Month: March 2024

When you say you like a company’s brand, what do you mean? Most people, when they say brand, they mean the logo of a company. Don’t get me wrong, a logo is an important part of a company’s brand, but a brand is so much more. We believe brand encompasses four key areas. Each of these areas is sizable and has lots of opportunities for subsets of information. But today, we’re going to look at things from a bird’s-eye view. We believe a brand encompasses the business’s identity, the business’s positioning, the business’s messaging, and the business’s visual identity. Let’s take a look at each of these elements. Number one, the business’s identity. The first part of any brand is who the business is. What is the business’s mission and core values? What is the business trying to achieve? The mission talks to the bigger picture that the company is trying to solve and what they value. The core values gives the team guidance on what behavior is valued in the organization. It will direct how components of the business interact with customers, how the business interacts with the team. It will set the tone for what the culture in the organization is.

Business identity is a key component of what makes the brand of an organization and gains importance as the business puts value on the identity, making it part of the culture and potentially part of the marketing. The second part of the brand is the positioning of the business. Positioning talks about what a business brings to market and how it goes to market. Or to put another way, what differentiates it from other businesses. When we think about what a business brings to market, what we mean is, how do we make something not a commodity? What makes our product special versus our competition? How we bring it to market might also be our differentiation. Are you the only car wash in town that comes to people’s workplaces? Are you an insurance agency that has the most available markets? Are you the largest organic and natural food provider in the area? How you bring something to market and the positioning that you use are key parts of the identity. The third part of the branding is messaging. This could be viewed as the verbal identity of the business. How do we describe the organizations? Do we have specific words that we use?

What is our marketing one-liner to quickly share who we are? This also works into the tone of how we write copy for the business. The fourth part, and the one that people think the most about when they talk about branding is the visual identity. The logo is the most important part of the visual identity of the business, but there are also several other components to visual identity. One of the biggest things is what we call look and feel. Look and feel for a brand is the visual style for graphics and things like websites. They give us a uniformed visual appearance across all interaction points for a customer. A social media graphic should be able to be visually related to the website, which should be visually related to the business card. This unified visual identity is usually tied together by specific colors, typefaces, textures, or graphical elements like certain shapes or icons. A proper visual branding contains these components and a guide with all the rules on how use the visual branding. Is your business using all the elements of a brand, or do you just have a logo? Today is a great day to start developing the other elements of your brand.

A great thing is to look at companies that do branding well and start to look for all of those components and how they use them. When you start looking for them, you’re going to notice them. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine podcast. If you need help developing a brand or rebranding your company, please reach out to me at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com.

When thinking about the customer acquisition journey, it can sometimes be a mystery how people decided to do business with you. Sometimes people describe it as a funnel. The more people hear about you, the more it’ll filter down to the people who turn into customers. And that’s a pretty good model. But a slightly different take on that, and a bit more of a relational take, is the know, like, and trust model. The know in the know, like, trust model means for someone to do business with you, they have to know who you are, they have to decide that they like you, and ultimately, they have to decide to trust you. Once they’ve decided they trust you, they will be willing to sign on the dotted line. This week we’re going to talk about the know, and then in future weeks, we’ll talk about like and trust. In the know like trust model, what does it mean to know? Very simply, it’s I know who you are or that you exist. So how do we become known? Two big thoughts, inbound and outbound marketing. Let’s start with outbound. Outbound marketing is anything that you are doing to actively get your name out there.

That might be sponsoring a local event, buying digital ads, or having a logo on the side of your truck. Outbound marketing is great for introducing yourself to people that might not know who you are or bringing you back to the top of people’s minds. Inbound marketing is when people come looking for you. It’s the experience they have on your website. It’s the content they see on your Facebook page when they come and look for you. I call inbound marketing being ready to be found. The biggest way inbound works into the no category is through things like social media and having good search engine results. We’ll talk more about inbound marketing when we talk about getting someone to like and trust you. But for now, know that if you invest in outbound marketing but do not have inbound ready to go, you are wasting your money. You have to be ready to be found, which is where steps between know and like start to bleed over. So what should we think about for outbound? One, audience, two, cost, three, brand image. When we think about audiences, we need to consider, are these the people we want to talk to?

So who do you want to talk to? Are they potential customers or are they referrers of potential customers? Are they just general potential customers? Or are they the target market that you really want to develop? Cost. Can you afford to do this? What do you think the ROI will be? Is it a one-time expense or an ongoing expense? Spending $1,000 to talk to 10 of the right people might make a ton of sense for your business. Spending the money to wrap your van might make sense, too. The cost varies by the audience and your business goals. And then finally, does this opportunity fit your brand? Even if an opportunity is with potential customers and affordable, does it make sense to align yourselves with that opportunity? This question could mean a variety of things for your brand, but things like the type of the event, the cause of the organization, or the message that the platform carries could have an effect. An example of this would be Adelsberger Marketing advertising in a traditional print newspaper. It would be an odd place to see us for a number of reasons, and it wouldn’t be a good fit.

We’ll talk more about know, like and trust in upcoming weeks. And so you need to ask yourself, are you ready to be found? Are you ready to start that relationship with a new customer? If not, send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com and subscribe for future episodes of the Content Machine podcast.

Kevin

Welcome back to the Content Machine podcast. This week, we are joined by Roshni Patel. Roshni is the digital ad specialist here at Adelsberger Marketing, and hopefully, she will be helping us learn a few things about digital advertising that will help you in your business. Roshni, thanks for joining us.

Roshni

Thanks for having me.

Kevin

So a commonly asked question we get, Roshni is, is it better to put ads on every platform or just a few?

Roshni

Just a few. Knowing where your audience is coming from is really important, so you’re not just spending money unnecessarily. Helping determine that means you might put your ad out on fewer platforms, but you’re getting a better cost per click result.

Kevin

All right. So using this, using any of these digital advertising platforms, are there ways to filter down to that audience to see, to the people you want to see to show your ads to?

Roshni

Yes. So most platforms allow you to choose an age demographic as as well as geographical demographic. So you can narrow down who’s seeing your ads. But a lot of platforms, such as Facebook, will allow you to target ads to people who have similar interests of your business or have liked your page or interacted with your page. Therefore, you’re being more cost-effective when showing your ad.

Kevin

Okay, very good. Yeah. And a lot of that starts with understanding who your customer is, right? Yes. So that’s a key part to when we start an ad project, we want to make sure we understand who that company’s customers are.

Roshni

Exactly.

Kevin

And then we can target ads to them. There might be a a few options of platforms that target customer that we were just talking about. Is there any ad format on those platforms that you think should be utilized more?

Roshni

Yes. So in recent years, video ads have become very popular. They’re very cost-effective, but they also keep the audience engaged. So short 15 to 30 second videos are really effective. So you can create short copy for them, but really, you just want to get your main points across in that short video.

Kevin

And should you always use video or can you use graphics as well? And if you can use graphics, do you have any tips on that?

Roshni

Yes. Graphic ads are also very effective, and especially depending on who you’re trying to engage as your audience. Platforms like Facebook, it’s really smart to use very clear and concise graphics and have more information in your copy. So you want to make sure the picture is engaging but easy to read. Also creating multiple variations of that copy with the graphic is really helpful because that way the platform can see which works best against each other. So what copy is doing best out in the field as opposed to just having the one ad.

Kevin

Okay. Yeah. So when we come to the table, frequently we bring multiple versions of a graphic so that we can make sure that we’re getting the best return on the customer’s ad spend. Yeah. And then a common question we get is about how much should we spend on digital advertising, or why is my cost so click so high? And what has been your experience with that?

Roshni

So cost per click can vary depending on the customer and where they’re located as well as what their competition is. So a big factor is competition in your area. If you are a local business, for example, like a plumbing and HVAC company, you might have more competition. Therefore, your cost per click will be higher because you’re fighting to appear in those ads, in the ad space. Another really important role is your ranking. And so ranking is determined in large part by your SEO. So that’s search engine optimization. Having a high SEO ranking will help you appear faster when you’re bidding for those ads. You can also, when doing Google Ads, for example, you can put a bidding increment in there, which means that’s how much you’re willing to spend when you’re trying to appear in those ads. It doesn’t mean Google will use all that money, but it just shows how far you’re willing to go to appear, which is really helpful.

Kevin

Yeah. So you might be able to say up to a dollar per click. And if the bid goes up to 65 cents, that’s what you’ll get charged. Yes, exactly. But you’re willing to maybe spend more than the other competitors. More, if maybe. That’s right. Now, sometimes when you’re looking at Google Pay Per Click or other types of pay-per-click advertising, keywords are important. Can you tell us about what keywords are and how do they work?

Roshni

So keywords are basically phrases or words that describe your business. They’re really important because keywords help determine where your ad appears. So for example, in a search ad, if someone’s searching plumber near me, having the keyword plumber in your ad, or in your keywords, excuse me, will help your ad appear. And it also helps narrow what is shown. So if someone’s searching for a painter, a plumber won’t appear. So you’re not wasting money. Keywords should be a shorter list and more detailed rather than a longer list of just a bunch of words, because you really want to narrow what your company does and what you’re hoping to promote or sell.

Kevin

And a lot of times with keywords, one thing that we’ve seen a lot is that sometimes the meaning that you think you have for the keyword is not the meaning that the searchers are having for the keyword.

Roshni

Yes, sometimes those words are a little skewed. Yeah.

Kevin

So you got to be careful to think about ulterior meanings or if the meaning of the niche of that word may not be what you’re trying to sell is another factor to consider. Well, Roshni, thank you for your time in joining us on the episode today. If you need help with digital advertising, please get in touch with us. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com, and then hit subscribe on this episode so that you can get notified of future episodes that are coming out. And we’ll see you on the next episode of The Content Machine podcast.