Marketing Monthly: Tips from Our Expert
Welcome to a new series, Marketing Monthly, where we’ll be presenting you a round-up of updates from one of ES99’s marketing gurus, Design Mentor Hazel Imogen.
You’ll learn about tips and strategies for business marketing and what marketing looks like from an agency perspective when working with organizations.
Take a look!
Marketing Monthly: March 2021
Hi, I’m Hazel and I’ll be taking you through our marketing tips for this month. Let’s get started!
Importance of the Company’s Offering
At Es99, we work with so many unique businesses in industries many of us have never heard about before.
‘What they do’ may be a very obvious story for our client but to us, it’s all a new world that we’re excited to learn more about.
It’s really important that the team gets a high level understanding of how these business works so that we can speak the same language and get an idea of every touchpoint we can potentially influence.
It’s here we uncover things like: how often our clients are emailing their customers, what a customer journey looks like, and how products get sent out.
Once we know these key aspects, we can put together a clear strategy that best showcases what the business is best at to prospects.
Importance of the Short- and Long-term Future of the Company
Knowing the short- and long-term future of a client’s business allows us to set up internal goals and checkpoints to strive towards as well as strategize how we should be positioning our executions.
For example, If we know that the business wants to be hiring more workers in the short term, we can shift our efforts to consciously address this.
That could look like: setting up a referral program for current workers, adding something in the weekly newsletter emails, or pushing social ads.
Long-term future may be something we simply need to keep in mind for down the road: perhaps it’s a service providing business that eventually wants to expand into consumer products—it’s great to know that up front so we can provide ideas on how to eventually integrate that.
Telling Your Story Through Branding
This is one of my favorite questions to ask, by determining some of the struggles or challenges our clients face, it sets our team up to be problem solvers. This is really the core of what we do.
Yes, branding and marketing can look and sound beautiful, but if it’s not doing anything, if it doesn’t have a purpose, then it isn’t smart and it isn’t going to create results.
Communicate What You Represent
We often like to ask this question to our clients who are about to undergo a rebrand.
These words are a window into how our clients see themselves. Getting this characteristic language and communicating it effectively can help navigate our branding direction but should not be the end-all and be-all.
Sometimes a client will say character words to represent them that they think they want to be but doesn’t align with the strategy we’re suggesting be implemented for them. We look to these words as a compass rather than a road map.
Emphasizing Emotional and Functional Benefits to Prospects
Getting to the emotional benefit of our client’s business is the best way to figure out how to connect with their audience.
When we can get to the root of this, we’re no longer selling a product or service based on features but telling a story that will move people and want them to engage with their brand.
We had a client who sells and installs beautiful luxury doors into homes, and all over their site they were calling out door features—speaking of the sizes, the materials and installation speed.
When we looked at the emotional benefit of these doors we saw a much more compelling story: rooms that balance life, that bring the outside world in, and completely transform your living room. This is a much more captivating story that resonated far more strongly with their prospects.
“If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.” – Jay Baer
That’s all from Hazel this month. To learn more about marketing, you can watch our Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2021 webinar here. To learn more from Hazel, take a look at her TikTok channel, where she provides insightful advice to her audience of 25 thousand marketers and aspiring professionals.