So many business owners operating in the online space today are struggling with their marketing. We have become all too dependant on social media which, don’t get me wrong, I’m so grateful for as an entrepreneur. But it’s diminished our ability to trust our own voice and our own authentic approach because we’re constantly comparing ourselves to others.
As a brand strategist and designer, I see marketing through the lens of branding. Let’s be real: your brand is an experience. So if you’re looking for ways to optimize your marketing for consistent conversions, you need to optimize the phases of your brand experience first.
CONTENTS
THE HOLY TRINITY OF BRANDING
For your marketing to be truly effective, your brand experience needs three things:
Memorability
Relatability
Possibility
I call this the Holy Trinity of Branding.
The biggest difference between marketing and branding is that marketing is micro while branding is macro. Branding is all about the big picture.
For your marketing to convert, your brand experience needs to be strategic and fully realized.
So let’s take a quick look at the Holy Trinity of Branding.
MEMORABILITY
Your brand needs to be memorable in the eyes and minds of your target audience so you stay top of mind. Having a simple and distinct brand identity increases memorability and brand awareness. The same is true for your messaging. Concise, captivating messaging will increase brand awareness around who you are and what you have to offer.
RELATABILITY
Increasingly, we want to feel a connection to the brands we're buying from. Consumers are more drawn to brands that have a shared or parallel story to their own, bridging the gap between consumer and business. Your story, core values, and brand messaging are how you find common ground with your ideal clients and communicate your understanding and empathy for their problems.
"We live in an era now where the baseline measure for trust is relatability."
–
Rebecca Johnson on this episode of the Concept Bureau podcast
POSSIBILITY
We want to be promised a solution to the problem we have, not just be shown the bells and whistles of how the solution will unfold. Leading with the end result and transformation in your marketing consistently will show your target audience what’s truly possible and improve your conversion rate.
THREE KEY PHASES OF YOUR BRAND EXPERIENCE
We’re all familiar with a traditional marketing funnel. The top of funnel is broad and all about gaining brand awareness. Conversely, the bottom of the funnel is narrow and filters out those less prone to buying.
Your brand experience works in a very similar way, except unlike a traditional marketing funnel, your brand experience focuses more specifically on the emotional connection.
Why is this important? The answer is two-fold:
We remember things that connect with our emotions (i.e. increases memorability)
Emotions are what encourage us to take action (i.e. increases conversions)
The three phases of your brand experience follow the same rules as the Holy Trinity of Branding. Let’s take a look at them.
The First Level: Attract and Appeal
Theme: memorability
Goals: distinction, awareness, brand resonance
The Second Level: Relate and Connect
Theme: relatability
Goals: engagement, empathy, expertise
The Third Level: Comfort and Trust
Theme: possibility
Goals: expectation, transformation, trust
HOW TO OPTIMIZE YOUR MARKETING AS A BRAND
Now that you understand the goals of each phase of your brand experience, you’ll see that your brand is not just about having a cohesive visual experience but also a cohesive emotional experience.
Activate the emotions of your audience consistently and from a place of real authenticity and you’ll see your engagement, interest, and conversions grow. This is why having a brand strategy to support your business growth is so beneficial. Your brand strategy will lead to a brand identity that is memorable, messaging that is relatable, and make your ideal clients believe and trust in what’s possible for them on the other side of your service.
Here’s how you can optimize each phase of your brand experience to improve your marketing and overall conversions.
First Level: Attract and Appeal
It starts with having a distinct and memorable brand identity. You want your brand identity to be using strategic design and colour choices that are going to resonate with your target audience. Doing a competitive analysis is always helpful to identify opportunities to stand out.
The more consistent you are visually, the easier it is to build familiarity around your brand. This means having a simple brand identity that is super easy to recognize. You also want to prioritize a cohesive visual experience across all of your brand touchpoints: from the obvious ones like your website and social channels to the easily forgotten ones like lead magnets and email workflows.
It helps to have a brand identity that you actually love so you won’t be tempted to change out styles. This will only diminish any brand awareness you’ve begun to establish.
Second Level: Relate and Connect
For those you’ve managed to attract into your brand universe at the first level, you now need to prove you have substance. The goal here is to ensure they stick around through engaging content and a deep understanding of their problem.
In the strategy work I do with clients, we identify not just the functional problem they help solve for their audience but also the emotional and self-expressive problems too. In step two of my Marketing Messaging Framework, you’ll see that in order to successfully relate and connect with your audience thorough your marketing you need to understand the ripple effect of their problem and how it manifests in their lives.
Sharing your own story and speaking from a place of authenticity supports your relatability factor and positions you as the true expert to solve their problems.
Third Level: Comfort and Trust
Once you’ve got them invested in what you have to say, be sure you’re regularly speaking to the transformation they can expect from hiring you. Focus on painting a picture of what’s possible for them. This will resonate with their emotions and motivate them to take action.
Clarity and repetition around a specific brand promise (aka results) will ensure the solution becomes synonymous with your business.
Repetition is recognition and familiarity breeds affection. The more consistent you are with your messaging, the more comfortable they become with the idea of hiring you. Have patience. This consistency goes such a long way when it comes to optimizing your marketing for increased conversions but it doesn’t happen overnight. Sales and marketing is a long game.
For them to trust you, you need to trust in your marketing.
In addition to that, when you prioritize a cohesive and consistent brand experience, you set a standard for what they can expect from hiring you. Remember, when we invest in a service-based business, we are looking for evidence to support our decision that it will be a good investment.
If you’re eager to optimize your marketing to increase conversions, I would love to support you with a simple and memorable brand strategy. Learn all about my brand strategy and design services here or book a call with me and I’ll create a custom proposal for your unique goals.
Jenny Henderson Studio develops memorable brand experiences and strategic brand foundations to improve recognition and revenue for service-based small businesses.