt your promotional messages—combine them with a positive idea or an incentive to stay safe.

You could suggest ways in which the products you sell can help your customers forget their troubles for a moment. Or simply suggest new activities for them to enjoy—with or without your goods.

Another thing you can try is participating in digital events and live streaming. Doing this will help you connect with your customers on a more personal level. People will feel like they resonate with your brand and be more inclined to trust you.

4. Focus on Convenience

If your brand is capable of providing fast service and shipping—let people know. This is a strong selling point to have during these times. If not, it might be a good thing to improve. People have enough to worry about. Try and go out of your way to make it easier for them to buy your products.

Consider offering both delivery and pick up services. In this way, you’re offering your customers a choice of service and convenience.

5. Associate Your Brand with Good

If it’s possible, try to offer your services for free to people that need them most. Or, if you can afford it, make donations. People will see you and remember you as a company that made a stand and made an effort at a time when action was needed.

Also, feel-good content that promotes a positive message will go a long way. Just be sure not to make your efforts solely for commercial reasons. Your clients will acknowledge your contribution and true purpose.

6. Keep an Eye Open

Trends change with the speed of light. Tracking the behavior of your clients can help you gain better insights. In this way, you can adapt your messages or improve your services and keep your customers happy.

If possible, try to plan and build multiple scenarios of what might happen in the future. Even though nobody has answers, it can’t hurt to be prepared, no matter what. This will help you stay one step ahead of your competition.

7. Offer Safety

It should go without saying, but make sure that you follow all health regulations. People need to feel safe in order to do business with you. Offer contactless methods of payment and limit the contact between people at delivery.

Try to find new and safer ways to deliver your products. Like a drop-off point where clients can collect their orders without any human contact. Always consider the safety of both your clients and employees as a priority.

Keep Safe and Adapt

There is a silver lining to this situation—there are ways to improve your e-commerce branding strategy so that you will come out as a stronger company when this is all over. The methods you use to sell your products must be ethical and actually serve your customers. This way, people will remember you as a brand that didn’t take advantage of a bad situation.

The important thing is to constantly adapt – and never go dark with your business. Staying in the spotlight for the right reasons can help you tremendously.

About Millennium Agency

Consumer demand for CBD products is exploding. Seventeen states have legalized the use of CBD extract, and some experts predict that sales could hit 22 billion dollars by the year 2022.

Not everyone is cheering those rosy sales predictions. Regulators in Washington are deeply concerned. In November, the FDA issued a serious crackdown to 15 companies currently selling CBD-infused food and drink. To summarize: the FDA is stating it can’t conclude that CBD is “GRAS” (Generally Recognized as Safe).

One of the main reasons for this concern is that 70% of US hemp is grown and imported from China, with little to no transparency when it comes to their growing practices. After extensive testing by a leading analytical chemistry laboratory, most products were found to be “highly contaminated” with heavy metals, herbicides, BPA and toxic mold. With the FDA keeping quiet until recently, most US CBD products are not yet regulated for purity and safety, and few companies have gone the extra step to be transparent. Many industry insiders are worried that with the rise of popularity and access, the possibility of a full-blown CBD health scare is also coming as well. Such a scare would rattle consumer confidence, much like vaping.

So how do you prepare your cannabusiness for what lies ahead in 2020?

Transparency

CBD manufactures and retailers must be ready with contingency plans to include the addition of transparency marketing practices. It has been shown that 73% of customers are willing to pay more for a product that offers absolute transparency across all layers and aspects of its production and marketing. Businesses that market cannabis and its derivatives can learn from brands like Patagonia that have focused on brand transparency for years. Patagonia allows customers to view all aspects of their products’ journey, including the (usually hidden) textile mills and sewing factories. This tactic has worked: CEO Rose Marcario estimated that the total revenue of the company reached $1 billion in 2017.

Even though the CBD market in the US is relatively new, many companies expect a need for transparency from CBD consumers and have built it into their business plan. Veritas Farms, which owns a 140-acre hemp farm in Pueblo, Colorado, has taken steps to do just that. They boast sustainability as one of their core principles and provide consumers full transparency of their growing practices–even going so far to link to Colorado State’s Industrial Hemp Program website. The proof that full transparency is crucial in the market going forward is in the profit. Veritas Farms saw a 165% lift in their total revenue from Q3 of this year and a 347% lift from September 2018.

Being honest with your consumer isn’t just good for your business – it’s good for your overall reputation. Lay the foundation for being your customer’s trusted brand today. Not sure how to get started? Our sub-brand, Cannabis Brands, can help you!

About Millennium Agency