How to Align Your Marketing & Branding Strategy

In the previous article, we covered how important it is to refine your marketing strategy depending on contextual information.

Selling a candy to a kid is different from setting up a distribution center for tanks sold to the government! ?

The "Zealot Checklist"

So how to define your marketing and branding strategy for success?

I call this approach the "Zealot Checklist". Naming your personal framework will make it easier to recollect the steps afterwards and occasionally gets some quoted exposure online. It works much better than "Mario's randomly picked technique for defining a marketing proposition."

Here's the 6-step process we'll review today:

1. Establish the business goals and the purpose of the marketing endeavors
2. Define the buyer personas (or target audiences)
3. Research the other influential players in the field
4. Determine your unique brand proposition
5. Pick the channels that work best
6. Establish a pilot marketing strategy

Let's dive in!

1. Establish the Purpose of Marketing

Marketing is primarily used to generate leads. But leads could be:

• Prospective clients for an agency
• Potential users of an emerging product
• Volunteers for an upcoming event
• Partners for a new endeavor (or even co-founders of a startup)
• Your own employees, increasing their retention rate
• Future recruits who want to work for a transparent and innovative business
• Yourself, as a freelancer, consultant, speaker

As discussed previously in the series, each target is approached differently. Sourcing clients internationally will bet on a mix of paid online campaigns with some partnerships and brand building. Looking for reliable volunteers will be a local effort, stressing on different values of the organization. Recruitment is a different game -- and we'll cover this one as well.

2. Define the Buyer Personas

According to HubSpot:

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.

HubSpot provides a set of persona templates you can fill out before you move forward. Google "buyer persona template" for additional resources and spreadsheets.

Product-based businesses often create print cards at the office with their buyer personas. This helps them stay top of mind while making UX decisions and marketing considerations. See Atlassian's personas for some context:

Most non-marketers planning their strategy shoot for a broad, generic approach which lacks personalization. Examples:

• "All moms living in the US"
• "Executives of large telecom companies"
• "Marketers in all sorts of product organizations"

While this may technically be your market in 10 years from now, it lacks personalization.

1. Niche marketing is far more powerful than global broadcasting.
2. It's drastically easier due to the limited competition.
3. It's cheaper.
4. It coverts better when you adjust your proposition accordingly.

Here's the starter template we've designed for our own personas -- ready to print and fill out:

The Best Lead You Can Think Of

Your persona is the absolute ideal profile you aim for.

Her name is Jane, she's 45 and lives in Dallas, Texas. She has graduated from a regular university with an MBA degree. She earns $85,000 a year, has two kids, works her third job in a mid-sized corporation. She dreams of a side business that relieves her from the stress of the corporate, full-time job, the financial uncertainty, the lack of creativity. She's passionate about arts, is afraid from failing, but is willing to test a low-risk service that helps her bootstrap her dream project at low cost, being able to scale later if things go well.

No, you're not losing on potential opportunities. You're effectively maximizing conversion rates through building a client base and a portfolio that support each other.

Your "Jane" may be your favorite client you worked with 3 years ago. Our four personas are based on specific clients we work with. We understand their pain points. We know their objections and what took us to solve them. It's a problem solved that reduces the friction and pushes us forward, faster.

Starting with one or two personas is best. You can expand later on as needed. When pitching businesses, discover who's the right person in the organization. The CEO is usually the wrong answer as they delegate their work to the C-Suite, their VPs, a director in the organization, or their secretary. Oftentimes, the bottom-up approach works even better.

3. Research Other Influencers (And Competitors)

Best-case scenario, your offer is unique enough and provides some competitive advantage. We'll discuss the details further in this article.

In the meantime, doing some due diligence can really help you discover what works and what doesn't, and pick a unique approach to a previously solved challenge.

Known Influencers

When you compete in a dense niche, you can easily pinpoint the popular brands and individuals who stand out.

• Browse their websites. Find out how they position themselves, what they sell, how they define the offering. Look for specific keywords and phrases defining their proposition.
• Repeat for their social profiles. They probably use customized cover photos and bios targeting their personas.
• Look them up online. Search for guest posts, interviews, podcasts, mentions in popular websites, speaker engagements.

This will help you gather some ideas for your own positioning, see what works, and potentially get some insight on packaging, pricing structures, communication channels, etc.

Exploring The Market

If you're entering a new industry (or a location), building a separate product, consulting a client in a different field, you should do the legwork anyway.

• Google the most targeted keywords for your business. Sift through the first few pages in Google and add every brand or individual to a spreadsheet.
• Look for magazines or blogs featuring brands and people in your field, or even "Ask me Anything" sessions.
• Use BuzzSumo to discover industry-related content that ranks well. These folks get the right attention. You can dive down into the Twitter lists of people sharing content and browse for other sites and mentions.
• Browse for meetups and conferences -- both locally and internationally. Review the speaker line-up and sponsors.
• Browse through Facebook and LinkedIn groups, Instagram accounts, Quora topics or anything that's relevant to your business. Public personas make their way through the interwebs, thus any channel may work.
• For brands, search through LinkedIn (companies), AngelList, Crunchbase.

Here's a sample snapshot from the upcoming WordCamp US and the speaker line-up:

In some cases, BuiltWith can help identify certain technologies. SEMrush and Ahrefs will suggest similar sites ranking for the same set of keywords. These tools can be tremendously helpful though suggestions are usually off, especially for sites that don't get that much overlap.

Some tools work really well in certain cases and for given markets. Bet on creativity and always look for unusual ways to discover data and markets online.

4. Determine Your USP

Your "unique selling proposition" (USP) is the reason people will choose you.

For a new market/category, you're on your own. There's almost no competition in the space. But these cases are rare, and creating a new market category is extremely complicated. You have to create the need, and it takes time and resources to do that.

Generally speaking, you have to be the first in the category or aim to be the best.

There is a hybrid approach. Pick a known category and niche down.

Inventing a completely new solution, tool, or a service that nobody has ever used is rough. But competing with Google as the "next best search engine" or Coca-Cola with "the best soft drink ever" is counter-productive.

Instead, you can niche down and pick a subset of the market. An industry, a category, age group, demographics. You can always expand later on, but this, along with defining your buyer personas, lets you solve really specific problems for your target group.

Take ConvertKit as an example. As discussed in an interview for Indie Hackers,

What used to generate $5K/mo instantly quadrupled, and currently is in the 7-figures monthly.

All they did is, instead of competing with MailChimp, they turned the narrative into a custom-tailored solution designed for bloggers. Nowadays, they serve almost everyone, but the initial traction comes from the first subset of users.

I once worked with a recruiting firm that specialized in hiring IT staff locally. Their entire team of headhunters was comprised of recruiters with strong technical background, able to assess technical profiles and bridge the top talent with tech startups and outsourcing firms.

Consultants can utilize a similar approach -- or go for a unique intersection of their skills.

In a crowded space, pick a mix of skills or services you know well and don't see offered by generic courses or agencies.

• Technical writing for startup executives
• Workshops for moms crafting toys from home
• Sales and business mentoring for foreigners aiming for US clients

By niching down, your message will respond strongly to your ideal audience, which is much more likely to convert (and far easier to find and approach). Also, instead of developing several brands or different propositions simultaneously, you can focus your efforts on your newly picked niche in the long run.

5. Pick The Right Channels

Facebook being the dominant social network online, we constantly hear that it doesn't work for people who have spent their budget on Facebook sponsored posts or paid campaigns.

While there are plenty of known problems that will sink your campaigns, Facebook is not the be-all and end-all solution.

• Pinterest's users are 70%+ female and under 34 years old. Combined with Instagram, visual content aiming for young ladies may convert better there.
• LinkedIn is the leading B2B network for enterprise-grade sales. Conversion rates on expensive software or consulting agreements on LinkedIn are significantly higher than Facebook's.
• Twitter is wonderful for personal branding, media marketing, community building. Developing these aspects of your business can get better results on Twitter than Facebook.

And social networks aren't the only place you need to aim for. Quora is a great source to establish your personal brand, promote your product, or build a community. reddit can generate ridiculously high traffic in certain categories. Industry-specific blogs read frequently by your audience are worth sponsoring or writing a guest article for.

Content marketing and SEO is (almost) always a great investment, but takes time. Studying the buying habits of your target group will define the right direction. Some users actively listen to podcasts or spend their time on YouTube so don't neglect alternative non-textual channels.

6. Establish A Pilot Marketing Strategy

Once you have everything in place, craft the pilot marketing strategy.

This really depends on your time, budget constraints, breadth of your market and how complex the industry is. Of course, it takes time and practice makes perfect.

Set Some KPIs

But it's really important to set some KPIs in place and be patient. Most people give up too quickly right before they start to get some traction.

Nowadays, getting some traction with blogging takes 18-24 months on average. It used to be 6-9 months just a few years back, and it isn't getting any better. Niching down can reduce the friction but won't make wonders on its own.

Test Parallel Campaigns

Succeeding with paid ads is also a trial-and-error game until you establish what works. It's always best to set up alternative campaigns for the same piece or campaign and A/B test them. Most networks let you do this. This helps adjusting the narrative for ongoing campaigns, decide if fun cat photos work better than sad panda, bet on emotional or logical copy.

Reading some case studies and average industry metrics is often a great idea (when available). Conversion rates across verticals are publicly available. Average traffic for sites can be guesstimated with tools like SimilarWeb. Social media followers and likes are easy to find, too.

For organic, don't forget the keyword research, identifying the right topic clusters, and moving prospects further down the funnel:

Assess Conversion Complexity

Some marketing funnels are trivial - get a ton of traffic, convert 4%, repeat. This works well for cheap products or affordable (or freemium) SaaS solutions. You can easily adjust pricing or traffic channels for better efficiency. Others, especially more complex and expensive deals, may require a complex approach including remarketing, global brand awareness, sales calls. Study your market and your competitors, their buying habits, and the complexity of "closing a deal" to get the right averages.

Monitor your KPIs on a regular basis -- weekly is fine. Make sure you get the right traction. Adjust as needed. Consider other channels to get the same ROI but don't rush too much.

It's a balancing game at the end but patience will slowly and steadily help you move upstream.

Next week, we'll do a sample review of a brand (or an influencer) and get a sample strategy running, including some tooling tips and quick WordPress hacks. Tell me about your business or your competitors in the comments -- I'll pick one and do a sample breakdown of what you can do to bootstrap your positioning online!