A succinct guide to elevating your brand marketing
Looking to grow your brand’s awareness through consistent marketing? Even with a brand strategy in hand, it can be hard to effectively implement this strategy across all your marketing channels. (Don't have a brand strategy yet? Don't worry, we'll cover that too.) This is where a handy marketing principle called omnichannel marketing comes into play! Read on for a 101 on what omnichannel marketing is and how to integrate these tactics into your small- to medium-sized business.
When you shop with a big-name company like Target, you will experience a cohesive expression of their brand, whether navigating their app, social media profile, website, or one of their almost 2,000 stores across the US. You will see that the same language and messaging (“Expect More. Pay Less.”), brand values (for “every family’s Target run to be convenient, relevant, affordable, and packed with joyful experiences”), iconic logo (the bullseye), and signature red color (hello, bright red employee uniforms and shopping carts) are present in your every interaction with the brand. This is the experience we've become accustomed to with big brands. But this seamless brand experience from start to finish that feels normal and effortless to us is actually very strategic from a marketing perspective. While you’ve undoubtedly experienced an interaction with a brand as described above, you may not know that there is a term to describe the tactics that create overarching similarities in the customer experience: omnichannel marketing.
There is a myriad of definitions floating around for this current marketing buzzword, but we think of omnichannel marketing as differentiating your branding across multiple marketing channels with the goal of creating a consistent brand experience for customers.
Using our working definition of omnichannel marketing, if you’re a small business with a website, a storefront, an Instagram, a Facebook account, Tiktok, Etsy, Pinterest, and/or an email list, you too can employ omnichannel marketing tactics. It can actually be quite simple, so let's dive into our favorite practices for doing just that.
First things first, brand strategy
Keeping things consistent across the board can be a bit impossible without the solid foundation of a brand strategy. Often misunderstood, this is more than the sum of your logo, color palette, and chosen typefaces. A good brand strategy answers the following questions:
What is the brand’s mission/what problems do we solve? (And how do we help our customers solve problems?)
What are the values and guiding principles of our brand? (What is important to us and the way we operate? What kind of culture do we want to create?)
Who are our ideal customers, and how do we engage them? (What are their needs? What will they be attracted to in our brand?)
How does the brand communicate its goals? (What will our brand voice sound like? What brand language and visual guidelines will create consistency in our brand?)
How does our brand differentiate from our competitors? (What are our strengths? What makes us special and sets us apart? How will our customers see us when held up against similar businesses?)
The importance of having a good brand strategy in place cannot be overstated. Let’s put it this way: Trying to create a consistent brand experience for your customer without a brand strategy is like driving across the country without a GPS. Even if you think you can figure it out, you’re bound to get lost along the way. It’s necessary to start with a roadmap if the goal is to reach your intended destination. And the same goes for reaching your brand marketing goals.
Creating personality through brand voice
Your brand voice works in tandem with and is derived from your brand strategy. Your brand voice is the distinct personality your brand takes on in every client or customer touchpoint. Your brand voice is a critical part of your marketing strategy, formulated to reach the audience that you’ve set forth to attract in your brand strategy. Crafting your brand voice is surprisingly easy with the right tools, here’s a blog post we wrote recently to help you do just that.
Once you craft a brand voice, keep it consistent wherever your brand messaging may appear. If you do this well, your customers will learn to differentiate your brand voice from other brand voices, and your brand will form a recognizable personality of its own in the minds of your customers.
Building meaningful brand experiences through marketing
Omnichannel marketing is centered around your customers and their interaction with your brand messaging. Calling to mind our initial example, customers have come to expect a holistic experience when they interact with big brands like Target. Whether conscious or not, customers attach certain feelings and emotions to their experience with the brand. People make purchasing decisions based on emotions and their experience with your brand. Knowing this, Target has set out to make every “Target run” a memorable and “joyful experience.” They round out the customer’s “joyful experience” with their brand by speaking in a cheery tone with differentiated information across their app, emails, and ads. Omnichannel marketing tactics such as these take into consideration that the customer may see all of your messaging across many different channels and know that communication must be cohesive across each of them, without being repetitive. Consequently, every customer experience with the Target brand, though content may vary, is intentionally set up for the customer to feel joy. The extent of their success is evidenced by the culture that Target has created, in which customers often engage in a “Target run” just for fun, without a list in hand of items to buy.
Matt Davies sums up this approach in his book, Storyategy: "Defining the meaning that people attach to your brand is only the beginning. You then need to find ways of ensuring you give this meaning the best possible chance of being discovered by your audience and look for ways to give them experiences which reinforce this meaning."
Find the thing that makes your brand exceptional in the eyes of your customers and use it to build a brand strategy that puts their needs and wants at the center. Then speak to them in a familiar voice, one that they will be receptive to. All the best brands do.
Practical steps for applying omnichannel marketing techniques for small- to medium-size businesses
You’ve established a brand strategy and brand voice for your business…now what? It’s time to customize your marketing efforts to fit each channel that your business inhabits. That means using each channel to your strategic advantage.
Keeping your overall brand message and brand voice the same, play to the strengths of each platform you're on. Use Facebook to build community; treat Instagram like a photo gallery to make a solid first impression; share longer-form content in email marketing; make personable, quick TikTok videos related to your offerings. There's a delicate balance here where each platform can have a different purpose and tone while still remaining consistent.
Determine a purpose for each of your platforms and consider creating specific content for each one (this is best for entrepreneurs who have a marketing team or agency on hand). Perhaps your goal for using TikTok is to humanize your brand by inviting viewers behind the scenes. Or your intention behind posting to Twitter is to position yourself as an expert by sharing industry news related to your field and providing comments. Approach each platform with a specific strategy that's underpinned by your overall brand strategy and brand message.
If you're running a one-man or one-woman show (a.k.a., doing all the marketing yourself), keep it simple by repurposing the same content across each of your platforms but in different formats. For example, write an in-depth blog post that's emailed to your email list; create a shorter-form Instagram post summarizing that blog post; start a discussion on Facebook by posting a question related to that topic. This keeps content creation simple on you, yet offers different experiences to your customers on each of those marketing channels.
Still feeling stuck? We're dropping a blog post on how to brand your social media profiles that will provide a more in-depth dive into these practical steps!
As a small- to medium-sized business, it is likely that you will work with a handful of teams/agencies who all need to keep your brand strategy and voice consistent throughout various applications. Having a real and coherent brand strategy in place allows these teams to be consistent and seamless on their part, and for your brand messaging to feel like it’s all coming from the same place, even if there are many hands in the pot.
Don’t have a brand strategy? Work with a brand strategy pro
At Author Brand Studio, we help you form a brand strategy and identify your brand voice. When clients first come to us, they’re often drawing in customers that aren’t ideal, or they’re only reaching a fraction of the potential of their business. Usually, we find a lack of clarity around branding as the culprit, and our proven process helps translate who you are and what you do into a brand with offerings that your ideal client can’t resist. Doing this kind of work first can save you thousands of dollars, avoiding branding that doesn’t work and skipping right to the good part of a thriving brand, backed with brand strategy. Ready to get clear on your brand strategy? The first consultation is free! Schedule a call with me.
