Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. I'm Esther.
And I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about the triangle of alignment. That sounds really like the triangle. Love doom. But no, it's not. Okay. So it's not all doom and gloom. It's marketing. It's a triangle. And it's actually coming because Melanie wrote a blog about this, and it just really grabbed my attention. And I think it's something that all our listeners should know about, should hear about and should be interested in. So Melanie, talk us through the triangle.
Okay. Well, obviously a triangle has three sides and there's two bottom points and a top point. Okay.
So what does that make it, an Isosceles?
Yes.
Does it matter or right angles? Yes.
It's just a triangle. It's very excited now.
Okay.
Seriously?
Yes. Okay.
Are you done now?
I am. Good.
The point of this, whatever you want to call it, with three equal sides from the brand. It starts from the brand. In my opinion, what needs to be looked at considered first is the brand. Once we've worked through that, then we look at your market, the people that you're serving, and then obviously, how you approach those people afterwards using campaigns. So like I said, I think that the top, most important thing that we need to work on and build a real strong foundational understanding of is the brand. So there's three elements to that.
Okay. So when we talk about brand, we're talking about your name, we're talking about what you call your company, the color schemes, what you believe in. We're talking about how other people see that brand.
It goes a lot deeper than just the visuals. I mean, the visuals are assumed, the color, the font, the typeface, that sort of thing. But what I think people not all the time but seem to sort of skip over is the mission and vision statements. And I know there's a lot of people going, oh, yeah, we looked at that to start your own business, but not everybody do them. And I think that's a real shame because it really helps you Hone your direction for your company or for your brand yourself by having a mission and vision statement. And the great thing is obviously it's something that's flexible and it can change as well.
There are also people who do it and tuck it away in a corner and never remember what it is with their vision and their mission. So it is something that you should have front and center.
Agreed. And normally on your website as well.
Yeah.
And then the next element I would put into your brand is obviously your brand voice and persona. We're all so worried about looking at who our audience is, but how are we putting ourselves across to our audience? There's absolutely no shame in being yourself, but by putting it down on paper, how are you going to respond to questions? Are you going to be humorous? Are you going to be officious? Are you going to be sort of show some sort of trepidation in your responses because it matches your brand persona and your brand voice? Is it going to be a rapid beat? Is it going to be short, sharp responses? Or are you going to be florid with your responses and huge paragraphs of answers to questions, that sort of thing? And then once you go beyond those so the mission and vision, the brand voice and persona, then you're actually going onto something that's been cropping up more and more and more and I think it should do over the last five years. And that's your corporate and social responsibility as well.
So just for people who don't know what corporate and social responsibility is, it is sort of your response to climate change, what you're doing to reduce your carbon footprint.
Diversity.
All of that. So is your website, for example, has it got an audio version? All of that is your corporate and social responsibility. Obviously some people do not hire they are solopreneurs, but they still have to look at their corporate and social responsibility. Don't print off stuff. You don't need to turn off all the lights, unplug your computer when it's fully charged, blah, blah, blah, blah. All of that stuff.
Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think it's something that we all need to get into the habit of looking at and updating because people are looking to us now as leaders or as thought leaders in our industry. Are you representing me as a customer, as a consumer of your business? Are you representing me? Are you protecting the planet and jobs? And are you being diverse enough as well? People are looking, yeah.
Okay, so that's the top of our equilateral triangle. I'm not a mathematician. I really don't know what this triangle is called. Right. So then we're going to look at your market. So we've talked about this loads of times and loads of different podcasts. Who are your customers have their avatars even print? Sorry, don't print them off. Draw them in front of you. Have them on a note document on your computer. So you're not wasting note paper. I'm a notebook lover though. Have an idea of who it is that you are talking to when you are using your brand voice. Yeah. So that means your ideal customer. Where do they hang out? What do they do? What do they like? Where do they live? What's their demographics?
Yeah. But again, I think we need to be a little bit broader because by understanding who our audience is and just having a picture of them in our heads, it doesn't actually make them buy from us. So we have to understand the language that they're using that will activate them to come down our sales funnel. So what value can we offer them throughout the journey? The customer journey. And so keywords is one of the things you've got your customer avatars, then you got your keywords. Activate those avatars to sign up. Subscribe, listen to your podcasts, read your blogs, and basically, how are they going to respond to your posts and your content in general? And I think the next best way to do that is to understand how your product or service connects in their lives. So it's not who they are. It's what problem they're having that you can help with, I think, is the most fundamental important thing. And to understand that it's not just your product or service that's important to them. There'll be other things going on in their lives. And by showing an empathy and a sympathy for what's going on in their lives and developing that sort of visible understanding to them, they say, oh, yeah, they totally get me. They totally understand my pain points. They totally understand what's going through my mind. And they kind of relate to you very quickly because you're seeing how your product or service connects in their lives overall.
Yeah. So it's always thinking of what's in it for them. Basically think about what's in it for your ideal customer and write your content based on that. Based on I was going through this and I found this really helpful, and that's why I do this, for example. Okay, so we've done two sides of the two points of the triangle. The last one then is the champion. Yeah.
So the first two, I suppose, was the potatoes and veg. And this is the real meat of the dinner. If you like.
Or the plant based protein
oh the plant based protein
vegans...
I'm Being inclusive, Melanie.
Yeah I'm being fully inclusive now. So now we're thinking about the campaign. And the campaign doesn't just take it's, not just ads. There's an awful lot going on as part of the campaign. You got to understand, are you targeting your correct avatar using your brand persona and activating keywords on the right platforms at the right times? Although it's obviously nice and easy to share campaigns on different platforms, either through paid way or if you're going to be doing it manually with just a snap of a button. But sometimes it's better to actually fully understand when your audience is going to be on there. So as a really good example, is Facebook and Instagram. Obviously, you can put your scheduled posts into metabusiness suites, but I wouldn't put them out at the same time to both Facebook and Instagram because there's no guarantee that your audience is going to be there exactly the same time on both platforms. So I would go through and see when your audience is there, put your content up, saying all the right things on the right platforms and understanding. Is it visuals? Is it photos? Is it gifts? Is it text? There are lots of different ways that you can get people to build a rapport in a relationship with you on these different platforms and then understand throughout the whole process where you are in the sales funnel, are you trying to generate awareness? Are you trying to generate consideration? Or are you actually bringing people down to the bottom of the funnel and finally down to actual conversion? But all of this only works is if you have a look at your analytics, and that's a cyclical kind of thing. You kind of go round and round and round, doing all three of those and then hitting analytics is the last thing. And that's what I mean by campaign.
Yeah. And obviously, as part of your strategy, we'll focus really heavily on your brand persona and your brand voice, because if your brand is a more serious brand than gifts or gifts or whatever, you pronounce them or memes and things like that would not fit in with a serious corporate voice, whereas infographics would be more in line with that. If you're having fun, then definitely use all the different means that you have fun videos, et cetera, and stay away more from the infographics, unless you're going to use cartoon versions of them, for example. So just always be focusing on all three aspects of that so that they are in alignment so that they totally work together and always revert back. Would this campaign suit my avatar? Is this campaign using my brand voice? Is it pointing me in the direction of my mission and my vision? Always have all three in your head together, and obviously your analytics. You can find them for free on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Analytics, et cetera. So make sure you're signed up for them all.
And don't forget there are third party apps that you can use that will help you monitor your analytics as well and help you better understand who your audience is specifically. Of course, we're going to flagway for Agorapulse here.
Of course.
But lots of different platforms can help you understand who your ambassadors are, who are engaging with you. And these are really important tools because then you can understand what motivated them to engage with you in the first place. But I write at least one blog a month, sometimes more on my stomp website. So stomp. Ie blog. And there's hopefully something going up that's useful every single month. And then at the end of every month, I also do a social media round up as well. But it's time to just get your head back in the game. Things have, well, slowly reverted back to normal here over certainly over here in the Republic of Ireland. And I really hope wherever you're listening to our podcast today, in some way, things have returned to normal. But we'd love to hear your feedback on my blog. I'm always open to learning. The only reason why I'm writing these blogs is because I've learned something. And thank you for showcasing it today, Esther.
No problem. Like I said, I find it very fascinating, very interesting, and think it's something that our audience definitely needed to hear about today and yeah, guys, get in touch with us. Let us know. Obviously subscribe to our podcast. Share it out with your friends who are in business and if you would like to try Agorapulse for two months for free, then you can I'm sure there's a link right below this podcast intent, Lincoln. That's it for today, guys. We're back next week with more Monday morning marketing. Until then. Bye bye.
Bye. For now.