Start With Target Buyer Personas to Build Your Online Brand

If you’re in the marketing field, you’ve probably heard of “Buyer Personas,” but what are they exactly, and why do you need them?

For fans of the Showtime series, Homeland, you may have seen super sleuth antihero, Carrie Mathison, sitting cross-legged, surrounded by an array of suspect’s photos, including bios, histories and known associations. These are personas. In the case of “Homeland,” these are Terrorist Personas. Fortunately, we live in the less perilous, yet often elusive world of marketing, but share Carrie’s need for a deeper understanding of our targets; what they look like, what they like and dislike, where they congregate, what they read and who they associate with on a regular basis.

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How a Concise Brand Strategy Will Save Your Website Project

You are in charge of Marketing. Your competitor just launched a new site. And it’s good. They have case studies, testimonials, video and interactive diagrams. What’s even more disconcerting is that they are telling a compelling story with a point of view. Their copy is solid, design is modern; They got their branding right. 

Your CEO is not happy, wants to see something done about it and wants results fast… but within a budget. How do you get it done?

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An Effective Web Design Strategy Starts with Your Brand

We’ve talked about Market Strategy, Brand Strategy and Content Strategy, so why do we need a Web Design Strategy? Because, of all of these strategies, only your Website Design Strategy is externally facing. Let’s put Website Desgn Strategy into context to clarify how these strategies work in tandem.

Strategy_ffunnel2Using a funnel metaphor, your Market Strategy is your highest level strategic decision, in which you define the markets for your products and/or services and determine whether your market approach is industry specific, solutions or applications-focused or some combination.

Once this is determined, your Brand Strategy encompasses the way you describe what you do, for what audiences with a compettive value statement, which sets you apart from your competition. You socialize this brand internally, and externally at every customer and employee touchpoint.

The power of a relevant Content Strategy — based on sound Market and Brand Strategies — is to create a program to disseminate and exchange your valuable content across all media and over time, which leads us to your Website Design Strategy.

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Why B2B Branding Works – And Why It’s More Important Than Ever

creamypbIf you buy the wrong brand of peanut butter, you can always buy another brand when you finish the jar. The wrong trio of underwear, you might be out $14.99, but buy the wrong computer software or hardware solution for your business and you have a major problem. Brands matter in the B2B world, sometimes more than B2C. A strong brand means the perception of reduced risk and makes doing business — whatever the business — easier. As with B2C, buyers of B2B products value vendors’ reputation because it makes the purchase decision safer.

In fact, a Forbes survey found that B-to-B purchasing decision-makers consider the brand as a central rather than a marginal element of a supplier’s value proposition.  Their survey found that decision-makers say the brand is almost as important as the efforts of sales teams in encouraging them to make out a purchase order.

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Has Your Website Entered the 4th Dimension?

For much of the life of the commercial web, websites were one dimensional, essentially online brochures that over time became large and often unruly repositories of tactical content. But, in just a few short years after the recession, websites have catapulted to the 4th dimension.

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Brand Positioning and Messaging Demystified

We do a lot of work for clients in the technology and sciences fields and are continually amazed by the endless acronyms that seem so routine in these fields, but for a relative outsider can sometimes feel daunting. Working with such a client recently on a branding project, I was reminded that the branding work we do is just as full of industry insider terms that can be confusing or seem arcane. This is especially true because even branding experts sometimes play fast and loose with the terminology.

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