I write regularly about how branding impacts your website, your marketing and your business. Last week, in celebration of RainCastle’s twentieth anniversary, we launched our new website, in which we introduced our new brand theme, “EXPERIENCE MATTERS,” here’s why.
We’ve talked about Market Strategy, Brand Strategy and Content Strategy, so why do we need a Web Design Strategy? Because, of all of these strategies, only your Website Design Strategy is externally facing. Let’s put Website Desgn Strategy into context to clarify how these strategies work in tandem.
Using a funnel metaphor, your Market Strategy is your highest level strategic decision, in which you define the markets for your products and/or services and determine whether your market approach is industry specific, solutions or applications-focused or some combination.
Once this is determined, your Brand Strategy encompasses the way you describe what you do, for what audiences with a compettive value statement, which sets you apart from your competition. You socialize this brand internally, and externally at every customer and employee touchpoint.
The power of a relevant Content Strategy — based on sound Market and Brand Strategies — is to create a program to disseminate and exchange your valuable content across all media and over time, which leads us to your Website Design Strategy.
Branding is Lead Generation’s best-kept secret. And what is “Messaging” if not the public face of your brand?
When clients and prospects approach us about a lead generation campaign or website, they’re seeking a way to cut through the clutter of similar sounding competitors or the perception of market monotony. Sometimes, they have a target number of leads in mind, or some idea of a marketing campaign to achieve goals, and usually a tight time frame for achieving results.
In these situations, the success or failure of marketing campaigns and websites often comes down to one thing — Messaging —finding the right concept and meaning that will authentically express the value of their brand and engage with customers to make a lead convert.
Here are some compelling reasons for you to focus on your brand messaging before launching a marketing campaign or website:
If you buy the wrong brand of peanut butter, you can always buy another brand when you finish the jar. The wrong trio of underwear, you might be out $14.99, but buy the wrong computer software or hardware solution for your business and you have a major problem. Brands matter in the B2B world, sometimes more than B2C. A strong brand means the perception of reduced risk and makes doing business — whatever the business — easier. As with B2C, buyers of B2B products value vendors’ reputation because it makes the purchase decision safer.
In fact, a Forbes survey found that B-to-B purchasing decision-makers consider the brand as a central rather than a marginal element of a supplier’s value proposition. Their survey found that decision-makers say the brand is almost as important as the efforts of sales teams in encouraging them to make out a purchase order.
I’ve never written an annual “State of the Website” blog and endeavor for it to be more relevant than the State of the Union speeches have become. As the leader of a company that has been designing websites for 20 years, a recent blogpost by Michael Brenner, titled “Is the corporate Website Dead?” certainly caught my eye.
RainCastle is pleased to be working with Jim Stengel, former Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble, and an industry leader in the fields of Marketing, Brand and Business.
Infographics are taking over the earth! At least it seems that way. There has been an explosion of infographics on the web — in both B2C and B2B — literally illustrating that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. But before we get into what makes a good one, let’s define what an infographic is and why they have reached the tipping point.
It’s a well-worn fact that B2C marketers set the trends that B2B businesses subsequently adopt. Between them there are usually several years of lag time. The case for B2B companies to adopt mobile marketing practices and a mobile-friendly web presence warrants an acceleration of that schedule in direct correlation to the speed at which mobility is reshaping the world. Here are some compelling arguments pointing towards the value of mobile to B2B businesses.
The end of each year always serves as a time to reflect, and this year, I was pleased to see the growing B2B investment in content marketing and other online pull marketing techniques. It came to mind that there were a fair number of non-traditional case study examples highlighting this push, and that looking to these examples may encourage even more creative B2B planning in 2013.
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