Jack Smith, Author at Smith Marketing

Why Your Brand Needs a Style Guide

by Jack Smith | Oct 3, 2022 | Brand Needs, Brand Story

What’s the point of a brand style guide?

Style guides lay out many of the details behind your company’s marketing materials, from fonts and formatting to grammar and link use. And they’re an essential asset when it comes to keeping your brand identity consistent — especially if your team works with freelancers or contract workers.

Here’s how to make your style guide shine, including three components it needs to have.

Benefits of a Style Guide

A style guide is an often underestimated factor in brand success. Done well, it offers major benefits to your marketing efforts, including ensuring your brand voice is always represented and taking the guesswork out of cross-channel consistency.

A style guide also helps you get ahead of many of the questions copywriters and editors may have about your preferences. That means less time and money wasted, and that’s always a good thing.

Visual vs. Editorial Considerations

Visual factors to cover include logo(s), color palettes, typography and the overall look and feel you want to achieve with your marketing materials. Editorial factors should cover things like comma use, tone, linking and words to use and avoid. You can include visual and editorial standards in a single guide, or create a separate guide for each.

Key Components of a Style Guide

Make sure to include these must-have components in your style guide:

Brand voice. Succinctly explain your brand voice, ethos, and tone. Keep it concise, but make sure it’s clear what you’re trying to convey with your content.
Formatting rules. Will headers be in the title case or the sentence case? Should sources be linked in the body copy or included as footnotes? These and other formatting rules should all be covered as needed for consistency across the board.
General style guidelines. Include whether you’ll be following AP style or Chicago style, so everyone knows where to look for additional guidance.

Have more style guide questions? Get in touch and let’s chat.

The Quick Guide to Customer Personas

by Jack Smith | Sep 19, 2022 | customer personas

Are you putting customer personas to work?

A customer persona is an incredibly helpful tool in marketing. But in order to get the full range of benefits, you need to make sure that you’re following all of the necessary do’s and don’ts that go into creating them.

Here’s what to know so you can craft customer personas that boost your marketing performance and drive more business your way.

What Is a Customer Persona?

A customer persona is a detailed overview of your target customer. This persona is not meant to correspond to one specific person but is rather a general composite sketch that adequately defines the relevant traits, challenges and preferences of your ideal audience.

Done well, a customer persona provides you with a blueprint from which to segment and target your core audience. And in many cases, you’ll create a few personas, one for each subgroup of individuals you’re trying to reach with your products or services.

Steps to Creating a Buyer Persona

Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining existing personas, follow these steps to make them as thorough as possible.

Research: Gather demographic data, behavioral data and anything else that will help you write your persona(s).
Analyze: Dig into the data to pull out key trends and patterns.
Segment: Based on what you learn, segment your audience into one or more persona groups.
Write: Create a document that covers all need-to-know information about a specific persona, including their name, interests, position, pain points and anything else that’s relevant.

Customer Persona Mistakes to Avoid

Here are a few don’ts to keep in mind as you focus on writing the best possible customer personas:

Don’t segment on character traits alone. (Use pain points instead.).
Don’t let bias seep into your personas.
Don’t include useless information.

Need more guidance? Get in touch and let’s talk.

How (and Why) to Write Better Alt Text

by Jack Smith | Sep 8, 2022 | Copywriting, Marketing

Are you using alt text correctly?

Alt text (aka “alternative text,” “alt attributes” or “alt descriptions”) is beneficial for both accessibility and SEO. But a lot of brands aren’t using it right, which can lead to issues with user experience and search engine performance.

Make sure you meet the mark. Learn more about the role of alt text and how to write it well:

What Is Alt Text?

Alt text is written copy that corresponds with the images on your website. Unlike captions, alt text offers a literal explanation of what each image contains, and is not immediately visible to most users.

Major benefits include:

Accessibility: Alt text provides a description that can be read aloud by a screen reader, thus providing a cohesive experience for users with visual impairments or those who cannot get images to load.
SEO: Alt text allows search engine crawlers to index your web pages more effectively and boosts your ranking potential.

How to Write Good Alt Text

In order for alt text to serve its purpose, it has to follow a few simple rules:

Keep it concise. Be as succinct and to the point as possible. This is not the time for fluff or flowery language.
Avoid keyword stuffing. It’s good to add a keyword or two, but don’t overdo it or try to stuff in keywords where they don’t fit.
Skip decorative images. If a graphic isn’t relevant for users (i.e., stylistic border images), forgo alt text there since it will interrupt the flow of the page.

Other Resources

Want to learn more? Here are some additional resources that may be helpful to you:

The A11Y Project
Codecademy, What is Digital Accessibility?
Digital.gov, An Introduction to Accessibility

For any other questions, get in touch, and let’s chat!

How to Write Your Brand Story

by Jack Smith | Aug 22, 2022 | Brand Story, Digital Publishing, Marketing

Are you telling the right story about your brand?

Your business’s narrative plays a huge role in how customers perceive it. It’s essential that the story you tell is well-aligned with your values, your objectives and your overall brand mission — and it’s important to be the one controlling this narrative. Here’s what a good brand story can do, plus tips for making yours a success.

What Is a Brand Story?

A brand story is the narrative that exists around your company. It includes your origin story, of course, but also goes deeper to encapsulate things like your values and priorities, as well as what you’re trying to achieve with your product or service.

Ultimately, this story helps humanize your brand and gives your customers something to connect to, trust and empathize with. It also serves as a cornerstone of your brand identity and a thread of connection tying together all of your marketing channels.

Elements of a Good Brand Story

All brand stories are not created equal. Some elements that separate the good stories from the not-so-good stories include:

Authenticity
Credibility
Personability
Consistency

Also key is to make sure that your story has a human element since audiences are more likely to connect with people than corporations.

Tips for Writing Your Brand Story

Whether you’re starting from scratch or making improvements, here are some quick tips for making your brand story shine.

Have a well-defined message. A brand story isn’t just a timeline of events. Your story should have a real purpose behind it and should be rooted in establishing and sustaining a solid brand identity.
Highlight adversity. All good stories have some sort of conflict in them. Be true to real events, but do incorporate an example of how your brand faced — and overcame — adversity.
Keep it simple. Your audience doesn’t have time to read a novel about your brand. Keep things simple and succinct.

Need more advice on building a killer brand? Get in touch.

Is it time to market in the metaverse?

by Jack Smith | Aug 4, 2022 | Marketing, Metaverse

Any new social media platform offers marketing potential to brands. And the metaverse, touted by some as the future of the internet, is no different. However, that doesn’t mean it’s worth investing in just yet.

Here’s your quick guide to the metaverse — including why you can probably hold off on your metaverse marketing strategy (for now, at least).

What Is the Metaverse?

The metaverse exists at the intersection of virtual reality and social media. Users engage as avatars in a fully digital world that mirrors the physical world, complete with shared virtual spaces and the ability to shop and engage with brands.

No one really knows how the metaverse will evolve, but there are already some pretty obvious pros and cons for marketers. Advantages include widespread reach and the ability to build stronger and more personable connections with an online audience. As for drawbacks, there are some (warranted) concerns about privacy and security, as well as the fact that we don’t know yet how popular it will eventually get.

Marketing in the Metaverse

Brands interested in virtual and augmented reality will likely have a ton of opportunities waiting for them in the metaverse. Marketing in the space will be interactive, community-based and highly personalized, with a strong influencer focus and lots of new ways to weave in social commerce.

So, Should You Get Started?

It’s probably not that important right now. For most brands, the metaverse has the potential to be something big, but it’s not there yet. So keep an eye on it but don’t feel like you’re behind if you haven’t gotten involved yet. That being said: If the metaverse excites you or seems like a natural fit for your brand, it never hurts to explore the metaverse.

Have more questions? Let’s chat.

Why Your Brand Needs a Style Guide

The Quick Guide to Customer Personas

How (and Why) to Write Better Alt Text

How to Write Your Brand Story

Is it time to market in the metaverse?

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