BRAND STORY 10
Marketing got you stumped? Start with Touchpoints.
To get your startup off the ground, you don’t need analytics — just an engaging brand story and a small universe of touchpoints.
Marketing used to be simple. You had three choices: Advertising, direct mail, and collateral. You launched them into the market and hoped for the best.
All this changed in the 1990s when marketers gave new meaning to the famous Monty Python sketch:
- Man ordering breakfast: “Well, what’ve you got?”
- Waitress: “Well, there’s egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam; spam bacon sausage and spam; spam egg spam spam bacon and spam; spam sausage spam spam bacon spam tomato and spam.”
Suddenly, bulk email bots flooded our inboxes with spam — that is until the CAN-SPAM Act hit the brakes a few years later (sorta).
Spam email was just the beginning. In 1994, Wired Magazine shocked the Web community by launching the industry’s first web banner ad. Louis Rossetto, the co-founder of Wired, remembered the moment:
“People told us if you put ads online, the Internet would throw up on us. I thought the opposition was ridiculous. There is hardly an area of human activity that isn’t commercial. Why should the Internet be the exception?
So we said, ‘Fuck it,’ and just went ahead and did it”
The original clickbait spawned an explosion of digital messages that now seep into every moment of our lives — and the momentum continues: Apple can now beam proximity ads to your watch via cell towers mapping your location. Fortunately, Apple is keeping that particular gate closed — for now.
And there’s more: A company called Wrapify will wrap your car with advertising, connect you to their app, and pay you cents per mile. The next logical step is to bypass impression-based advertising and implant micro-messaging chips directly (something our Legislature takes seriously in Georgia).
Lame joke aside, as a shoestring startup, you might feel overwhelmed having to learn and navigate the labyrinth of digital marketing, yet this complexity also offers enormous opportunity. Never before have everyday people been able to target millions of people without spending a penny — unless, of course, someone clicks. Today’s digital platforms can target, place, measure, and analyze brand messages with remarkable precision. But mastering this technology is a full-time career in its own right — and you just want to sell CBD-laced jam!
What about SEO, Analytics, Automation, Conversion Rates, CTR, CPA, CPC, CPM, PPC, Hashtags, Keyword Density, and all the rest?
The lie of digital marketing is that if you tinker with the mechanics, a stream of prospects will convert into sales.
The Brand Story approach states the opposite:
People must desire what your selling first. Tactics come second.
Case in point, Apple fans used to camp out in long lines, often days in advance, to get the next iteration iPhone on the launch date. No prompting from the marketing department nor hashtags were involved.
Apple developed a cult following from a brand story that embraced a great product, outstanding customer service, people-friendly technology, and of course, the mystique of Steve Jobs.
But you’re not Apple. So, how do you get your message out?
Take a breath. You’re already ahead of the game because digital marketing without a brand position becomes spaghetti on the wall. But, since you’ve done the hard work of building a Brand Story and aligning it to your target customer, your story will do the selling for you.
Seven rules to simplify your marketing
As a shoestring startup, follow these seven simple rules to jumpstart your business:
Rule 1: Think in terms of touchpoints
Every place a prospective customer encounters your brand is a touchpoint. Handing a hotel guest a hot cookie is a touchpoint, as is greeting a burrito customer with “Welcome to Moe’s.” Sharing a business card or adding an email signature with your logo and tagline are touchpoints. The “Carbon-Free Lawns” t-shirts Donnie’s three-man crew wears on the job count for three touchpoints (at $10 per shirt).
In contrast, a Super Bowl touchpoint costs $5 million for 30 seconds.
Each Touchpoint is additive. If you start with three Touchpoints, your marketing footprint doubles when you have six.
Donnie started his teenage lawn-mowing service with a touchpoint marketing plan that was simple and effective:
“I’ll put a big logo sticker on the back of my clipboard,” he mused. “Then I’ll add my tagline to my estimates, wear a branded ball cap and T-shirt around town, post social updates to my Facebook page, sponsor a banner for my daughter’s soccer team, and write a sustainable lawn care article for The Intown Blog.” Count the signage on Donnie’s truck, and he’s got seven no-brainer touchpoints.
Later, Donnie offered to give Saturday morning demonstrations of organic lawn care at his local Ace Hardware. Donnie handed out business cards while the store pushed bags of organic fertilizer. For Donnie’s shoestring business, this coup was comparable to a CEO scoring a speaking slot at an industry conference.
Adding touchpoints — one at a time — makes marketing manageable.
Rule 2: Touchpoints must point
The purpose of Touchpoints is not to create brand impressions, but to point customers to your Brand Story.
You’re building a touchpoint universe. Instead of the Dog Star and Betelgeuse, you’ve got bumper stickers, blimps, and business cards.
Touchpoints point to your Brand Story via taglines, slogans, and campaigns. Simple touchpoints build into a small galaxy, and finally a touchpoint universe:
Yes, it’s daunting to build a universe but remember — your touchpoints point. Since they connect to your Brand Story, they are viral by nature. Example:
“Can you believe it?” Joe tells his friend over coffee. “I saw this young guy pushing an old-fashioned lawnmower. Carbon-Free Lawns, he calls it. These kids are serious about climate.”
Rule 3: The most effective touchpoint is free
And, that is your network. I never liked the word network, so I prefer the concept of karass, invented and explained by Kurt Vonnegut in his seminal book, Cat’s Cradle. In the book, Bokonon, the leader of a fictionalized religion, explained how a karass works:
“Humanity is organized into teams that do God’s will,” Bokonon explained. “These teams are called a karass… Karass ignores traditional boundaries like nation, occupation, and family. If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons, that person may be a member of your karass. We find such people by accident, but we stick with them by choice. With any luck, we find a crew that we’re happy to bond with.”
The problem with network is that it feels like work — something extraneous you create by handing out business cards at Chamber luncheons. With a karass, Vonnegut recognized that life gathers the crew. The people and connections you need to expand your world simply show up.
Working your karass has a Hansel & Gretal quality to it. You must remain awake to every breadcrumb along the path to see if it leads to a casual conversation — or better, a chance to share your elevator pitch.
Imagine being part of a boy band that nurtures its fan base through the decades. In this way, your karass of connections serves you for your entire working life — your friends from college, the corporation where you cut your teeth, old professors, parent’s friends, your network of moms, golf buddies, and so on. For this reason, your karass should be nurtured and revered like tribal gold. You never know if one of the people on your “crew” will lead to an investor, a partnership, or your first big client.
Rule 4: Keep Social Media Social
The major social platforms offer great tools for pinging your people but don’t use them to directly solicit business. Social means social. Use your personal pages on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter to share what you are doing, but keep your marketing posts in a personal context. For example:
“Enjoying the awesome craft brewpubs in Pittsburgh. Dave and I are here to show our new line of retro necklaces at the Independent Jeweler’s Conference. Steel City’s got more hip factor than we expected.”
Your social network is interested in you and what you are up to — but your friends don’t want to be prospects. You can buy some Adwords on Google, but your karass carries more weight. Someone in your yoga class might see your Pittsburgh post and mention your products to a friend who owns a jewelry shop. The ripple effect works virally.
Is multi-level marketing the same as working your karass? Your karass and MLM both leverage personal relationships — but differently. With multi-level marketing, distributors at the top of your “down-line” leverage your friends to feed their revenue streams. For this reason, MLMs are arguably unethical and not a karass. What’s more, 73% of MLM distributors make no money (according to AARP), and 99% fail according to a report done for the Federal Trade Commission.
People in your karass are on your team, and you are on their teams. They are generous by nature and want to help you out. Since you are leaning on bonds of trust, you have to deliver the goods and reciprocate by returning the favor. Social means social.
In my parent’s generation, earning a customer’s trust worked differently. If you needed life insurance, your next-door neighbor, Ned, might recommend Ted Macklevane. After mom fed the kids, Ted would show up in a suit and tie, shake hands, share how he and Ned go way back, then join you on the couch with his sales book. Ted built his whole book of business this way.
Rule 5: All roads lead to your Website
Websites are Useless!
if you expect people to find your site, get turned on by what you offer, and start placing orders. The premise of search engine optimization (SEO), referral networks, Google analytics, and referral networks assumes you can build a website that scoops prospects like a butterfly net. The truth is that 50% of all online retail sales come through Amazon. Yes, there are people looking for a chiropractor or dog walking service through a Web search, but more likely, they will encounter your brand in the real world or ask friends for a referral.
Websites are Indispensable!
Why? Because real-world touchpoints point to your website. Your friend’s referral for a chiropractor or a dog-walker will typically lead to a Web look-up — often while you’re on the phone with your friend!
Whether your web visitors come from personal referrals, business cards, bumper stickers, or other real-world touchpoints, your website must solve the visitors’ problems, establish their trust, and close the sale. A strong Brand Story makes that happen.
Today, the whole Ned-Ted line of trust has been augmented by the Web. Referrals are key, but people ultimately compare products by the feeling of the brand. They may not be able to articulate why they like a Web site, but subconsciously, they are responding to your Brand Story — do you feel legit? Is the position clear? Does your story align with me? The newest twist is that customers will go to SelectQuote.com where there is no Ted — and no insurance company! Just a bundler of brands with a click-easy, unassailable brand position: We Shop Many, Highly-Rated Insurers for your Best Rates.
Rule 6: Don’t Sell; Build a Sales Engine
When all your touchpoints work together to drive sales, you have created a sales engine.
Example:
Donnie discovered that his Saturday demos at Ace Hardware delivered some new customers, but talking about fertilizer was boring. He discovered that most people don’t even bother to fertilize, but they all wanted a neat and trimmed lawn.
While Donnie gave demos, he learned more about his customers. They wore Fitbits and Lululemon, sipped Keurig coffees, and showed up pushing high-end jogging strollers.
Donnie asked the store manager to stock some manual reel mowers and then took it a notch higher — asking him to stock high-end reel mowers from Fiskars (the scissors people). Donnie explained to the store manager, “Your customers are into double-wall stainless French presses for their morning coffee — they will want a Fiskars mower.”
In a stroke of genius, Donnie also purchased Fiskars mowers for his crews. Then he changed his brand color to Fiskars orange, created a big logo decal for his mowers, and used his decal mower for the store demos. “The hipsters will buy a Fiskars mower for the cool factor,” Donnie reasoned, “but in the end, they will have me do the work.”
The orange mowers became an important touchpoint — in the store and all around town. Importantly, via Ace Hardware, Donnie built a sales channel. To build his full marketing engine, Donnie went a step further. He launched a referral program — a free Fiskars scissors set for every sales referral from satisfied customers. Donnie could now hand out a branded promo item that reinforced his brand story: Don’t whack grass with gas; save the planet one clip at a time.
Rule 7: Advertising Costs; Stories are Free
Story-driven content marketing delivers the best bang for your buck for a simple reason: customers connect to stories. The first step in content marketing is to identify your Big Idea, i.e., your brand position. The goal of content marketing is to set the “tent pole” (your big idea) then anchor it with a broad footprint of “stakes.”
Donnie built out his big idea — the need for sustainable lawn care — with social media stories, press releases for his local paper, topic landing pages to build SEO, a blog entry, and a YouTube video of his Ace Hardware demo. He reused this material for a series of LinkedIn posts and an email campaign.
With “Sustainable Lawn Care” as Donnie’s Big Idea, he created his content marketing plan: One new story per month released through multiple platforms. He came up with twelve short topics and tapped them into his phone calendar as a reminder each month:
- “March: Petro products in your garden?”
- “April: Pollution-free lawn care,”
- “May: Ancient mower performs new tricks,”
- June: “Put Compost to Work…” etc.
With this scalable approach, Donnie developed a suite of core stories to drive his brand message into a noisy marketplace — without any out-of-pocket costs.
Next year, Donnie plans to create a “pillar page”– a web page that covers his overall topic, “sustainable lawn care,” in-depth. By adding links from the pillar page to his blog content, Donnie could establish himself as a thought leader while enhancing his search engine visibility.
Build out your Touchpoints
Let’s finish where we began: Turning three touchpoints into six, and six into twelve. Consider all the places people might bump into your Brand Story:
Here are some ideas — some out of the box.
SOCIAL MEDIA
- Purchase targeted advertising on social media.
- Use LinkedIn to start conversations with potential leads.
- Post regular updates on Facebook with a mostly personal (slightly business) angle.
WEB MARKETING
- Enhance your Website’s SEO with targeted content.
- Offer quarterly Webinars.
- Submit your listing to online business directories.
- Sign up for Google Local, Yelp, and similar.
- Launch a Google Ads campaign
DIRECT MARKETING
- Distribute flyers into mailbox flags.
- Send direct mailers at 19 cents each through Every Door Direct Mail from the USPS.
- Create an e-newsletter (and sign-up form), and send out quarterly, even if you are starting with a handful of contacts.
CONTENT MARKETING
- Create topical blog posts, articles, and white papers for your site and repurpose them on LinkedIn and Medium.
- Write a short downloadable ebook to demonstrate thought leadership in your field.
- Create demonstration videos for YouTube.
- Create a Question/Answer UGC (User Generated Content) page to increase your Google footprint.
- Create a pillar page to boost SEO around an in-depth topic.
PRESENCE MARKETING
- Post a business card at your yoga studio or the hardware store.
- If you’re a contractor, attach an outdoor acrylic brochure holder to your truck or place a yard sign on the job.
- Rent motorized searchlights.
- Build a float for your small-town parade.
- Order some pop-up banner stands.
- Attend trade shows and events as an exhibitor — or cheaper, don’t buy a booth. Walk around the show to make connections and hand out cards.
ADVERTISING
- Create a radio spot for Spotify or Pandora.
- Run a TV spot on your local cable network.
- Sponsor a kids' soccer team.
- Create a low-budget Times-Square-like splash by booking a cheap digital billboard for a short run. Shoot a beauty shot of the sign at sunset, and turn it into a postcard mailer promoting your launch.
PROMOTIONAL GOODS
- Order embroidered logo caps or polo shirts and wear them.
- Integrate a promo item into a direct mail campaign: For example, a free Starbucks card if a prospect takes a survey.
- Send out “dimensional direct mail” to key prospects — often a promo item plus collateral piece with a clever message that links the item to the message.
- Or, keep soft doggy Frisbees on hand (with logo/tagline) to hand out when you’re out and about.
AT THE TOP OF YOUR LIST, WORK YOUR KARASS
- Invite your friends to a launch party.
- Contact old business connections from years ago.
- Go to your inbox and send a personal email to every viable contact.
- Ask five business acquaintances if they know someone who might use your service.
- And, don’t forget to call your mom! She’s a shameless promoter.
And finally, give your services away free!
My massage therapist friend, Gail Cole, explained how she started:
“A successful therapist counseled me, ‘Aways count the number of people you want to see each week, never the amount of money you need to make.’ So, initially, I set my goal at seven people per week. When I made that regularly, I upped it to ten, then thirteen. Whenever I was short of my goal, I would call people to come in for free treatments. It worked!”
Today, Gail is so booked, she’s not accepting new clients.
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