Why Words Matter
In today’s digital economy, your website is a living, breathing part of your brand. However, marketing messaging is often missing from the website simply because a business owner wears too many hats and the website is either outsourced or thrown together at the last minute. As we shift our focus from in-person sales to online customer engagement, it has become necessary to build a story that reaches your customer at earlier points in their journey. The words you use to tell this story can have an enormous effect on a customer’s relationship with your brand. Therefore, choosing the right keywords to use in your brand’s story matters more than ever.
In the past, keywords were king. All a business had to do to rank higher on Google was jam-pack their website with every keyword under the sun. Nowadays, things are more sophisticated, and users (as well as Google) value a cohesive online presence, with selective keywords, reinforced across all your marketing materials. Marketing is all about reaching the right customer with the right message at the right time. So how do we get the right message to the right customer? By ensuring consistent and cohesive messaging no matter where your customer reaches you.
All brand messaging should flow from your website. But how do you choose which aspects of your business to focus on? You start by identifying what is important to your ideal customer and build your brand from there. Take a look at how a small truck stop restaurant off the interstate in Nebraska connects with their customer base by appealing to their sense of family. Their marketing message begins with a humble story on the back of their menus about “Grandma Max” Bosselman and how she and her family took her little truck stop restaurant and built it into the Bosselman empire that spans across the midwest. Their entire customer base can identify with values like family, hard work, and Midwestern American success that are evident in the way they brand themselves. That family branding is evident in every industry they have grown into, from restaurants to auto mechanics to oil and gas.
Marketers will then take these words that you have defined and use specialized tools, customer experiences (reviews, testimonials), and other methods to identify those core values and learn the top keywords customers use in their web search that lands them on your brand’s website, and how those keywords can compare to their closest competitors. They can compare keywords with your competitors which helps give insight not only on how similar companies market themselves, but how to differentiate your business from them. Finding the right words that set your brand apart and influence customers’ feelings about your business is the ultimate growth hack. This is absolutely key in controlling the narrative around your brand. It is the foundation for creating a cohesive message for the entirety of the buyer’s journey.
At the end of the day, what we are trying to impress upon you is that the words you use to describe your business will have a significant impact on the way customers feel about your brand from beginning to end. Choosing the right ones is vital and these words create a cohesive story from your website to your marketing to your customer retention. It can be the difference between better sales next quarter or being in the red. Come back soon for our next post in this series where we’ll discuss what words matter and delve into the needs analysis process.
About the Author:
Stephanie is an accomplished Senior Executive, Advisor, and Board Member with more than 15 years of success across the information services and computer & network security industries. Her broad areas of expertise include customer relationship management, competitive analysis, marketing communications, and go-to-market strategy. Stephanie holds a leadership position as the Cybersecurity and Cloud Technology Marketing Advisor for AlphaSights and Advisory Cloud where she coordinates with clients and partners to identify areas of collaboration, spark growth innovation, and deliver value.
Stephanie is dually-based in Washington D.C. and the Bay Area.