Digital Marketing Agency Pulls Back the Curtain and reveals the secrets to Define your Brand and then Broadcast it

Do me a Favour

Let's do a quick comparison of both the Australian Supermarket giants.

Head to www.woolworths.com.au, then open another tab in your browser and head to

www.coles.com.au.

Can you see any similarities? In fact, as we are doing this exercise ourselves there are many:

• The colour palette that has been used matches the respective brand (primarily, green for

Woolworths and red for Coles) even the buttons on the website are either green or red.

• They are both currently plugging their Black Friday sales (it is currently November) but if

I visited this site any other month, they would still be showing me their bargains first,

perhaps under a different theme.

• They both offer a value add in recipes, with Woolworths focusing on easy, fresh and one pan meals, Coles is more focussed on affordable meals for the family like 'Dinners under $10'.

This aligns with both their current TV advertising.

• They also both have prominent features on their homepage about the ease of their delivery

service (I just had a flashback to the three times that I have walked around our old street

looking for our groceries, because they were delivered to the wrong house!)

Actually, after analysing the look and feel of these websites, if you had have told me they were built by the same person (or group of people) it would not be surprising. In reality both of these juggernauts have marketing departments responsible for every facet of their marketing and brand image.

Fun fact: as of the date I am writing this book, If you Google search Woolworths, Coles is the

first listing that comes up by way of Google Ads (smart advertising! bargain hunters will likely

see their Black Friday sales first).

Now if you jump over to Facebook and look at both their pages, you will see much of the same. Their social media content all aligns with their website, which aligns with their brochures, which aligns to their TV advertisements etc. Woolworths and Coles are their brand, they are different, one is green and one is red, but the similarities (aside from being a supermarket) far outnumber the differences. This is because they have a system that is engrained in everything they do and it works.

Develop Branding

It is not lost on me that the readers of this book will likely be at different levels for what branded resources they have developed. It is my assumption that we have a blend of established local brands and sole traders, who may be a highly skilled plumber, electrician, mobile mechanic, (insert occupation here) but are just doing what comes naturally to them when marketing and developing their brand. Perhaps, from ideas drawn from other players in their industry or other businesses that have caught their eye. Therefore, I will start at the bottom and the only assumption that I will carry into this, is that your business has a logo. Feel free to skip through parts where you feel I am only rehashing something you already

know.

Theme and Colour Palette

As you would have witnessed when reviewing the marketing content of Woolworths and Coles, they broadcast the colours that represent their brand and they are their identity. We highly recommend doing the same for your business. You can easily create a theme in Microsoft Word that can then be used across all Microsoft products (this is pretty straight forward and we recommend a google search on how to set this up and save the theme to your computer for safe keeping). You can select the colours that represent your brand, or if you want to get more specific, enter the actual #HEX codes. When selecting colours from specific #HEX codes in the colour picker window, select 'Custom' and enter your code in the bottom box.

Although, you should absolutely not go overboard with AI (More on this later), AI Chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot are pretty handy in detecting #HEX codes if you upload your business logo and prompt it to.

Brand Photos

We strongly recommend collecting brand photos and saving them in a file for quick use. Something I cannot stress enough, is do not rely on pictures from your website builder, shutterstock or stock photos. If you run a cleaning business, nobody is going to believe that the photo of the model, smiling and dressed in cleaning attire, is your employee. Instead collect genuine photos of your staff, doing their role and collect as much as you can. You will quickly identify the better quality, more professional images that can form a part of your brand photos. There is a place for using stock photos, sparingly, but not when displaying your

team, your office or work environment. You do not need an expensive camera! The quality of cameras on smart phones today is more than sufficient to take quality brand photos.

Do not use AI for brand Images! I cannot stress this enough. I was scrolling through

Facebook a few weeks ago and noticed a paid Facebook Ad for a Security Company. The guards not only looked like supermodels, they were wearing High visibility vests with Security spelled incorrectly! AI is a fantastic tool, but as we become more aware of its capability, we become more sensitive to detecting it. Think back to the last time you scrolled through your Facebook feed without identifying something that you were certain was AI generated.

An Actionable Social Media Strategy

As we work through this post, I will provide you a template that we use with our clients. A detailed social media strategy helps in organizing both high-level themes and campaign-specific details.

Define Goals: Clearly identify the goals you want to achieve with your social media efforts.

Align these goals with your organization's priorities. These goals must be relevant and valuable to your business, achievable in a given time-frame, and straight forward to measure.

Identify your Target Market: Understand your target audience's demographics, challenges, and goals. This helps in personalizing your messaging.

Content and Channels: Decide on the topics and content formats that resonate with your audience and choose the right social media channels to focus on.

Organize Activities: Outline your social media programs, campaigns, and tactics. This includes estimating the required budget, resources, and staffing.

Publishing Schedule: Establish a clear publishing schedule to organize your content distribution and maintain consistency. Post as much as you can, but ensure each posts aligns to the strategy and objectives of your social media strategy. Take your time with each post! This may be what your next customer is using to decide whether they want to do business with you.

Paid Advertising

I would love to tell you that you can do it all for free and sometimes you can. The idea is to create relatable content that resonates with your target market and educates or offers value (such as discounts, deals etc) to your audience. If you own a cafe, paid advertising may not be necessarily required. Build a following and post specials and deals for your audience, along with a mix of relatable content and you may achieve the desired outcome of your social media strategy. You do need an audience though! As well as inviting all your friends and family to follow your page , display your socials in your business (if it is customer facing).

Another effective strategy is to offer an incentive for your followers. I once visited a newly opened store that made nutritious smoothies and protein shakes. They were offering 50 cents off for following them on Facebook and a further 50 cents for following them on Instagram and naturally everyone in the line had their phone out to show their evidence to take advantage of the discount.

As mentioned earlier, you must carefully select your paid advertising content and once you find something that works, continue to use it until it is no longer achieving results. Next we will learn about a highly effective strategy of Digital Marketing, a High Value Content Offer.

High Value Content Offer

Sabri Suby is a Digital Marketing Genius, Entrepreneur, Shark Tank Investor and Author of Sell like crazy: How to get as many clients, customers and sales as you can possibly handle. This is a brilliant book that we highly recommend, that is essentially top to bottom, a how to guide of how to write, design and build a HVCO. The book is available on Amazon and in book stores and Sabri also provided the book completely free (you just had to pay postage and handling) in a brilliant marketing campaign that was in fact a High Value Content Offer to promote his marketing systems. A HVCO, is a low pressure, lead and email generating

machine. Sabri believes most business's get social media advertising wrong. In releasing ads that just tell you how good their business is (if that) and that you should buy, he likens this to walking up to a stranger in a bar and asking them to marry you.

In essence a High Value Content Offer is a free report, ebook or book offered in a completely low pressure environment for zero cost. Well not exactly, in return the customer is providing their name, email address and whether they consent to a free consultation/ appraisal/ assessment/ health check (pick your poison). If they do not take you up on your offer at first, that's okay! You have attained their email details and they have now entered your sales funnel. You can now send them regular (but not an outrageously annoying amount) further high value content and again provide the option to consent to your free consultation (or alternate).

With the algorithms that social media deploys today, you will often have people with some level of interest in viewing your content, viewing your ad, but studies suggest only 3% are looking to buy now. That's not to say they will buy with you.. but they are looking. Then it comes down to why you're better than your competitors. That leaves another 97% that are either actively looking, problem aware, or not even problem aware yet, that a High Value Content Offer affords the opportunity to tap into and market your product or service.

What to write in your High Value Content Offer? Think of the knowledge that your

customers are hungry for. Search online on platforms like Reddit, Facebook or review sites. What are the concerns of people that are buying or looking to buy your product or service? This is the best start point. Next look at what works! Let's go back to Woolworths and Coles, what do you often see in front of checkouts? Those trashy interest magazines. These are the best insight into a highly effective, attention grabbing, sales converting headline. Those headlines are exactly how to grab a persons attention that is standing in a queue, and force them to want to learn more, thus picking up the magazine and adding it to their trolley.

1. Design a professional booklet providing the knowledge that is the burning desire of your potential customers. It does not even have to be long, 7-8 pages is more than sufficient.

2. Create a page on your website, providing a brief intro about your HVCO, don't be modest you are the a top (Landscaper, mortgage broker, real estate agent, financial planner) or the fastest growing (Cleaning, Security, Clothing) company and you are peeling back the curtain and providing this exclusive report, completely free. Just enter your name and email below (we recommend not asking for a phone number unless a lead is generated, we

are so accustom to telemarketing calls, this stops people dead in their tracks) to be provided the free report. Include a tick box or consent to your second unbelievably high value offer for a free consultation (or alternate). If you want to add even more value to your offer, put a price to it, for example, a free financial health check valued at $99.00!

Create a rule in the form, that if this option is selected, it prompts the person to enter their phone number and one of our advisors/ consultants/ planners (anything but sales people!) will be in touch to book your appointment.

3. Create a compelling and eye catching social media advertisement. Along the lines of Top/ Fastest Growing (insert type of business) releases the exclusive report,( insert your eye catching, lead generating monster of a title). Read the free report now!

Then include a button (to your lead generation webpage) that states 'Learn More'.

You may not generate a lead every time, and that's okay. In return for your high value offer, you have been reimbursed with an email to add to your digital marketing efforts. Email marketing is statistically proven to be the most effective of all digital marketing methods.

If you generate the lead, Congratulations! Don't go in guns blazing! This is now the

equivalent of maybe not asking a stranger to marry you, but more like asking someone to marry you 10 minutes into the first date! Take your time and provide your secondary (in person/ over the phone) High Value Offer . Deliver value again and again and you will find converting the sale will be significantly easier!

Call to Action

Here comes the pitch! Well not really.. that was never the intention of this bpost. Can you apply the lessons from this post to your business and see results? You bet. Will you become an industry leader, a pioneer and the next big success story? You could, but with a lot of hard work, further learning to master the concepts presented in this post, late nights and likely by naturally increasing your head count as your business grows to the point where it resembles big business.

In Steven Bartlett's book, Happy Sexy Millionaire, he presents a compelling perspective that made an impact with us. Steven's belief is we are all at the roulette table of life placing chips that represent our time. We choose where to place our 'time' chips and we should choose wisely as our time is limited.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the current life expectancy for

Australian Males is 81.1 years and Australian Females 85.1 years. Lets split the difference and say 83 years. Now lets say with a bit of luck on our side we achieve this life expectancy.

Now the confronting part. That equates to 30,295 days or 727,080 hours (roughly 218,342 of these hours you will be asleep!). That's how many 'time' chips you have in your stack. If you are 30 years old, 262,800 of those chips are already spent! If your 40, that is 350,400 chips spent and if you are 50 that is 438,000 chips spent! Some gave you incredible and fantastic returns, for example, starting your business, meeting your spouse, getting married, having kids, or buying your home. Some not so much, maybe all the hours spent scrolling social media or watching Netflix alone. If you run a business, your time is even more valuable. Queue the old saying, there is only so much time in a day. If you are a small business owner, you likely don't have a marketing department, customer service centre, or even a HR department, its all you (and your small team). This is where we come

in. Skyline Co was created with these concepts in mind, to bridge the gap between big business strategies and small business realities . We are a social media management and marketing powerhouse, that also specialise in strategic planning, business training and brand development. We partner in your success

at a highly affordable price for the amount of effort and work that goes into our offering. The ideas we presented in this post are yours to put into practise, but if you like our ideas, and already have enough on your plate, let's catch up for a coffee and an obligation free strategy session. Start Your Journey today!