Why your marketing needs to include Editorial and Brand Guidelines

Social Media has changed the way companies reach and communicate to customers through marketing. And while many may view traditional marketing (such as direct mail) as dead, there is a purpose to establishing a foundation for all types of marketing communications. One of the fundamental building blocks of a foundation for marketing communications is having an editorial and branding guidelines. Once created, integrate the standards into every marketing touch-point you have with your customers, even via social, to provide a consistent look and feel.

“A brand is a living entity – and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time, the product of a thousand small gestures.” — Michael Eisner, CEO Disney

Editorial Guidelines

Every interaction is an opportunity to say something representing your company. Your communications personifies the voice of your company and what it stands for. Personality reflects the values of your company. To strengthen your brand impression, create guidelines to ensure there is consistency.

The purpose of having Editorial Guidelines is to provide standards pertaining to the style and tone of all communications created by your company. The idea is that this will help maintain quality and make the process more efficient for your writers and editors. 

Definition of tone:

“The general character or attitude of a place, piece of writing, situation, etc.”

To help determine the tone that is right for you, answer the following:

• Who is your customer?
• What types of communications you will be creating?
• Where the content will be distributed?

For some, humor may be an important way to build a following, for others a more direct style is fitting. Knowing your customer will help determine what tone will most resonate with them, helping to engage, build trust and credibility.

In addition to defining the tone, look to include the following:

• Style and Formatting (titles, headlines, bulleted lists, fonts and font sizing)
• Punctuation
• Spelling
• Trademarks
• Legal Copy (copyright & trademarks)

Providing structure around your copy ensures consistency and also helps editing to ensure compliance to your guidelines. If you have multiple contributors to content without the benefit of an editor, this will help make sure the content continues to reflect the style of the company and also serves as a great reminder to use spell check before distributing.

How you say something, and how it is represented (proper grammar and spelling), makes an impression of your company. The guidelines ensure you are consistent and always putting your best foot forward.

Brand Guidelines

The purpose of Brand Guidelines is to provide visual and graphic standards with all aspects of your company’s brand. Consistency in presentation is important to strengthen the impression of your brand. This includes logo placement, company name, website, print and eGuides design, email formatting, types of images and video. In addition, Brand Guidelines often include a palette of colors to use that provide compatibility with the primary branding colors.

I’m sure you seen a number of presentations that simply import random photographs, add text, use a variety of colors and skip use of the company logo. Simply providing a hodgepodge of information. While the content might be very engaging and informative, will you remember where it came?

When you see a piece that has been designed using guidelines you’ll see a piece that flows well, and fits well with other communications from the same company. And with the inclusion of a logo, you will always know who is the author of the information. Providing a consistent brand experience at every customer touch point increases the impression they have of your company.

Unless you have absolute clarity of what your brand stands for, everything else is irrelevant. – Mark Baynes, global cmo, Kellogg Co.

While Editorial and Brand Guidelines may seem like the old way of marketing, they actually enable your company to provide a consistent impression upon new and existing customers. Using guidelines and planning, your marketing efforts can build off of one another helping to strengthen your brand in the minds of customers and giving you a competitive advantage. 

How to Provide a Positive Customer Experience

We’re mid-way through 2015, providing a positive customer experience begins far before buyers reach your site and can learn about your products. With social and search, buyers are doing a great deal of research prior to landing on your company’s website. Therefore, you have to think beyond your website for opportunities to reach and interact with buyers before they start narrowing their decisions of where to buy.

What goes into providing a positive customer experience with social media, and your website with little or no direct interaction with buyers?

Provide value on social media

Be available where they are

Make sure your company is active on social media sites where your ideal buyers are spending their time. That way, when they start their research process you will already be a part of the consideration stage.

Provide useful tips and blogs

One way you can attract interested buyers is to provide information that is unique and of value about your industry. Use content as an opportunity to capture their attention by providing useful tips or educational information through blogs to captive. 

"Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value." -- Albert Einstein

Interact with customer inquiries

Conduct live Twitter chats or inquiries on Facebook. Hosting a discussion about industry standards on Google+. Use these as a way to build your community and trust for your brand.

Keep your website simple

Make your site easy to navigate

Limit your navigation to only the essential items deemed necessary. This will make it easier to buyers to find what they are looking for particularly since many are now conducting their research via mobile.

In stores, 82% of smartphone users turn to their devices to help them make a product decision.(1) 

When arriving to your website, refrain from forcing buyers to sort through pop-ups, lengthy scrolling, or interpret your nomenclature for locating content. Give them what they are looking for right away.

The average attentions span of a human being is 8 seconds.(2)

Keep your web pages free from an overabundance of text. With short attention spans keep your content focused on your main message, and highlighting benefits. For those who want great detail, send them to another page that gives them the nuts and bolts of your product.

Be available for customer care

Customers are seeking customer support via social. (Another important reason why to be present where your buyers and customers are), therefore, having someone who can respond as quickly as possible to resolve the situation will help build credibility.

Among respondents to The Social Habit who have ever attempted to contact a brand, product, or company through social media for customer support, 32% expect a response within 30 minutes.

For conflicts, request direct interaction from the user to remove the details from general view. Resolve the conflict then post a resolution note. Why not be transparent? Sometimes resolution is a simple fix and can make the responder look foolish. Other times, responders can get pretty conversational until you find the path to resolution. Stay upbeat to ensure the end result is a positive customer experience.

Customers may forget what you said but they'll never forget how you made them feel." – Unknown

Make a positive customer experience your number one goal. Do this by making it easy for buyers to find the content they are looking for and worth their time to read. This will build trust and loyalty, and you might just capture a customer.

1 Google/Ipsos, “Consumers in the Micro-Moment” study, March 2015

2 National Center for Biotechnology Information

Learn the Key Components to an Effective Landing Page Design

You have completed creating the perfect offer as a way to attract new visitors to your website. You know they are just going to love it. It’s the sliced-bread piece within your industry. And you can’t wait to get out there and promote it. Just one more thing, setting up your landing page. The page whose sole purpose is to capture leads.

According to The Landing Page Course, “Landing pages live separately from your website and are designed to only receive campaign traffic. As we’ll see, this separation allows them to be focused on a single objective and makes analytics, reporting & testing a simpler task.”

Landing pages are where visitors land who are interested in your offer. Since the purpose of the landing page is to convert, keep your page simple and neat. You don’t want to distract your visitors from the purpose of why they are on your page.

“An impression is formed in 1/20th of a second. Make yours count.” Ion Interactive

Here are the key components for your landing page:

1.     Headline

Make sure your headline grabs their attention while communicating the main benefit of your offer.

2.     Copy

Provide the value of your offer in 1-3 sentences. Keep your copy brief - use bullet points as they are easy to read, and focus on benefits not features.

3.     Relevant Image

Give them a preview of what they are going to get. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words.

4.     Form

Keep it short requiring information only a few fields. Only ask for the information you really need. The easier you make the form, the higher likelihood of successful conversion.

5.     CTA

Use your call-to-action button to motivate your visitor to complete the action. Pay attention to the color, and use action-oriented copy for your button.

6.     Above the fold

All content should be above the fold to keep visitors focused on the reason they are there.

7.     No menu navigation

Again, by not providing website navigation, you are keeping your visitor focused on the task at hand rather than distract. Your goal is for them to fill out the form and download your offer.

8.     Thank You page

After hitting the submit button, visitors should be redirected to a Thank You page - from here, visitors can download the offer then use your navigation to view other pages of your website. Here you can provide other opportunities for interaction with an offer that would apply to the next stage in the journey.

“The businesses that are the best educators will be the most successful." @MarkKilens

Knowing where your visitors are within the buyers journey is key. It will determine the type of offer you provide including the creation of your landing page – content, headline, CTA, form requirements. In addition, you will then know what type of offer is needed for the next stage of the journey. Develop a script of what types of information they are looking for at each stage and base your offers and landing pages on that stage of the journey.

What is your current conversion rate and what is your goal?

Traditionally, a good conversion rate is somewhere around 2% to 5%. Depending on your business, where your buyers are within buyer’s journey, will determine what success means for you and your business. Increase the odds of success by testing your landing page for colors, copy and placement of your CTA. See if you can identify why some of your visitors are not following through – what is preventing them from completing the form? Does your copy speak to your visitor? Is the CTA compelling enough?

A strong landing page will make a big difference as to the success of completed conversions. Make your offer attractive, and make it easy to obtain the offer with a simple landing page. Delight your visitors and they will come back.

Step 4: How to Create Offers That Attract

You have taken the time to research and define your buyer personas. You know who they are, understand their pain points and have mapped where they spend their time online. Now that you have all this information, how do you get their attention? Create something of value; provide information that can help them define their problem. Educate them about their problem, let them know a solution is achievable. Do all of this with an offer.

When developing an offer start determining where in the Buyer’s Journey this offer will apply. Awareness. Consideration. Decision. Most of your offers will be targeting those in the Awareness Stage which gives you the opportunity to capture them as a lead. In the Awareness stage customers are still trying to define their problem. Their research efforts are centered on industry information that will help them identify the symptoms or problem. Offers created for this stage need to provide educational information rather than be promotional. The focus of the offer is to help the buyer understand their problem.  

Set goals. A few metrics you can easily measure include page views, amount of time on your landing page, lead generation rate. Before you create an offer that attracts, define your goals and make sure you have the tools to measure them.

"As with any relationship, the market favors those who give more value than they ask for." ― Leslie Bradshaw, Former COO, President and Co-Founder of JESS3  

Since your offer is targeting those buyers in the Awareness Stage your offer can be as simple as a blog post or developed into a more tangible piece such as an eGuide or Checklist. Content developed for an offer can always be leveraged into blog post that ties back to the offer. For example, if you create an offer that is a checklist for planning a business celebration, you can then write a blog post regarding the importance of covering all your bases to ensure a successful party.

Different types of offers include

• Checklist
• eBook/eGuide
• Infographic
• Whitepaper

and for later in the Buyer’s Journey:

• Comparison Chart
• Case Studies
• Webinar
• Video
• Product Demo/Tour

Prior to writing the copy for your offer, identify the relevant terms you will use within the piece. These are your keywords. You can find these terms by asking your current customers, or make a list of topics that are most relevant to your business. They may be one word, or a phrase (actually a phrase – 3 words or longer - is better for SEO). Using keywords is important, as this is one of the determining factors that are used for ranking within search. Phrases of keywords, known as long-tailed keywords rank better. Determine the keyword that you will focus on within the piece, include it in the title and again when you promote your offer.

List the distribution venues for promoting your offer. Promote using the social media networks where your buyers are spending their time. This is not a one-size-fits all. Customize your copy, identify or create the images necessary for promotion for each network. To be effective, each social media network requires a their own unique piece of content.

"Invite people into your brand, and lean into the possibilities. Build movements, not campaigns!" ― Ekaterina Walter, Author of Think Like Zuck  

Finally, after developing the offer, create a landing page with a form to capture the lead information and a thank-you page where they will download the offer.

With a little time and planning, you can create and promote and offer that will you’re your buyer personas AND help you to attract new buyers.

Step 3: Find out where your buyers are, and how to reach them.

Now that you know who you are targeting (ie. your buyer persona) and have an understanding as to their pain points, now is the time to figure out where they spend their time online. What social platforms capture their attention? What types of information do you need to create to capture their attention? How often do you need to ‘be’ present?

The purpose of establishing a presence is to provide information to your audience that is helpful. The top social media networks from Statista:

1.     Facebook – 1.4 billion subscribers

2.     LinkedIn – 347 million subscribers

3.     Google+ - 300 million subscribers

4.     Instagram – 300 million subscribers

5.     Twitter – 230 million subscribers

Defining your buyer persona will help you determine not only where establish a presence, but also the type of content that is useful. And note, it is important develop content designed for each type of social network, as not every type of content will work for each network.

Facebook

Posts that are 40 characters tend to get the best response. Use Facebook to engage with your community by posting something fun, asking questions or engaging your audience in an interactive post by having them comment or post pictures images to an event or your product/brand. 

LinkedIn

Depending on your business, LinkedIn may just be the place for you to grow your base. Because it is a professional social network, the types of content and ways to participate differ from Facebook, etc. Your content needs to be high-quality and provide very specific ways to help your audience solve a professional problem. Consider joining a LinkedIn group that is relevant to your business. By following the group you can leverage the comments to create content that is helpful to your buyer.

Google+

Best part of being active on Google+ is that your engagement also helps your SEO within Google. Start by ensuring your business page is connected to the maps listing. Google+ is a great tool for building communities. Add industry influencers and potential customers to your circles. Provide content that is interactive to boost your community and drive participation and engagement.

Instagram

All users like to view content that is visual. As they say, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ and visual content sticks much better than text – infographics are a great example. Other types of images to include are pictures of your products, customers using your products, even pictures of your employees hard at work.

Twitter

With it’s character limitation set to 140, use twitter to promote educational information such as links to content of value from industry influencers, images related to your topic of interest, links to inspirational quotes or created content from you.

Once you have identified the social media networks where you need to be active, how often do you need to be post? According to SumAll:

• Facebook – 2 times per day, at most 
  2x per day is the level before likes & comments begin to drop off dramatically.
• LinkedIn – 1 time per day 
  20 posts per month (1x per weekday) allows you to reach 60 percent of your audience.
• Google+ – 3 times per day, at most 
  The more often you post, the more activity you’ll get. Users have found a positive correlation between frequency and engagement. When posting frequency wanes, some have experienced drops in traffic up to 50%.
• Instagram – 1.5 times per day, or more
  Major brands post an average of 1.5 times per day to Instagram. There's no drop-off in engagement for posting more, provided you can keep up the rate of posting.
• Twitter – 3 times per day, or more. 
  Engagement decreases slightly after the third tweet.

In addition to the top social media networks mentioned above, there are many more - Pinterest, SnapChat, and Tumblr, to name a few. You do not need to have a presence everywhere – just where your buyers are. Take the time to understand what networks are most relevant to your buyer persona, where having a presence and providing helpful content would engage, then put together a plan to create content and captivate!