Guide to launching your brand on the Web in 2023: developing 2/3
This article is part of a series of tips for launching your brand and is a follow-up to the talk given by the ASSONANCE team at the SEO Garden Party in July 2022. It follows the first part of the guide dedicated to the creation of a brand.
In the previous step, we explained how to design your brand identity, right down to the choice of its name. You now have everything at your disposal, your brand identity is complete. But before choosing whether to prioritize SEO or inbound marketing(1) on social networks, you will enter a second phase of reflection.
Choose your weapons for your strategy
Thanks to the identification of your personas and their habits (who they are, what their networks are), you already know where to communicate. Define your objectives as well. Awareness? Conversion? According to this, you refine your decision making. Once this step is completed, you have the basis of your strategy and define your acquisition levers.
Will you use :
SEO, by focusing on a natural referencing strategy?
SEA, by creating a Google Ads campaign?
The power of social networks? By creating relevant content and generating engagement through your community?
Content marketing in general (white papers, etc.)?
Print advertising, by creating flyers, brochures...?
TV or radio advertising?
Your sales goals and the nature of your brand will define your strategy. For example, a netlinking platform that is just starting out will certainly focus on :
SEO,
ATS,
Show up at events (by doing conf's, demonstrations, etc.),
Offer white papers.
The brand knows that its targets are above all looking for performance and "proof by demonstration".
On the other hand, a web design brand that targets primarily small merchants will rely on print advertising, flocking its cars with its logo and the promise of a great site.
Create an editorial content strategy
Here we talk about editorial content strategy. ASSONANCE is a web marketing agency whose core business is the production of editorial content. With SEO expertise, we design articles and pages with one guideline: relevance.
What is relevant to the user?
What is it for the engines?
Bonus: What's relevant to copywriters?
At this stage of designing your strategy, you already know your personas and the search queries to target. The art of copywriting is to convince both the personas and the search engines. Among the objectives: to make a commercial transaction. And, for the most ambitious: to make a customer relationship last. In fact, designing an editorial strategy requires sifting through the targeted keywords once again. The objective is to design content that will please both the user and Google. Content that will have, if not a transactional power, at least an attractive one. The challenge? To push the Internet user to recognize your brand as competent in a field and to impose itself little by little to him as a reference.
If on day 1 your prospect reads an article that actually answers his query, on day 2 he will certainly turn to you again for another question in your field. Or why not make a purchase? (If you're lucky, he'll do that in the same day.)
But for an editorial content strategy to be effective, it must be strictly supervised. We(2) call this "The Editorial Charter".
Create a functional editorial charter
What is an editorial charter and what is its purpose? The answer to these two questions is the following: a set of rules defining precisely the editorial format of the contents, the tone of the brand and the objectives; guaranteeing the coherence of the contents, and thus of the brand's communication in the long term.
For example, in an editorial charter, we find the following recommendation:
" " Don't make sentences as long as the previous one. Make your sentences short and dynamic to impact the reader. " "
It is an absolutely essential document for the success of any Web marketing project. Even if you are alone on board, if you don't put your communication rules in writing, you risk a chaotic strategy. One day your tone will be familiar, the next it will be too strong.
What is in this charter?
The tone of the brand (close, light, educational, institutional...),
Semantic elements (what vocabulary to use to convey the brand's universe),
The "editorial" graphic elements (can we use emojis or not? Which ones? When?),
Content format (presence of images, links, number of Hn, etc.),
Accessibility (whether or not to use inclusive language, in what form?),
The format of the CTA(3) (where should they be placed, sentence or action verb?).
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An effective editorial charter is a document that is clear and actionable. Content creators must be able to understand what exactly is expected. To ensure that there is no room for interpretation, systematically illustrate your point with examples. At Assonance, we use the "Do & Don't" principle, which perfectly frames the instructions.
Create an editorial calendar
Embarking on a content strategy without keeping a calendar is like baking a soufflé without a recipe. It can fall apart quickly.
An editorial calendar is crucial to your content strategy. It allows you to:
Plan the design and distribution of your content,
Organize your teams without duplication,
Do not forget any design step (at random, the correction),
Have an overall vision of the editorial strategy.
And, like the editorial calendar, the editorial calendar is useful even for solopreneurs.
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Notion
Google Sheets
Trello
Asana
Monday
Adopt good content creation practices from the start
Is your innovation in the nutrition sector? Position yourself as an expert by publishing content:
unique,
useful,
well optimized for SEO,
relevant,
Google EAT (Expertise Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness) friendly,
updated.
Don't rely solely on text-based editorial content. Think about formats that have real added value and engage your audience (video, images, infographics, etc.), and content that combines UX and SEO. These best practices will help you develop your brand on the Web, and in the long term.
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Two free tools that we like to consult at ASSONANCE? Google Trends to get the latest news on your sector and to keep an eye on trends, and Google Alerts to create alerts on your product, your competitors and the market.
Marrying SEO, copywriting and storytelling in your pages
Think a product page doesn't need storytelling or copywriting? That an "about" page will do without SEO entirely? Then it's time to look at these issues holistically(4).
| What is the purpose of SEO in copywriting? | Giving the Right Semantic Signals to Search Engines So They Understand What We're Talking About. |
| What is the purpose of Copywriting in a Web Page? | To Turn The Internet User Into A Customer. |
| What is the purpose of storytelling on a web page? | How to structure your page to turn the user into a customer... And to keep them coming back. |
The SEO
Having an optimized TITLE on your about page will help your brand rank better and radiate its branding.
Example:
✅ Do: The LinksRoxxor platform - the power of netlinking
❌ Don't : About - LinksRoxxor
Copywriting
Having good copywritten headlines and CTAs on your product page will hook the user and encourage them to take action.
Example:
✅ Do: How does it work?
❌ Don't: More
Storytelling
Using storytelling to structure your web page brings narrative consistency to your page design and branding. It allows you to design headings and sections that follow a conversion tunnel. Storytelling allows you to have a narrative continuity between paragraphs and calls to action. And it also allows you to control the graphic environment of the page to transform and build loyalty.
What we recommend you do:
Know how to design hybrid pages
The good example we saw above is an illustration of the concept of hybrid page. Namely, a page that seeks both to position itself on search engines and to convert.
These pages can perfectly host copywritten elements with impactful visuals, but also carefully optimized text paragraphs. But for this to work, the page must be structured. At ASSONANCE, we use wireframes (5), interesting tools to build this type of page and thus for the three levers of persuasion.
Today, 92.1% of Internet users surf the Web from their cell phones (Moderator's Blog). The arrival of smartphones has changed the consumption habits of Internet users and the time they spend on a page.
We believe it is important to adapt to the uses of the Web and to design pages with clever solutions that meet all the challenges. It no longer makes sense to compartmentalize the use of acquisition/conversion levers.
Whatever the case, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Next step, harvesting success?
Everything is in place, you just have to wait for people to come to you and pay for your products and services? Nope. The hardest and sometimes most frustrating part is still to be done. Have you done the right things? Did you use the right levers? Did you reach your goals?
To answer all these questions and allow your brand to succeed and last, you need to track your work and measure its effectiveness. This is where we invoke ROI (Return on Investment).
This is step 3 of your brand launch strategy and the subject of the next article: Measure, adjust, thrive: sustaining a brand in 2022.
(1) Inbound marketing. A strategy aimed at bringing customers to you.
(2) And communication agencies.
(3) Call-to-action (or calls to action)
(4) A holistic approach is a comprehensive approach to a subject by taking into account all the elements that characterize it.
(5) Mock-up or functional diagram of a user interface or Web page.
