Visual Brand
Your visuals include brand colours, typefaces/fonts, logos and other visual elements like iconography and photography. Being rigorous about sticking to your visual brand is one of the easiest ways to ensure brand consistency.
Logos
PNG Format – Raster
Raster logos cannot be scaled infinitely but use a small file size, so they’re better for digital use.
SVG Format – Vector
Vector logos can be scaled infinitely but use a larger file size, so they’re ideal for print use.
Mood Board
Audience
In order to choose you, your audience needs an answer to three questions:
1.Do you understand their needs?
2. What exactly do you do?
3. Why should they choose you?
One important caveat: they need those questions answered in that order. Our brain will not push us toward a purchase until we feel understood. It’s essential to demonstrate you ”get” your audience before all else.
Your Audience
Brand messaging is the copywriting you use to draw new clients. In this section, you will find the building blocks of copy you can use again and again to communicate with your audience. Using the same wording throughout your marketing materials helps your audience trust and absorb what you have to say.
Key Messages
Structuring your copywriting
In the previous sections, we learned that to spend money at your business, your audience needs a clear consistent message that begins by demonstrating you know what they’re going through.
Here’s an example. Do you see how the second one demonstrates the company understands its audience?
BEFORE: “We’ve been Calgary’s favourite accountants for 40 years.”
AFTER: “Looking for accountants with experience? We can help.”
In the “BEFORE” sentence, the focus is on the business. In the “AFTER” sentence, the focus is on the customer and what they require.
Remember how we are trying to speak to both the cave-dweller brain and the modern problem-solving brain? Starting with the audience’s perspective is an important part of that process. Our emotional, gut-instinct brain loves to hear about itself, so give it what it wants by centering your audience in your marketing copy.
By doing this, you’ll be following the classic storytelling format known as “The Hero’s Saga” used by many business writers including Donald Miller and Martha Beck. This format grabs the attention of our limbic system through relevance and emotion, yet also satisfies our sophisticated cognitive skills by answering anticipated questions.
The Problem: What is your customer going through that only you can solve?
External: Why they need your help
Executive leadership teams understand that culture is important. They may even enlist the help of employee engagement surveys and other measures to assess and improve culture. What bosses aren’t doing is asking the right people the right questions to get the unvarnished truth about what is going on in their organization.
Internal: How it makes them feel
It is incredibly frustrating to go through the motions of trying to improve culture and engagement, and know you’re still not getting it right. Some leaders are totally clueless. They believe their culture is fine, and their team is as committed to the same overall vision as the leaders are. It’s devastating to learn that team members are sitting on information that could be crucial to building a better organization. All of this could be avoided with proper diagnosis of what is really going on within the business.
Philosophical: Why it’s just plain wrong
It’s just not right that businesses are spending tens of thousands of dollars on employee engagement programs and team building programs, only to remain disconnected, with suffering performance. It takes an immensely skilled coach to unlock what is really going on within an organization. Strategic Pathways has 30 years of experience helping businesses do just that.
The Guide: Why are you “the Guide,” the only person who can solve your customer’s problems?
Gathering the Data that Lets You Make Decisions
For 30 years, the Strategic Pathways team has been specializing in organizational diagnostics. By assessing the members of a team using its proprietary interview technique, it gives leaders the most current, accurate and reliable information about what is going on in the business. Key decision makers can use this information to identify opportunities and see where shifts are necessary.
Habits Coach: Rael Kalley is a sought-after Habits Coach. While most executive coaches and corporate trainers go after behaviour as the driver of results, Rael focuses on the habits that drive that behaviour. When we change our habits, everything changes.
Happy Ending: What does success look like for your client?
- They understand the true feelings and motivations of their staff.
- They communicate successfully and effectively with their team.
- The team feels heard and empowered.
- They have strategic plan that focuses on goals uncovered during the diagnostic process.
- They were able to head off potential problems uncovered during the diagnostic process.
Unhappy ending: What does failure look like for your client?
- They have a high number of low performing employees, who do not feel heard or respected.
- They have a high rate of turnover and/or have difficulty with their hiring and recruiting process.
- Their goals are not rooted in the true capabilities or commitments of their team.
- They seem to waste a lot of time dealing with unexpected problems or challenges.
Answering “What do you do?”
Long Version:
“I run a business called Strategic Pathways. We help our corporate clients learn the unvarnished truth about what is happening in their business with our proprietary interview process. By interviewing staff throughout the business, we build a complete diagnostic assessment. From there, we can determine the organizational landscape. This is often the first time a business owner has had a candid look at what their employees really see, feel and believe. Once the diagnostic assessment is complete, we help the leadership team identify opportunities and determine shifts that may be required.”
Short Version:
“I run a business called Strategic Pathways. We help our corporate clients learn the unvarnished truth about what is happening in their business with our proprietary interview process. Once our diagnostic assessment is complete, we help the business owners identify opportunities and determine changes that may be required.”
Taglines
What you don’t know about your company is your biggest risk.
Leverage your greatest resource: your people.
Change your habits, change your business.
You can’t fix what you don’t acknowledge, you can’t acknowledge what you don’t know.
Proposition defines the specific goal(s) of your marketing program. As you’ll remember from your Whole Team Marketing sessions, your marketing goal should be specific.