I was in a zoom meeting this week with a client and even though we had an agenda for marketing strategy it was amazing how the needs of the team change, or the realization of needs change. No matter the marketing plan, there are things we must have and know in order to pursue a great marketing strategy.
Even though we were on a zoom call in different states, the concept of teams, branding and work culture, and um, humans are basically the same. We need to understand who we are, what we do, how we do it and for whom we do it for. We can a waste a lot of time and money to just - try to get more clients - without GREAT BRANDING to lead your marketing!
What is great Branding?
Great branding can be many things. It can be a logo, color or font, but what, there's more! It is also the feeling you create in your customers, the feeling they have when they buy from you. Branding can be the words your clients use when referring you to another person. As business owners we get a chance to help that message by consistently living in and working on our product and message.
There is a lot on google about branding, but I want to talk about the areas we find that help guide teams in fairly simple terms. The 1 Liner and Customer Persona. This week in our meeting our focus changed when we decided to lean in on these two areas... it got more concise and fruitful.
By asking ourselves what our 1 liner is and what our customer persona is - if we allow - will expose holes in our game, our messaging and really, our businesses.
What is a 1 Liner and Customer Persona?
In Marketing Made Simple by Donald Miller and J.J Peterson - a 1 liner is your elevator pitch. When someone asks you "what do you do for living" you say "_____________", what? If you are a hotdog cart company, do you and your team say, "we are a hotdog cart in Boise, Idaho"? Or do we say "We satisfy hungry customers all over Boise, Idaho by making the best hotdogs in town adding very own unique, homemade and delicious condiments." One says what you do, the other says who you are, what you do, how you do it, and for whom you do it for. It shows the problem you are solving and how you are solving it.
Customer Persona might be easier to understand. It just tells us where to throw the rock in the pond. It can be who you serve (who do you like the most lol) AND it can be who you WANT or SHOULD serve. To keep the mobile hotdog cart analogy going further... we might realize that it's the mobile part that makes you unique. Maybe most of your business comes when we park by business districts or malls in town where people are in a hurry but want a unique meal. So our customer persona could be busy families or busy moms. Or maybe we realize that we make the most around fair grounds or ball parks, so our ideal customer are families who do sports and drive big SUV's etc. Not that we don't serve everyone, but we can at least gear our marketing and business choices (big parking lots for big SUV's full of people for example) to make sales easier for our customer persona and therefore grow and make bigger ripples. The impact in the pond or customer persona ripples out from the center effecting all kinds of customers.
As you work on your business and marketing try to narrow down your branding and include a 1 liner and customer persona your brand kit. Then let your brand kit guide your marketing. More on each of these in our next blog posts.
Get after it!
Dylan
