How to build a Climate Tech brand identity and platform
This is the fifth post in our Ultimate Guide To Building A Climate Tech Brand.
You'll get the most out of this guide if your desire to scale your brand is exceeded only by your willingness to execute on the concepts within this guide.
This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of branding, from your brand’s foundations to strategic messaging for sustainability startups to positioning yourself as a thought leader in the emerging impact economy to building your relationship with the press.
Overview
This guide will showcase 7 major sections including:
Brand Foundations: How to define your mission, vision and storytelling narrative
Market Segmentation: How to define your audience, position yourself and choose the right target audience
Strategic Messaging: How to communicate sustainability and value simultaneously
Brand Identity and Platform: How to build an identity and digital footprint which represents your potential impact
Thought Leadership: How to position yourself as a leader in the emerging impact ecosystem
Public Relations: How to leverage public relations to build your authority
Building a startup brand identity for maximum impact
The first step to being a successful entrepreneur is coming up with an idea.
The first step towards creating a successful business is building your brand.
Once you have your brand manifesto and your strategic narratve down on paper and you know exactly who your targeting and how, it’s time to focus on building your brand’s identity.
There is a logic to having all of these pieces in place before you begin on your brand’s identity. For instance, your narrative feeds into your website copy and your manifesto into your “About Page”. The same goes for your customer funnel: How can you create content which captures your beachhead market if you don’t know who your target audience is?
This step is, for most entrepreneurs, something that they just do.
They don’t think so much about it because they don’t have time or it isn’t considered a priority. What usually happens is that an entrepreneur has an idea, they build an MVP, then they build a website and fill it with information about the MVP. It’s classic and it’s understandable. But later down the line, when you go to start raising capital, pitching your solution to accelerators or apply for a grant, a platform without any of these elements integrated will hold you back.
Then in a last-minute scramble, they realize that they’re already two steps behind and they revisit their brand identity and reconsider whether it represents them.
You can recognise this by the following sentence, “We’ll get to it once we get some capital.”
Whether this is the case for you or if you’re starting from scratch, having those elements in place is going to make building a strong brand much easier. This is especially true if you decide to have a designer to build your identity and website because the core information already exists and can be handed over without a thought.
Why is this important?
Every time anyone has an interaction with your company, it leaves an impression. The only thing in your hands is whether you take ownership or leave it up to chance. Whether the impression is “they seem like they’re passionate and in control of their future” or “they’re inconsistent and they’ll never get anywhere”, is up to you.
By taking control of the interactions which your brand has with the public, you can communicate your worth – and potential impact – subconsciously as well as consciously. This is especially necessary when you’re interacting with potential partners or investors. When a decision is being made on whether to work with your company, branding can be a differentiating factor. Your brand is the perception of your company to the world.
What is an impactful brand identity?
A brand identity is how your brand presents itself. It’s the channels you choose to use to communicate, it’s your business cards and the design of your office. And it all stems from your visual identity, your tone of voice and your brand’s character.
If your solution is the most forward-thinking and innovative X that there is, but if two other companies are offering similar services, how does the purchaser choose? What if your website looks like it comes from 2010? How can you then present yourself as forward-thinking or innovative? This kind of disconnect is especially a problem when it comes to impact entrepreneurs who think their methodology or their innovation will carry them further than the way that they present themselves.
People fall ill to an inherently human trait; they make choices based on gut instinct. This is especially when the metrics and price are similar.
If you define that you’re both on the same path, then it’s a simple choice, but if your brand subconsciously communicates something that puts doubt into the head of the customer — perhaps something as simple as the fact that you haven’t put much pride into your branding — then it can kill the transaction before it begins along with any future transactions and any goodwill that customer might have spread.
In the long run, your customers are only human and they have the power to change the direction of your entrepreneurial journey.
Crafting a distinct and memorable brand identity stems from the other foundation elements. Your logo, your website, your business cards. They all project a certain image of you.
The message is intrinsic but it’s real whether you like it or not. By taking this into your own hands, you have the potential to influence all of your future business endeavours solely by the creation of an image which clearly shows how your brand fits the scene.
Brand personality for impactful brands
But before you get started, it’s good to take a minute and consider this; branding and storytelling go hand in hand. You cannot tell a story without the main character and the main character is always your company. Nine times out of ten, a story always follows the same structure. Or so says Dutch storytelling agency Lemon Scented Tea. The agency believes that every story follows a similar structure which is engineered to engage an audience.
The structure goes like this: There is a hero and the hero fights to achieve a goal. At his disposal are various means. Standing in the way is an adversary, who interferes with the hero’s quest to achieve the goal. This is the moment conflict is born. The audience’s interest piques and they become sympathetic to the cause.
In the context of your startup’s story, you’re the hero. The adversary, however, can be anything from a societal rule, a competitor or a persistent public prejudice. When the conflict emerges, the hero, your company, relies on its personality and winning character traits to push on and succeed. These character traits are endemic to your brand. For example, a creator brand uses creativity, imaginational, non-linear thinking and nonconformity to overcome adversary, whilst an explorer brand will use independence, bravery, nonconformity and self-sufficiency to overcome the same challenge.
Write your brand’s personality in this context. What is your adversary? What character traits do you have that will enable you to succeed? Once identified you can then apply them to the different battles that your start-up will likely fight.
Visual identity for impactful brands
“Once you find a character, new or existing, truly in sync with your brand, it improves your team’s understanding of your company, the public perception of your company and, ultimately, builds trust among customers,”
- AdWeek.
Once you have considered your brand’s personality, then the next step is to focus on visual identity. Firstly, I’d just like to put it out there; don’t be that sustainable brand using forest green as your primary colour, unless you are sure it is the persona you want to portray. The “sustainability” brand has been done to death.
A visual identity is the combination of the colours you use together with the typography, the logo, the imagery and any physical assets your brand takes. Given its importance, it is something for which I recommend the use of a professional designer. Why not get it right from the start?
What I will introduce however is the psychology of colours and branding. Take AdWeek’s brand archetype wheel as an example. On this wheel, you can see a myriad of colours in combination with different character traits that correlate subconsciously in your mind. If you’ve decided that your brand’s personality is explorative, independent and non-conforming, then according to the wheel, your predominant colour maybe green. Choosing one colour based on this list is a good way to start and then complement it with a second, less intense colour.
Researches explain the phenomenon in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, saying; “like a carefully chosen brand name, colour carries intrinsic meaning that becomes central to the brand’s identity, contributes to brand recognition and communicates the desired image.”
Choose branding colours which complement each other. I would recommend choosing two or three colours; one primary and one or two secondary to use in your communications.
Typography
Typography, the fonts that you use and the way those fonts are laid out, is hugely important to the branding process. Fonts send a message to your audience about who you are as a brand. Are you old fashioned or modern and quirky? What’s it going to be like working with you? How open to innovation are you?
Your font can tell a story every time someone interacts with it, about who you are as a brand and what they can expect from working with you. Typography is important to knuckle down in the beginning because the last thing you want to be doing is chopping and changing fonts. Just like using Times New Roman or Comic Sans will send a different approach to if you choose to go with Helvetica for instance.
If you’re an early-stage impact start-up, you probably don’t have the time or the inclination to think that much about fonts. I must admit, it’s not my favourite thing either. I simply go to Google Fonts and choose one Serif and one Sans Serif font that compliment each other. I use the Serif for text and the San Serif, in all caps for headings. Simple. It’s a quick way to win.
Logo
Your logo is the face of your business. It’s usually the first visual interaction anyone has with your business and a cleverly designed logo can edge itself into someone’s mind, but a poorly designed one can be a stain on your company. Even worse than a poorly designed logo is the logo that fails to differentiate. I consistently come across “eco-friendly” logos with a brand name and a green tree in the background. If you want your logo to help you stand apart from the competition, it’s only common sense to make something different. Thus, I would suggest splashing out on a logo. With your brand story and ingredients, you should be able to track one down for a small fee. If you’re not a designer and you can afford it, don’t consider trying to make one yourself.
Imagery
What images should you use in your communications? I’ve worked with brands before that didn’t have a style guideline for imagery and as a result, there was no continuity in their communications. There were high-res black and white images, next to cartoons, next to cropped landscapes. It made no sense.
This reflected badly not only on their design skills – they presented themselves as a design firm – but also made others question their ability to deliver. Choosing how you present images, the shapes that you use frequently and your form will keep you in check when it comes to communicating. Ask yourself “does this image represent us” and if the answer is no, then why are we using it?
The best way to do this is to pick a single style and stick with it. For example, in all the images on my website, I’ve taken most of the colour out and put the contrast up. Others may use only images of nature or aerial shots. Whatever you choose, play with the colours a bit to make everything look continuous.
Tone of Voice
Just like your customers expect to see a clear and consistent logo and colour scheme across all of your brand’s communications, they expect you to don a similar tone of voice as well. Your brand should have a specific tone that reflects the values you hold and your ethos. Maybe it’s professional, innovative, tech-driven or maybe it’s humorous. But when a brand is inconsistent, it can confuse people and allow them to see through your brand.
To get there, I suggest you analyse your competitors and map them out on a whiteboard. What kind of words do they use? What do they say and what do they imply? Are they disruptors or are they content being the foundation? This stems from your brand’s position in the marketplace. Also, it’s important to identify how your customers speak, what language they use and try to implement that into your tone of voice. For instance, if your audiences are casual and you’re too formal then they might consider you to be a bit too high-brow for them.
Keep in mind that you can develop specific personas for specific audiences. Another example are the difference between Tesla’s tweets and it’s website’s news section — and I know I keep using Tesla as an example but I can’t resist as they’re so on point here.
“Model X made history when it became the first and only SUV to ever receive a 5-star safety rating in every category and subcategory from the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.” vs. “Let’s all take a moment and think of our friends and family who can’t watch videos, sing karaoke and play videogames with their car”
When choosing your tone of voice, go back to that first story you wrote, the values you pulled out of it and consider how they translate to speech. Your brand’s tone of voice is simply going to embody the personality of your company in written words.
To define your brand’s tone of voice, gather samples of content released by other brands who you admire and ask yourself, “what do I like about them?” “Why do they speak to me?” Set them aside for later.
Referring to your brand personality, consider a handful of words that represent your brand’s character traits. They should be adjectives which describe that personality. Refrain from using words like “innovative” as the purpose of this exercise is to broadcast what is actionable. Also, make sure the words are not in contrast with one another or with your brand’s general personality.
One of the companies I used to work with consistently instructed me to be more poetic in my writing, yet more scientific and creative at the same time. It was a very confusing experience which at the end of the day, none of us was happy with and which produced very little product that saw the light of day. Having consistent guidelines is important to help in content production.
Your Digital Assets
Once you have the foundations of your brand marked out and have solidified your brand’s identity, it’s time to create the assets which underpin your startup.
Likely, you’ve already got a LinkedIn profile, a Twitter profile and Facebook profile and you’ve probably even written something on all of them. Perhaps you’ve even posted the same link to a Guardian Environment article on all three. Copy. Paste. So why hasn’t Fast Company called yet?
I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear; it doesn’t work like that. Without the proper assets in place, it’s unlikely that you’re going to get far in your communication strategy. One thing at a time, as they say. In this section, I’m going to give you an overview of the strategy that I usually go through with my clients.
So many entrepreneurs jump the gun on this entirely. They begin to communicate without having the basic structure in place to make that communication effective. If you’re one of them, you’re not alone. Actually, the majority of impact entrepreneurs struggle with the same issues. And as an impact entrepreneur, you’re more likely to be a scientist, an academic or a Delft University genius than a marketeer. But getting your online footprint right is one of the single biggest advantages you can give your startup.
Your digital footprint comprises of three main components; your website, your social feeds and external links. Each carries a certain weight and all must exist in equilibrium to build a trusted brand. But there’s an order in which you should build that follows a similar pattern.
The Website
Your website is the best salesperson you have. It’s a 21st Century business card, office and storefront rolled into one. It should be where the selling happens, not in your content beyond. If your customer or target audience has arrived there, it’s because you caught their attention. But will you leave an impression? Or will they stroll past and move along in their purchasing journey?
Having a website that is in line with your business’ values and both visual and verbal identity is a key pillar to success in building your brand. To do so, you need to display information relevant to your guest and let them know they’re in the right place. For every website, there is a distinct order in which you should display information. When you follow this order, you’re following a logical narrative which people expect to find information. But before diving into what that is, let’s go back to psychology.
You have on average, eight seconds to capture someone’s attention. That’s roughly the same attention span of a goldfish. And we live in a world where attention is the greatest currency there is.
We earn it. We spend it. We value it. And sometimes, we lose it. And that’s a problem for impact entrepreneurs.
You don’t have the luxury to go into details about your circularity methodology or your technology stack. People simply don’t have enough attention span to care. They care about themselves, their needs and their problems. So to reduce how quickly someone encounters and then leaves your site, design, comprehensibility and a focus on problem-solving are key.
Your website visitor should be able to figure out what your website is about within the first few seconds of landing on the page. In this first glance, they will see your design, logo, slogan and one sentence of text on the homepage of your site. This is the equivalent of a digital elevator pitch. If the prospect browsing your site doesn’t know within the first eight seconds exactly what they can expect from you, then they will almost certainly leave.
Going back to the two common hang-ups which impact entrepreneurs can have when communicationg — scientific or social — we can see how each has a negative effect specifically in the context of our website.
The scientific or academic route is a classic impact entrepreneur character trait. Because those tackling some of the world’s greatest problems head on are generally pretty damn intelligent, they tend to think their target audience is the same. Unfortunately, when overtly scientific language confuses your website’s visitor, they simply leave and go somewhere less overwhelming. Industry-specific jargon has no place on your website, especially if your target audience comes from outside the sustainability bubble.
In a business context, social justice warriors also turn the audience off. “Save the whales...buy our product” is an all to common mantra that doesn’t tend to convert customers so well. And your website is essentially useless if it’s not helping you convert customers. Socialites also struggle to niche down.
They use open language, broad branding and stock imagery as it appeals to a wider audience. However, as we really need to get across — within an incredibly short time frame —what we can do for our target audience. Our opinion on the latest IPCC report or a Guardian Environment article unfortunately don’t get that message across.
Your website is there to help you convert clients, showcase your case studies and elevate your thought leadership.
When you create content for your website, always ask yourself if this content is contributing to a two-way dialogue.
Content should always add value and solve problems for your audience. It’s not a one-way monologue. It’s a conversation. So when your audience — the person on the other side of the screen — doesn’t understand you or doesn’t see themself in the receiving role, they’ll switch off from your message.
After all, you’re trying to hold their attention and talk to them; not talk at them. You must make it as easy as humanly possible for your target audience to get their hands on the information that will convince them to use your solution. To flip both of these concepts you need to know what language your customer speaks and what problems they have.
It is incredibly important here that you don’t talk about your brand from your perspective, but rather focus on what the customer needs to hear. Answer their pain points. Let them know that you have a solution.
There is a simple criterion here: The Golden Circle format. Start with why you do what you do, then consider how you solve your target audience’s (call them out) pain point and then simply state what you do. These three things must be seen in the first eight seconds of someone landing on your website.
To hold attention and convert visitors into leads, it’s up to you to make sure that your user has the best experience possible on your website. But keep in mind that websites are scanned and not read. As a result, you should keep the overly complex language and industry jargon to the minimum. A website must be:
Usable. Site must be easy to navigate, easily approachable and logical
Informative. User must be getting something of value on your site
Findable. Content needs to be locatable and navigable offsite and onsite
Useful. Content should be original and fulfil a need
Credible. Users must believe and trust what you tell them
Actionable. When a potential customer comes to your site, give them a way to take action to solve their pain points.
Open. Reduce barriers to entry as much as possible
To plan out the structure of your website, you should focus on keeping a three-phase structure of content. The typical tri-layered website structure is as follows:
Home Page
About — Services — Blog — Contact
Blog Content
1. Home Page
The first layer should be simple and easy to understand for your target audience. It should answer their needs and address thei r pain points whilst giving them social proof that you’re up to the job. This is an example of a high converting UX designed home page:
Above the Fold. Before you scroll down, you should see either a Hero Image or a full-page video banner with Text over it. The text should address the prospect and tell them that they are in the right place. For instance, my target audience is impact entrepreneurs, so above the fold, my website states, “We help impact entrepreneurs, sustainable scale-ups and transformative leaders build their brand and become thought leaders in the emerging impact ecosystem”.
Golden Circle. Next, follow up with your Golden Circle followed by deeper examples, social proof and a clear, consice call to action:
Purpose. (WHY) written concisely.
Tagline. (HOW) strongly worded which shows the benefits your target users will get.
Product. (WHAT) Outline your product so that the visitor knows what you’re talking about.Descriptions. Create a description that’s a bit more in-depth than your tagline that shows how you’re solving a problem for your target market.
Visuals. A video between 30 – 120 seconds can take place of a description. This can be also placed higher in the website to replace your company’s Golden Circle.
Call to Action. Sign up to email list, join the platform, get a free trial, download your latest whitepaper
Testimonials for Social Proof. You should ideally be posting three testimonials with photographs of the individuals giving them and a link to their company or organization. Having testimonials provides social proof that what you’re offering, works.
Client or Partner Banner: Further displaying social proof.
Thought Leadership: Seen in the Press section/Blog articles. Here you can put either article from your most impressive blog content or a section linking to your most recent press articles. Press is valued as social proof above your blog, so if you have finally got that interview with Fast Company, this is where it should live.
Footer. Add social media links & contact details.
2. About, Services, Blog, Contact
The second layer should provide an extra layer of complexity. You should assume that if your visitor has made it there from the home page, they are at least intrigued by your solution.
This is where you can get more specific about the industry that you’re active in, expand on your purpose and the greater societal trends which are driving your existence. Here you can go in-depth on WHAT you do.
Outline your services, define your product. Chances are when someone is on this page, they’re here to find out if they can use your product.
To make it as easy and actionable as possible, give prices, show videos, add personality.
3. Long-Form Pillar Content
The third layer is where you can get into your in-depth analysis of your subject matter.
This layer consists of services, knowledge, insights in the form of articles, whitepapers, e-books, blogs and news. Anything to act as proof of why you are an expert on the subject at hand.
This not only helps your social reach but it also plays into your content and SEO strategy. Begin with the major topics which your business wants to be known for and build off this.
Go in-depth and always link back to your pillar content in blogs, etc. Blog content should be titled with headlines which answer questions. This is simply because that’s how people search on the internet. For example, say you’ve written a great piece of long-form content about bees in cities.
If your headline reads “Why bees are important for Smart Cities” then it’s more likely to show up in Google over “Apoidea Ointment: Lo-Fi Smart City Natural Capital”.
Whilst the second may be more intriguing for a magazine article, it’s going to be lost in the deep blue depths of Google’s search algorithm.
That doesn’t mean you have to make the article boring, just that the titles have to appease the search engine gods. The article can be whatever you want it to be. It simply means that there is no point in creating something that is purely for yourself to enjoy. And by utilizing SEO, you can make sure that your content brings value to people out there. You need to give them something that they will find useful, entertaining or funny. Engage with them. Tell them a story. And build from there.
For startups, it’s hard to rank at the top of Google for keywords. It’s even harder if you don’t optimize your content. The general strategy I tend to use is to write four or five long-form articles — pillar content — and focus on optimizing them first. A pillar page broadly covers a particular topic and cluster content should address a specific keyword related to that topic in-depth.
For example, you might write a pillar page about renewable energy — a vast topic in itself — and have multiple pieces of topic-specific cluster content about electric vehicles, batteries and household solar within the article.
The customer funnel
“Content is King,” they say. And it’s true.
Once you’ve made and optimised your home page, unfortunately, it’s not time to sit back and relax. It’s time to produce. Content appears at all three stages of the sales cycle.
Top of funnel content is what you’re likely to find on social media channels. It attempts to amplify your reach, to entertain, be informative and answer your customer’s questions about a particular pain point. It’s the “ah-ha” moment that we have when we’re scrolling through our social feeds.
Middle-of-funnel content is more in-depth. It can be anything from a whitepaper to email marketing, webinars or live events. The purpose of middle-of-funnel content is to nurture your leads until they’re ready to buy.
Bottom of funnel content is more serious business. It’s the type of content that a potential buyer would show to their boss during a pitch on why they should work with you. It’s your portfolio and it’s case studies which help the buyer feel empowered to make the right decision. This next section is going to focus on the types of content you will need to host on your website.
Top of Funnel Assets
The idea of a funnel is quite simple. It’s the entire customer journey from the introduction, to how you nurture those leads to closing a deal. Top-of-Funnel content helps introduce your brand to the marketplace.
It’s the awareness phase.
At the top-of-funnel, your content should aim to inform your target audience that you exist and about topics related to your brand. Its primary goal is not focused on selling. You should focus on understanding what type of content your target audience responds to and create a constant stream of it.
This is not the place to create something and let it fall to the back of your website.
Instead, it should be a rolling machine. For example, if you’re a company that focuses on measuring impact, you could create content that relates to the impact ecosystem, how to measure impact and why investors must see impact measurement.
One of the most classic examples of this type of content is the research paper in exchange for an email address. As soon as the stranger enters their email address, they transform into a lead. The following is a list of top-of-funnel content which can be hosted on your website:
Guides. Guides are essentially step-by-step long-form articles which help your potential clients solve their pain points. Usually hosted on a company’s blog page, they’re a valuable asset for organic search. You can usually identify a guide online by the title “The Ultimate Guide to X” or “How To Develop Your Sustainability Strategy: A Start To Finish Guide” or “Ten Steps To Transform Your Business”. When writing a guide, consider how you go about your business and write it out for a customer who wants to do the same. For instance, if you have an online 3D printing business, your guide could be The Ultimate Guide To 3D Printing Your First Product and then name each step in the process.
Events & Webinars. Events and webinars are fantastic ways to engage your target audience in a non-sales environment. Whilst they are relatively different in practice, the theory behind why they work is fundamentally the same. They put a name and a personality to a face; and we’re much more likely to trust a person than a company. What’s more, we’re programmed to trust the recommendations of people much more than a brand itself. An event can influence, inspire and impact people’s lives. It can be a talking point or a point of assertion for people. In turn, they’ll likely begin to believe in your brand and share their experience with their trusted peers. More on this in Chapter 10.
Research Studies. One of the best ways to have your content promoted for you — and earn you backlinks from other websites at the same time — are research studies. This is arguably one of the most powerful approaches to drive traffic to your website through both press and organic channels. Research can include a survey of your potential clients and report or their client and focus on a number of topics including pain points, opinions and forward-looking objectives. Consultancies use this tactic a lot and you can recognize them in headlines like “90% of CEOs believe in X”. Research studies are not only a great way to establish your business as a thought leader, they are also fantastic ways to engage your potential clients in a valuable and non-sales manner.
To optimize the content that you have created for your top-of-funnel, you must consider your target audience’s pain points. Consider how they ask search engines about them. For instance, when a customer wants help becoming circular in their waste streams, they search for “how to create a circular waste stream” rather than a brand name “CE Consultancy”. To give your results the best chance to top the list, it’s important to make sure you’ve got content that answers these questions.
That’s the basic principle of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short. It asks, what are your customers searching for and where you fit into that? Often if you’re selling something new, we believe that people are going to use new words to find us. This is not true at all. We must find the words which our customers are using to look for our solutions and own them, rather than creating a whole new way to describe our solution.
To make a start on this, all blog content should align with your keywords. Make a list of the words which you believe your target customers will use to search for you. For some help use; Scrape suggested keywords from multiple sources, Google Trends is another great free option to explore. Another good way is to go to the websites of your most successful competitors and see what words they’re using to start you off. Incorporate these keywords naturally (about 1-3% of your written content) to maximize your keyword search results.
For your website’s blog, you should be directly answering the issues that your customers have. Save the more conceptual stuff for your personal blog. Remember — it’s about the customer. I’m going to keep on saying that until it sinks in because it took me far too long to wrap my head around it. Hopefully, I can convey the importance of the message to you so that it sinks in a bit easier.
Middle of Funnel Assets
Middle-of-funnel content nurtures your leads until they’re ready to buy. They’ve been introduced to your brand. They’re leads. But they’re not ready to purchase yet?
This is the type of content that is made to entertain, to build confidence in your brand and to improve the client’s perception of your solution. In short, it should build the lead’s intent to buy.
Middle-of-funnel content is educational and entertaining. This form of content marketing can also include email, but in this section, we’re just focusing on assets for your website. We’ll get into email marketing later. The following are three examples of middle-of-funnel assets:
Whitepapers & eBooks. A whitepaper or eBook is usually hosted on a website and promoted through both native and paid channels on social media and search engines. They aim to help a prospective client solve a particular pain point in exchange for client information. They’ll often be sent in the form of a PDF to your email address after signing up. You’ll want to package your solution in a way that your buyer persona will actively be looking for on the web.
Case Studies. Case studies are an in-depth look at your portfolio. Before buying, 9 out of 10 people are looking for proof before making a purchasing decision. For instance, I recently signed up for a free trial with Mighty Networks to build an online community. Every few weeks, I receive an email from them with a link to an article. The article goes into detail about the strategy one of their clients used to create an online community. As I’ve not yet become a paying customer, these are relevant for me because I want to achieve the same results as those who they’re featuring. Each email I receive, I grow one step closer to becoming a customer.
A case study should follow the structure of 1) Introduction — where you identify the client’s key problems, 2) background information — where you set the scene, 3) evaluation of the case at hand, 4) the solutions which your business implemented, 5) and the direct result this had on your client’s business challenges. They should be accompanied by personal anecdotes from your clients and outside statistics to support your argument along the way. I always recommend that my clients’ host case studies on the front page along with client testimonials (in addition to having a dedicated page for them in your portfolio).Social Storytelling. When someone has already been introduced to your brand, a great tactic is to let them into the inside life of the business. This can mean interviewing your clients or employees and asking them about things that matter to them. Hosted on your website’s blog and cut into short form for social media, this can be powerful content to engage during the nurturing stage. It gives personality to a brand. Social storytelling can be either raw and unedited content or a short-form documentary. The main thing is that it lets the viewer in behind the scenes of your business, vision or mission and gives them a feeling of being part of the story. You can also ask your employees to contribute to creating this content which boosts their personal brands as well as giving them a feeling of being valued in their positions.
Bottom of Funnel Assets
Bottom-of-funnel content increases transparency in the buying process. It helps your buyers feel like they are making the right choice by choosing your solution or innovation. The role of this type of content is to nurture prospects and customers to aid in sales conversion. Without it, you may attract prospective clients to your website but they may leave empty-handed. One of the main reasons your website fails to retain the convincing elements of the sale is inconsistency in the message flow, insufficient proof of concepts or insufficient social proof. Providing the following type of content will help your startup increase its chances of conversion at a crucial stage in the sales cycle:
Portfolio. A product portfolio is a crucial element of your bottom-of-funnel strategy as it helps the company determine the types of projects you’ve done in the past and whether you’ll be able to fulfil their specific needs. I like to group my client’s portfolios into sections which satisfy some clients needs and get more specific the deeper you go through them.
Customer Testimonials and Reviews. Potential prospects want to see what your previous clients have said about you. Having a set ready can help them in their buyer journey, but they should be quantitative where possible. When you’ve finished a project, ask your clients for a review and you can always offer to make the process easier by writing it yourself. Just make sure you get it checked off. Alternatively, you can always reuse the reviews and testimonials from your LinkedIn and your case studies to be stand alone quotes.
Impact Measurement. This is an important function in any Climate Tech or impact-driven business. Yet it’s also one of the most elusive. Measuring your impact as a startup is a difficult and complex concept and one that can cost more than most startups can afford. Yet tools are popping up like Climate Impact Forecast — used by several Climate KIC startups — which can help entrepreneurs measure their projected impact.
Pricing Guidelines & Estimates. Pricing is about knowing your customer. It can be one of the determining factors of your business and it can also lock you into less-than-desirable contracts when you get it wrong. It’s normal then that entrepreneurs don’t want to put prices on their website. However, the fact is that visitors want to know — or at least have a ballpark idea — on whether or not they can afford to use your solution. The key here is confidence in your brand; if you believe that you should be charging what you charge and believe that you’ve demonstrated that with value to your prospective clients, then you should have either a pricing guideline or at least an estimate of how much they will spend on your website. Ultimately, it saves time, avoids the awkward budget questions later on down the line and shows that you’re confident in your ability to sell for that price.
Tutorials & Live Demonstrations. Lastly, tutorials and live demonstrations are a great way to help your new clients see what they’ll get by engaging with you. By taking them through your product or service at an execution level, you can smooth out or directly address any of their concerns in real-time. A product demo shows your customer how the product works visually and enables them to experience a more expensive product at no cost.
As with all content, you can always be creative when making bottom-of-funnel content. For example, take SodaStream’s 3D product demos which are located around the world including Tel Aviv airport. The demos include a cage which holds 10,657 used plastic bottles; the equivalent of one family’s plastic consumption over a five year period. The installations are so successful because they show the huge amount of waste produced graphically, strengthening SodaStream’s overall value proposition.
All of these forms of content can also be reused and repurposed across the entire customer journey. For instance, you can turn a product tutorial into a YouTube video or cut it up into shorter clips with highlights for Instagram. You can also turn each case study into a press release or a blog. By repurposing this content, you can save yourself a lot of time and effort in the creation process.
Social Media Channels
I’m asked by impact entrepreneurs if they should be using Facebook or Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter. But then there’s TikTok and there’s email marketing and Medium and your blog and then what? And what about Facebook? Isn’t Facebook dying? Honestly, I have no idea what the right answer is.
There is no one right answer. All I can say is this, as a mostly B2B business, you probably have at least three target audiences. Your customer, your peers and investors. If you’re a B2B company, all three hang out on LinkedIn.
If you’re B2C, then it’s more likely that you’ll find your audience on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook or other more casual social media sites. If you’re into journalism, your peers are more likely to be on Twitter and Medium.
For individual professionals and B2B brands, I believe LinkedIn is the most useful social network. It has the largest network of professionals on the channel and they’re active.
This creates a unique and unparalleled way to directly contact your target audience. People are there for work and they’re engaged and open to seeing direct marketing from businesses, whereas on Twitter and Facebook and to a lesser extent Instagram, that seems like an intrusion of privacy.
One thing is for sure, whereas traditional marketing is a drain on your funds, social media marketing is a low-cost alternative that gives you a direct line to current and prospective customers. And each channel has its particular benefits. Facebook has close to 2 billion monthly active users, YouTube has over 1 billion users, Instagram and LinkedIn have nearly half a billion and Twitter has just over 300 million users each month. In the following section, we will look into more specific stats of each site.
Facebook is the most used social media platform. The average Facebook user spends nearly an hour every day on the platform. Whilst the social network has made Facebook advertising solutions an increasingly valuable business tool organic reach is at a minimum. That means if you want someone who likes your page to see your posts, you’ll have to pay. That’s not to say it’s not a useful tool, but if you’re just in the beginning of your journey, it’s not worth spending your dollars on “boosting” a post. However, Facebook is the number one site for testing your content to a wide audience. Now when you scroll through the platform, you’re likely to see one advertisement out of every five or so posts. This content comes from those outside your network who want to introduce you to their business. A/B Testing is a way that you can run multiple pieces of similar content to see where it performs better (ie. demographic, region or interest) or variations of the same content (different ads, videos or images), to see which is consumed or converts at a higher rate. This alone can be useful when considering how to target your audience and what message resonates with them.
Early on, LinkedIn was seen as a digital CV. Today, however, that’s changed and LinkedIn is now one of the most widely used social networks. LinkedIn members range from upper management and founders to students who are trying to expand their network in the early years of their career. It can be an incredibly useful tool when marketing in B2B circumstances, attracting talent and connecting with clients. LinkedIn is especially powerful for building a personal brand and establishing yourself as a founder or entrepreneur or an expert in your field. But a detailed Company Page also helps you grow your audience, establish your brand’s credibility and drive business results. Whilst the price you’ll pay for advertising on LinkedIn is quite high in comparison to Facebook or Instagram, your organic reach goes a long way on this platform, unlike other social media networks. Ultimately, LinkedIn is the perfect place for someone who wants a brief introduction of what your company does and what it stands for.
Instagram is essentially a storefront which allows you to show off your products and services visually. Building a following on Instagram is hard work and it takes a lot of dedication and time. For businesses not interested in gaining a big following, Instagram can be a platform which detracts from a brand’s reputation. For instance, an account which says it’s at the forefront of innovation and only has 200 followers doesn’t exactly show authority. That being said, those that leverage Instagram from the beginning can highlight the technical and people aspects of their brand. But unless you’re selling a product directly to consumers, this is not the place to post promotional content about your service. Successful Instagram accounts post-native-mobile content multiple times per day and they leverage user content, raw content and short-form stories. If you’re going to commit to Instagram as a founder, make sure that you’re willing to put in the work and understand what your audience wants to see...chances are, it’s not a product review.
Twitter is a fantastic tool and yet incredibly misunderstood by most businesses. First of all, let’s start off with what Twitter is NOT for; promotions, vacancies, link-only content and company self-fives. Your followers don’t want to be inundated with content that has no value to them. They want tidbit bites of stories that have real meaning behind them. That being said, if you’re targeting early adopters, Twitter is worth considering: 61% of users regularly use Twitter to follow and interact with small businesses. This becomes even more apparent when you take into account how journalists use Twitter. Journalists are highly active on Twitter so if your ambition is to receive press coverage, it’s a great tool to interact with a journalist before reaching out to them and asking them to write about you.
YouTube
YouTube is not the most obvious star when it comes to social media, but if your business is in B2B, then it can be a powerful tool for your clients to connect with you. With YouTube, consistency is key. To use this network successfully, you’ll want to be uploading long-form content (above 10 minutes) at regular intervals. The types of content that perform well on these channels are: Product videos, tutorial videos, animated videos, interviews and how to’s. Most entrepreneurs, however, are terrified of posting non-polished content and will, instead of shooting for quantity, only produce one or two videos a year. Whilst these can be great introductions for your brand (on your homepage for instance) they won’t open your startup up to a new audience. If you’re going to use YouTube to its full potential and you don’t have a fully-fledged video production team, you have to become OK with imperfection. That’s not to say you have to produce sub-par quality content, but there will always be a difference in quality between an iPhone and a full camera crew.
Ultimately, it comes down to who your target audience is and whether you’ll be able to hold yourself accountable when it comes to creating content for these channels.
As with all marketing, social media success doesn’t come overnight. It takes time, consistent messaging and content that engages your audience to build a following.
Whatever you choose, remember this. Don’t spread yourself too thin in the beginning because you want to be everywhere. It’s not a case of build it and they will come. Choose your channels and own them.
In the next section, we’re going to look at how to leverage awareness channels and build thought leadership status for you as a founder and an entrepreneur.