Building a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Absolutely. So my name is Robin Agricola. I’m the founder and CEO of Birdhouse Marketing and Design. We’re a full-service brand marketing design full-servicing agency based in Massachusetts, but with employees working all around the country. We serve as clients mostly in the legal and medical spaces, but we certainly have clients in all different industries. And we basically do everything from logo design and branding all the way through web design and development and into full service, digital marketing, and even more traditional marketing channels.

Yeah. So when we engage with a new client, the first step is just like collecting all of this information. We wanna get as much information as we can.

Starting with the basics, starting the simple questions like, who’s your primary target audience? Who, what are your objectives? What are your overall goals? What is your audience need, on a pragmatic level as well as on an emotional level to make a connection with your brand?

What makes your product or service superior to your competitors? Where have your successes been with previous marketing efforts? Where have your failures been? What are the sticking points that prevent prospects from moving forward with hiring you? And really through these conversations, what we’re trying to do is piece together a story.

So we wanna know, during the sales cycle, what are the questions you’re being asked over and over again? Those questions, those are your stories, your answers to those questions, those are your story. So we wanna draw those out of our clients and make sure that we’re sharing information that is relevant to the consumers and what resonates with them as well. And then, understanding the why behind the company. So their purpose, that’s huge. People connect with purposes, not products or services. So we want to make sure that we’re able to connect that deeper core value with the client’s needs.

And then once we’ve put, once we’ve gone through that process of the deep dive and really like wrapping our head around, the business and what their goals and objectives are, then we really dive in and put together a strategy that’s gonna outline goals and objectives, their unique value, their core values, their a message map that kind of connects their core messages with their audiences and outlines how those messages need to be delivered, when and where, and how.

And on what channels and platforms. And then finally a detailed roadmap for how to achieve their marketing objectives through the use of various media channels, whether they have them already or whether we need to create new materials for them.

Oh, all the time. These are the questions that we ask in the process of getting to know the client and understanding their challenges.

It is an eye-opening process for the client. I think a lot of times they. They’re close to the business, so it’s really hard to get that, like trees from the forest from the trees. Look, very rarely step back and look at your business from that bird’s eye perspective.

So I think a lot of the questions we ask challenge our clients to take a look at their business and their marketing challenges through a different lens. And it’s, and it can be challenging I think a lot too. And as marketers, we’re good at it. Taking a message and pivoting it to be more of an emotion.

Make it more of an emotional connection with the audience. As opposed to that promotional this is what we sell and this is why you, should buy it, no. What are we solving? What’s the deeper level? What’s that deeper emotion? And I think getting the clients to think in that way is always an enlightening part of the marketing process.

Sure. The most successful campaigns that we’re seeing are, you’re gonna hear me say it a lot today, but the ones that connect with consumers on an emotional level those, the really, like hard selling like act now or else that messaging is just really not what consumers want to hear anymore.

And yeah, they’re pretty desensitized to it as well. Specifically in social media, we are constantly nudging our clients to send us pictures of them and their teams, their dogs, their kids visiting the office, and anything that shows them as human beings and not just business people.

And of course, that type of content does need to be aligned with a bigger strategy. I don’t think you can just start posting a selfie of me cooking dinner at night. That’s not what that’s not gonna help your cause. But, when done properly those like insights into the human nature of a business are powerful.

And when we’re looking at our client’s metrics and analytics, Those are the posting content that is getting so much more engagement than, anything else that we’re putting together it performs so well. Other than that, we’re seeing the more hyper-personalized you can get with a campaign, the better it’s gonna perform.

So talking about, email list segmentation retargeting campaigns, when that makes sense. And just getting regular with your messaging and fine-tuning it for almost like the specific individual you’re talking to and not necessarily this concept of the target audience as a whole.

So in our process at the beginning when we start working with a client and we’re developing that strategy, the message map that we put together is a really important tool. I think it’s important for the client to understand their messaging, but even for us, it’s something that we reference regularly.

So when we’re putting together our social media posts, or we’re putting together content for emails, we are constantly referencing that. Message map to make sure okay, is this one core message still at the center of everything that we’re saying? Is this, are we communicating messaging that’s in alignment with the overall strategy, the branding?

And that’s just something that we have to constantly be doing a gut check on because it can be really easy to start. Going down tangents and, creating new messages, but there’s a lot of strategy and thought that goes into developing those message maps. So we try to stay pretty true to that.

I think a lot of it is showing and not telling. So if our companies, if our clients have, certain core values, like I have a particular client of mine that’s in Portland, Oregon, and animal rights and humane society messaging is important to them.

And just showing that, so like they host a lot of events that go to benefit those charities and organizations. But even down to showing the pictures of the dogs in the office with the owners and that’s been a huge area for them to connect with their audience. Just like matching those values, matching those visions.

Not to say that they would only accept a client who has a dog or cares about animal rights. But it is a really important human connection that they’ve made. And just sharing that, making sure that we’re collaborating with other organizations in the community that are also aligned with those core values.

Making sure we’re providing those other organizations with value and taking any value that they’re able to offer us in terms of co-marketing or co-branding.

Yeah, for sure. To define that brand voice at the beginning of our engagement. And I have a whole questionnaire that I go through with my clients that helps us understand and I think going back to what you were saying earlier about this process being just as valuable for the clients, a lot of time our clients have no idea what kind of brand they even want to develop.

And so we have this whole questionnaire that we go through with them that opens a dialogue that sheds a lot of light on what our job as brand marketing experts is. But my favorite question every single time is what are the three to five adjectives that you would want your consumers to use to describe your brand?

You only get three to five. You can’t have any more than five because you can’t be everything to everyone. So that gets people thinking. I’m always like, don’t answer me right now. I want you to think about it over the weekend. I wanna hear from you in five days. Like I said, three to five adjectives, and could be approachable, credible, professional, energizing trustworthy. There are thousands of adjectives that could be used. So whittling it down to just a handful is a challenge, but that helps us guide our strategy in terms of devising a voice for these brands.

So again, every time we’re putting together content whether for social, for email, for, a blog, or whatever, we wanna make sure these adjectives, do they apply to this content that we’re developing. If someone read this content, could it be described as adjective A, B, or C? And if not, what do we need to do to tweak that language so that the voice is, so there’s some integrity to the voice?

Yeah, sure. Of course, like I’m always gonna go back to branding. To me, my background isn’t branding. I just think it’s so important. I want for all of my clients, no matter what marketing touchpoint a consumer is looking at, I want it to be very clear that it is from, that client.

So you know that a lot of the branding work, usually if I start with a small business, we are starting with logo design. And that’s usually a really beautiful process of going from the logo design, picking the color palette, choosing the fonts. That process lends itself really nicely to it segues really nicely into what the web design process, coming off of strong brand guidelines, that’s obviously incorporated. My primary goal of the website is can someone to land on this page and know instantly what you do and why you do it better than your competitors. Like within 30, not even 30 seconds. We’re seeing people bounce off websites so quickly if you’re not hitting them with the right message.

If they’re gone, if that page doesn’t load fast enough, they’re gone. Obviously like from a technological standpoint, there’s a lot of stuff that goes into building a website, but from a branding and graphic design standpoint, we want that, who you are, what you do, and why you’re good at it.

That’s front and center but also like multiple calls to action. So depending on where a consumer is in the sales cycle. We want them to take an action that is measurable, that captures the information that allows us to either segment them into an email list where we can either follow up with a very personalized follow-up, or we want, them to fire a certain pixel that triggers a retargeting campaign and Facebook.

But no, depending on where they are, They may be willing to sign up for an email newsletter, but they’re not necessarily willing to schedule that free consultation yet. Or maybe they are ready to schedule that consultation. Maybe they’re interested in learning about a topic and they wanna download an ebook, but they’re not like totally ready.

You have to address the people who are just learning and gathering information just as much as you address those people who are in those final stages of the decision-making process. So I like to give lots of different calls to action in alignment with the overall strategies.

So making sure if your primary goal is to schedule consultations, that’s gonna get the most visual attention on the website. We’re gonna try to drive the consumer’s eye there. And then we always wanna drive people to call just to click that like tap to call button.

That’s really like the people who are picking up the phone to call are the people who are ready to make a decision. So you wanna target them as well?

That’s so true.

Yeah, for sure. And we’re always fine-tuning. Like I tell clients all the time, a website is essentially a living and breathing piece of marketing material. It’s not, 20 years ago when we were programming sites in HTML and hard coding and there was no CMS, there was no way for a consumer to edit their website.

You did have to get it right a higher percentage of the time because making changes didn’t take two seconds. Nowadays, I use WordPress, that’s my platform of choice they’ve built in Drupal before, the thousand of other platforms. But we are working in WordPress where like essentially I can build a site for a client and I’m just like, Hey, click this button that says edit and you can change content.

Like you can go or you send that content to me, it’s gonna take me 30 seconds to change that content. Yeah. So we don’t, we can adjust based on what we’re seeing in your analytics and your metrics of like where people are bouncing off the site. What can we do to capture them a little better at that point?

What are the trends that we’re seeing and how can we address them? So we’re constantly looking at those analytics and making decisions about, what to change next or what to soup up to generate a better response.

That’s a really good question, and this is a super hot topic to bring up. I think AI has its place, and I think it can be very valuable for a brand that doesn’t have a huge budget, needs to get some social media posts done, and needs a Google Ads headline. A lot of those AI content generators are great for those small snippets of content.

In terms of long-form content, they’re just not there yet. Trying to get chat GPT to give me a blog about it, a lot of my law firms are estate planning law firms. So if I punch in what is the difference between a will and a trust, I can get a five-paragraph blog, 300, 400 words.

There’s no personality to it. I find, that writing is very near and dear to me. I’m a published author. I love writing is my passion. For me, I read through those chat GPT or AI blogs and I’m just like no. This is all wrong. There’s no personality, there’s no nothing here.

So I think they need to come a little bit more, they need to be developed a little bit more before sort of long-form content will be viable. Right now, I think in terms of a small business without a huge budget, being able to pump out some social posts, it’s better to have something than nothing.

But you can have customized work. It’s always better to be customized. Plus, just the human element of it, I’ve had my poor writers all come to me and just asked are our jobs safe? Are you going to start using AI and I’m like, your job is safe. I’m always gonna pay a human overpaying a robot a hundred percent of the time.

That’s if I have the choice if I can make that decision.

Thank you so much for having me. It’s been great to chat with you.

Absolutely. Have a great day.