We always start by making sure you have a strong, clear, brand profile. This is the piece that most people are missing, and it informs what you create as well as how you communicate with your audience. It is a focused slice of your personality, that is written down so you can refer back to it and update it as necessary. When you’re overwhelmed by tech or “ninja tricks” this document keeps you focused on which tactics are a right fit for you.
Next, we create a character profile for your ideal audience member (some people refer to this as an avatar, but thinking of your ideal audience member as a fictional character helps you speak directly to them through your marketing).
If you think of marketing as a funnel, your audience starts at the wide end and moved to the narrow end, building a stronger bond with you as they go.
In our experience, it works best to create this funnel starting with the narrow end and working “backward” to the wide end.
- Email automation: a sequence if getting to know you emails scheduled over at least one month, that train your audience to expect and value your communication with them. This also introduces them to your products/services. (For fiction, this is where you walk your readers through each book in the series, giving them extra cool tidbits based on your brand and ideal audience character.)
- Website: this is how people get onto your email list. Homepage copy, about page(s), blog/news updates, this is the online face of your business.
- Imagery: graphics are incredibly powerful. Psychology of color and design are the visual representations of your brand. They give your audience an understanding of who you are before they read anything at all. Again, these decisions are guided by your brand and ideal audience profiles.
- Social Bots: set up some bots to distribute your blog/news updates to social media (including your email list, Medium, and Huffington Post), so you can do one thing and your audience can follow you where they want to follow you. Pick one platform you love, and set up bots to share your posts from that platform to all the other ones. The goal here, is to keep your work to a minimum while maximizing potential reach. As long as the content you share is aligned with your brand and audience profiles, nobody will care that your content was posted by a bot.
- Ads: this is the hardest piece because every ad platform has its own learning curve, you need to know how to look at your data, how to test images, headlines, and copy. It is time-consuming and takes weeks to gather enough data to know whether any given ad is working. If you can outsource this, do. Again, your brand and author profiles are critical here: choosing traits and keywords that find your audience, creating the graphics and headlines to entice them. This process also helps you define your ideal audience member in more detail (for example, you may think your ideal audience character is twenty but find that you make more sales when you target your ads to women in their thirties who fit the psychographics of your ideal audience member).
Creating the emails, web copy, product/service descriptions is the hard part. But once you have something good enough, you can let it work while you learn from your ads and your clickthrough rates. Then you can optimize each piece based on actual data.
You will get the most out of our time together if we keep sessions short and focus on one thing at a time. This allows us to meet more frequently and gives you time and accountability to implement the things we discuss. There is a one hour minimum for new clients because we want you to get as much out of your time as possible and two half-hour sessions provide the focus and structure for you to take action, which is the most important part of any business endeavor.
Because everyone is different, we need some information before we meet.
This information allows me to understand where you’re at in the marketing/branding order of operations cycle and which pieces you may be missing.
Step 1:
Complete this application form to make sure you’re next on the list when Arianna is available to work with new clients.
Step 2:
Collect the information you’ll need to share with Arianna. If you want to learn more about the Golden Branding process, join our email list.
- Intelligence Type Personality Quiz Results. This helps us understand how you process information most naturally, which is important for communication and marketing. You can take the quiz here.
- Love Language Personality Quiz Results. This helps us understand what you need to get from your successes in order to feel fulfilled and appreciated. You can take the quiz here.
- Value Language Personality Quiz Results. This helps us understand why you care about the specific things you care about and helps you stay aware of why you might not care about something that does actually matter. You can take the quiz here.
- Your Brand Persona. This is a document that defines your company’s personality, values, mission, products, etc. If you don’t have one, we’ll work together to make one.
- Your Audience Character Persona. This is a detailed profile of a single individual who represents your target market. This could be an individual consumer if you are creating products or services for individuals, or it could be someone working in a decision-making role at a company if you are creating products or services for other businesses. If you don’t have one, we’ll create one together.
- Your Short-Term Goals. What are you trying to accomplish over the next few months?
- Your Long-Term Goals. Where do you want to be in five years? In ten years?
Step 3:
If we have the availability to work with you, we will send you an email with more details including a link to the form where you’ll submit the information from Step 2.