Welcome to the latest edition of marmalade pod today, we are talking about all things to do with decision making, which is a big part of every business.

Sometimes things are easy, and sometimes they're complex. And you have to look at things from different angles. It flows through every level of business and personal life. And we have often approach decision-making very differently in our personal lives to how we do in our businesses.

In our personal lives, things are often quite black and white, and we make decisions quite quickly such as what are we having for dinner or where are we going on holiday. Whereas in our businesses, not only does the decision-making process need to be a little more structured because of the impact it has, but often those decisions carry a lot more weight.

This week, we're talking about awareness, the first stage in customer journey and a big part of brand building.

Awareness does pretty much what it says on the tin, you are trying to make as many people as possible, aware of you, your band, your company, your offering, and how you can help them. From a brand point of view, awareness is building the brand, because you're constantly building the brand and building more awareness, I would say that the key brand elements of awareness are your positioning and differentiation.

It's about identifying where your ideal customers are, where they're hanging out, are there particular publications that they read? Or they're going to certain events? What are they engaging with other part of certain groups, and then looking at how you can best communicate to them to get your message across and to grow their awareness.

Today we're going to talk about branding and content, or how your content can help you build your brand.

Content is anything that you create and put out into the world in the form of marketing, information, or communication. It could be an email, it could be a video, signage, a leaflet or even a podcast, like we're doing now. It can be a data sheet. It can be instructions, that could be announcing a sale or launching a new product.

Everything comes back to the strategy. So, think about what you are you doing? Why are you doing it and who you're doing it for? You can then apply that to a content plan. You could theme your conte too for a week, a month, or a quarter, having that theme, and a campaign makes it easier for you to create content.

What's the difference between your audience and a customer?

Simply put your audience is people that know about you, who you are, what you do, and how you can help them your objective is to attract an audience and cultivate them - building a relationship with them that will turn them into customers.

For example, if you create an amazing blog article, and that blog article is all about ‘why a customer journey is important and how it will help a business’. That's valuable content that you might want to turn into a video or some social media posts or an email campaign.

To get maximum use for your content you need to tweak the way that the message is put across. The content may be the same, but the messaging and the language used to convey needs to be slightly different. Because with your customers, you're talking on a much more personal level because you're building a different type of relationship.

Today we're going to talk about brand identity. Brand identity is the most well-known form of branding because it includes the logo, and the logo is the most prominent form of a brand. It's what a lot of people think a brand is. But as we already knew, and we're going to uncover in lots of these episodes, that branding is much, much more than just a logo.

Brand identity is as you thought, branding, and strategy was your logo, your colours, your fonts, your uniforms, your signage of vehicles, it's the environment you create in your office, whether you have people coming into it with staff or customers, you have a sharp or you have a website and online presence, your social media, every tangible element that carries your company name is part of your brand identity, but it's also the people. And this is often relative to personal branding too, because as people, we have our own identities.

In this episode we are going to be talking about brand strategy. Becky: “I had never looked at a complete brand strategy. I think like a lot of business owners. I scratched the surface, and I had a basic understanding of what I might need to include.”

Many businesses owner their brand is built on logos, colours, fonts and how you use them – they are part of your brand identity. Your branding starts with and is underpinned by your brand strategy.

One of the common mistakes people make when they think about branding, or building a brand is they think about the visual aspects. The things that are tangible that you can see. Whereas a brand strategy, a bit like a business strategy, is not tangible. Think of an iceberg. The biggest part of the iceberg, the most powerful and forceful part of the iceberg is underneath the water, we don't see it. The tangible things are the bit that's above the water. This is the same for branding, the strategy is the powerful force that drives the tangible parts of the brand.

Hi, and welcome to the latest episode of the marmalade pod. In this episode, we're going to be talking about the customer journey. Customer Journey is an interesting thing. It's something that affects every business, it's not something every business takes a lot of time to consider. Sometimes it's very organic, in the way that it's put together, or the times, it's more strategic and more planned out. Yeah, lots to get into. Definitely. So what would you say are reasons why you start looking at customer journey with your customers? Or why do people start thinking about it? Usually, it's because they're looking to either increase their profits, or change their business, or they just want to offer a new service or increase retention, there's usually something very business-driven behind it. So the customer journey itself spans multiple areas.

In this episode, we are talking about all things brand. 

Well, you've recently gone through a rebranding exercise because your business had a change in direction slightly, but definitely a development of service and what your offering was. And in your strategy, that we talked about in the last episode, you'd got some need to reposition things and have a new identity, do you want to tell us a little bit more about the thought process behind why you did what you did? 

We'd had a rebrand a few years before. But it didn't really meet what we were doing. It was quite masculine looking, it was very tech-inspired. And it was from a colour perspective, it was what you expect to see in the world of tech, it was blacks and blues and greens and, and very kind of standard, and we wanted something completely different. And originally, we thought about the logo, do we just need a new logo, after meeting yourself learning more about the brand, I realised that a logo wasn't going to cut it, it needed to be deeper because I really wanted to make Unimax 2.0, as I was calling it at the time, a huge success. We focused on multiple different offerings, not just the one. And because our business has been so established, it needed to run deep when we made those changes.

This is your next installment of the marmalade pod. Today we're going to talk about strategy and planning. It's an interesting topic for us, given that we plan everything. We've always got post-it notes, highlighters, and all sorts of things. But today, we're going to be focusing a little bit more on strategic planning, and why that is important for your business as a whole. And equally for independent parts of your business, such as your branding, your marketing, your sales, your service, and how your customers interact with you.

A brand strategy is one of the first elements of building a brand, if you don't have a strategy and a plan that aligns with your business plan, then how do you know it's working?

How do you know it's the right thing to attract your ideal customer? Your Ideal customer is something that we're going to touch on in a different episode, but where the how does the strategy impact things from the customer journey? 

Hi, it's Clare from Make a brew. And Becky from Unimax Solutions. And we are delighted to introduce ourselves today because we're working together on this podcast. What's it called? …Marmalade pod! And what's it about? We're here to help your brand stick and your customers stick around.

We are so excited to be working on this collaboration project. We both have a similar outlook and approach to putting customers first, helping people build their business through their journeys and strategies.

We've both worked for each other, and we're customers of each other. And it's this is all about how we can bring our expert knowledge together to go through the different aspects of the customer journey and branding and all the different intricacies to have some interesting conversations and there'll be some guests on from time to time in different areas.