The concepts of branding and inbound marketing may seem to be at odds most of the time. After all, branding is how the world sees you; inbound marketing is how the world finds you. You’ll spend thousands of dollars and valuable hours developing a brand—an identity—by which you’ll be identified. This brand may be available to and recognized by a large number of people…the whole world, if you’re lucky. Those people, amazing as they are, won’t all be potential customers, and that’s where your inbound marketing comes into play.
Those who recognize your brand, see your content, and have pain points your products solve, these are the people at the top of your sales funnel. You’ll use inbound marketing to move those buyers from the top of the funnel to the middle, where you’ll use specific content to show potential buyers how your business solves their problems. Finally, those visitors will come through the bottom of the funnel and become bona fide customers.
The Internet makes sharing a brand easier than ever, but it also means you could destroy your image just as easily. Your inbound marketing channels, the outlets customers use to find you and your products, must maintain your branding at all times. One slip can start a scandal your brand might never overcome.
So, how can you ensure consistency in your inbound marketing efforts? Here are 3 ways:
Make Your Value Proposition Known
Your value proposition, how you will solve a customer’s pain point, is the heart of your brand. The rest—colors, logo, tone—aid in recognition, but your identity is your value proposition. All of your inbound marketing channels should keep that value proposition at the center. Blogs should address the pain point and solutions, ebooks and offers should provide valuable information relating to your products and services, and even your “fun” social media accounts should focus first on how you fix things.
Inbound marketing is all about directing customers to your brand and then building trust among those who need your services. If you’re not focusing on your unique selling proposition, your brand will be flimsy at best. At worst, your potential customers will walk away confused.
Pay Attention to Buyer Personas
Your buyers are as much a part of your brand as your products or services are. If you don’t understand the people who buy from your company your message will be muddled. Buyer personas are important when creating content for your blogs and ebook offers, communicating on social media, and even answering customer service requests.
Not only must you prepare content that your buyers want to read, but you must also know where to place that content so it can be found. Knowing the psychographic dimensions of your buyers means you’ll also understand where they spend their time on the Internet.
Invest in Your Story
You know the plot; you know the characters. Now it’s time to tell your story. When potential buyers find your brand, you get one shot to reel them in. Susan Gunelius says, “…the explosive growth of social media and content marketing, the opportunities to tell stories as part of direct and indirect brand marketing initiatives have become a strategic priority.” Each of your inbound marketing platforms should be used to convey your brand’s story at all times. Slip or deviate from the plot, and prospects will notice. To put things another way: Consider all of your inbound marketing channels as the components of a television commercial, only the story in a commercial ends after sixty seconds. Your brand story goes on forever.
Consistency is key if you want to build a strong brand, because your inbound marketing content will define you. Boring, useless content will equal a boring and useless company in the eyes of consumers. Have you encountered content that made you question a company’s branding standards? Did something shared on social media make you pause before placing an order? We’d love to know how inconsistencies have shaped your opinions about particular brands, so let us know in the comments.
