Imagine your brand voice was an actual person. Would it sound like Samuel L Jackson or Gilbert Gottfried? Would you want to talk to this person before your morning coffee? Are they the person you want to be stuck with as your Uber driver?
Selecting your brand’s voice is a powerful first step when developing a cohesive marketing strategy. From social media advertising to email marketing, today’s eCommerce companies work with a variety of niche agencies to generate revenue at the lowest cost possible. But the question remains, are they all sending the same message?
Consumers are savvier than ever, from conducting extensive research, reading reviews, and consuming content from a plethora of sources before making a single purchase… all at lightning speed. Across all channels, a solid marketing strategy must understand the needs of their consumers while remaining on-brand.
Channel Strategy Hit List
Understanding different marketing channels, their purpose, and how they work together is the first step in understanding why your brand needs to speak to your audience in one, unified voice.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is about having a deep understanding of your consumers and their search intent so that you’re able to cultivate keywords that put you in front of consumers at all stages of their purchasing cycle. Ask yourself, why are they searching? Because they have a question? Are they searching for a specific website? Or, are they searching because they want to buy something? Search Intent is Google’s #1 goal. If you want to succeed in the SEO landscape, you must first understand your customers’ search Intent.
When Opposuits came to us to turn their B2B into a thriving direct-to-consumer business, we developed a comprehensive strategy to generate more organic traffic through SEO. Now whether you search, “Crazy Suits,” “Printed Suits” or even just “Men’s Suits,” you’ll always find Opposuits on top of Google.
According to Search Engine Journal, the top 2 SEO Trends for 2019 includes “Understand Your Audience & User Intent,” and “Go Beyond Google Search,” meaning, “the best content on the fastest platforms geared to meet users wherever they’re coming from.” (Keith Goode, IBM’s Senior SEO Strategist) Your SEO efforts also need to be a big part of your Content Marketing strategy through blogs, podcasts, email marketing, and social media marketing, to name a few, so you can go beyond Google search.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or Paid Search Advertising, is buying adpositions from search engines with the keywords that your potential clients might use to look for your business.
Display Advertising is used to reach new customers, build brand awareness and remarket to those browsing your eCom. These ads could be in the form of banners, videos, rich media, and appear wherever your target audience is online. They take the guesswork out of selecting PMP ad buys.
Google Shopping allows you to promote your products on search engines like Google Ads, by giving the consumers your company name, product information, and a photo of the product. Shopping Ads usually see a higher click-through rate than traditional search ads. When To Boot NY wanted to revamp their strategic marketing plan right before the 2018 holiday season, we restructured their shopping, display, and search campaigns to be more detailed and run more efficiently.
Email Marketing is more than promoting your products and services. It’s about developing a relationship directly with consumers by hitting them at the right moments with automation flows. The most successful types of emails are Drip Campaigns and Nurture Campaigns. Drip Campaigns being a relatively simple process of “dripping” your message to potential consumers are the right time. While Nurture Campaigns is having a deeper level of understanding of your audience. It’s a relationship based email series build-out to nurture your audience and guide them through the buying process. After implementing an aggressive email automation campaign for Drew Barrymore’s Flower Beauty, we saw their email conversion increased by 81%.
Social Media Advertising uses intense segmentation of customer profiles to build a precisely tailored approach. You can create a custom consumer base that leads to direct purchases on your eCommerce site and generate a higher ROI.
Cross-Channeling & Omnichannel Strategy
A cross-channel marketing strategy is designed to take advantage of all digital channels to connect with current consumers, while also generating more leads. On a campaign level, cross-channel marketing is not just running the same ads across channels but engaging with potential consumers, so they remember what you offer, and they make a purchase.
The truth is, consumers aren’t just on one channel. How many times have you watched tv, typed on your laptop, while using your phone? The use of multiple channels makes it more important to have a consistent brand message and look across channels.
The interactive Advertising Bureau conducted a case study on Cross-Media Ad Effectiveness and found that consumers who were exposed to a consistent brand message on multiple media channels increased purchase intent by 90% and companies saw the perception of their brand increase by 68%.
Bottom Line
Consumers are smart. Brands are no longer trying to convince potential customers to buy their products but instead resonate with them in order to build a relationship through brand recognition and consistent messaging. But brand recognition is more than just trying to get your name out there, it’s about consumers trusting you.
Your brand message needs to be so consistent that when a consumer sees your company name they already know to make their next purchase from you instead of competitors. This starts with auditing your marketing channels to have one cohesive voice.
