In our last marketing blog, we walked through how to put together an effective strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis for your agency. SWOTs are a valuable tool for building greater visibility into your agency, but that’s not all. They can also inform other initiatives beneficial to your short- and long-term business goals. Take a strategic messaging framework as just one example. They channel your SWOT’s insights and help you speak with a unified voice that forms deeper connections with customers. Here’s how to put together your own framework.
How to think about a strategic marketing framework
Before you begin, it’s important to note what a strategic marketing framework is and what it is not. First, this framework should be:
Mission-driven: It should include the core tenets of your brand promise and identity.
Targeted and relevant: The framework needs to resonate with your target audience by offering clear value.
Strategic and succinct: Your framework must align with your agency’s needs and be short enough to fit various communication channels.
Emotional and actionable: Remember, people respond powerfully to emotional appeals and clear next steps.
Cohesive and comprehensive: Your framework must tie together seamlessly and speak to the entirety of your organization’s high-level priorities.
On the other hand, it should not be:
Disjointed or random: Each element of your framework must feel intentional and complementary.
Granular and tactical: Avoid discussing specific marketing campaigns or granular organizational details.
Exclusively sales-focused: Don’t make your framework solely about getting customers to buy from you. Instead, make it squarely about how you can solve their problems.
Vague and unfocused: Just because a strategic messaging framework is intended to capture high-level aspects of your agency does not mean it should be vague.
Start building based off your SWOT
Now let’s explore how to build a messaging framework based on your SWOT. First, create language that emphasizes your agency’s strengths. An example might be a message about how you “bring decades of collective experience to each closing.”
Then, build a message that reframes SWOT weaknesses as areas primed for growth or future advantage. For instance, if your tech stack is aging but you plan to update it, talk about how you are “quickly implementing more innovative solutions to better address stakeholder needs.”
Next, address your SWOT’s opportunities. The messages should align and build off your identified strengths. They should also convey how your company is positioned for long-term success. Be as specific as you can, include data if possible and always indicate why customers should care. As an example, if you have expansion plans on the horizon, you could explain how this “reflects the depth of your resources and the unparalleled competency of your team.”
Lastly, message your SWOT’s threats. These must also be reframed by putting the focus on how you will address them. The ebb and flow of the real estate market offers a good example of how to do this. For instance, you could articulate how “your financial strength and operational efficiency enable you to ride out periodic downturns and continue delivering for clients.”
Implement your framework
Once you have fleshed out messaging, it is time to integrate your framework into your agency’s communications. Let’s look at a few ways for doing this:
Incorporate your framework into your marketing materials, including your website, social media and press releases.
Create simple talking points so your team can easily memorize key messages and amplify your agency’s efforts where appropriate.
Incorporate your messages into your brand guidelines to ensure consistency across all materials, including those created by third parties.
Leverage your framework for thought leadership by using them as a springboard to talk about your values and long-term vision.
Measure, refine, rinse and repeat
After you have your key messaging framework based around your SWOT, it can be tempting to sit back and put your feet up. Don’t! The whole point of this exercise is to build greater connections with your customers. To know if you’ve achieved this, you must measure whether people are responding to your messages and connecting with your brand.
Track meaningful changes in core metrics once you begin using your messages in communications, and consider surveying your customer base to understand how they perceive you. If you don’t get the answers you want, revisit your strategic messaging framework and refine. And if you still don’t get the responses you desire, refine again.
Tell a story that connects and converts
In a competitive field like title insurance, it’s important to differentiate yourself. Building a strategic messaging framework based on your SWOT analysis is one way to do this. By thinking about your strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you can create a compelling story that will make your customers take note and engage more fully with your brand. That’s because they will have come to better understand who you and how you can help them achieve their goals.
Build out your SWOT for a complete picture of your business.
As any business leader knows, there is a huge difference between having an idea for your business and bringing it to fruition. One way to increase your chances of success is to utilize what’s known as a SWOT analysis. SWOTs bring increased visibility to your operations, while providing an honest assessment of your company’s capabilities. The exercise’s insights can then be used for more informed decision-making. Let’s explore what’s involved in doing this work and doing it right.
What is SWOT?
The “SWOT” in “SWOT analysis” is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Here’s some additional detail on each point:
Strengths are everything you have going for you with your business. This can include things like a strong balance sheet, top talent or a high net promoter score.
Weaknesses are the opposite. They can include high turnover, significant customer churn or outdated and inefficient technology.
Opportunities involve industry trends that you can capitalize on. Some examples are regulatory changes, strategic partnerships or positive changes in customer behavior.
Threats include anything that might imperil your business in the short and long term. Threats could be negative economic forecasts, supply chain disruptions or new competitors in the market.
Create your dream team
The first thing to realize about doing a SWOT is that it’s pretty difficult to pull off alone. No business leader is going to know everything about their organization. You need a team with you that has first-hand knowledge of each aspect of your business. Include different department heads and stakeholders from both in and outside of your company.
Dig into the data
Next, begin collecting data – and lots of it. Compile information on internal processes, review existing resources and pull up any performance metrics you have on hand. Some specific examples could include:
Financial reports
Brand recognition data
Customer reviews
Employee feedback
Draw conclusions and establish your matrix
Once you’ve gathered these insights, start identifying your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Drill down on what is working well and pay attention to any unique selling propositions. Then, do the reverse and look at what is not working. Be open and transparent here. It is the only way to get an accurate picture of what might prevent you from achieving your goals. Next, catalog opportunities and threats. Write down anything that might enable or prevent you from taking your business where you want it to go in the near and long term.
Now organize your thoughts via a SWOT matrix. It’s often easiest to group elements by: 1.)internal factors, that is, your strengths and weaknesses, followed by 2.) external factors, also known as your opportunities and threats.
Analyze your results and plan for action
You can then start putting together an action plan to achieve your organizational objectives, armed with the knowledge that you have an informed outlook on your business’s prospects. Be sure your plan works in unison with your SWOT. When done right, your plan’s strategies, tactics and decision points will grow organically out of your matrix.
Moving forward
Like any piece of strategic planning collateral, always remember a SWOT is a living document. As your business changes or the market shifts, don’t forget to update your analysis so it remains accurate and helpful. That way, you will always have a powerful tool on hand that will help you see your business clearly and make more strategic decisions.
We live in a digital world, and it’s easy to rely heavily on digital marketing tools to raise your business’s profile. Yet, when we focus too heavily on digital solutions, we can sometimes forget that person-to-person interaction remains one of the most impactful ways to form new connections and gain business. Concise and meaningful talking points that easily communicate your unique value proposition can be an important tool for making the most of these critical in-person interactions.
What are talking points?
Describing what you do isn’t always easy, especially when you’re on the spot. Sometimes, it’s hard to predict when you’re going to have a key conversation with a potential client. That’s why it’s always good to have talking points in your back pocket.
Talking points are short, succinct statements that describe key aspects of your business and the work you do. Often, talking points cover the services you deliver, what your company’s culture is like or how you work with clients to achieve their goals. In short, they are a series of brand promises that help audiences quickly get up-to-speed on how your business operates.
Best practices for developing talking points
Unsurprisingly, one of the best practices to keep in mind when developing your agency’s talking points is brevity. There is a lot more that goes into it, however, such as:
Key messages: Before you can create talking points, you first need to know what your business’s main messages are. These messages should reflect your firm’s top priorities and goals.
Integrate customer needs: Your company’s key messages and eventual talking points must address the needs of your ideal customers. To do this effectively, you should first understand who your customers are – both demographically and psychologically. And how do you do that? By building out buyer personas! Check out our earlier blog for more on building these personas.
Create a logical flow: Although talking points can touch upon different or disparate aspects of your business, they still need to move easily from one point to the next. Flow is important. You don’t want to confuse your audience.
Be benefit and customer-focused: When you are talking about your agency, try to put the focus less on you and more on your target audience. You will want to convey how your products or services will improve their lives.
Show your passion: Imbuing business communication with emotion can be tricky, as you run the risk of coming off as unprofessional. But the truth is people are emotional by nature, and your audience will want to feel your passion. You can accomplish this by discussing not only what you do, but why you do it.
Prepare for rebuttals: As you build and deliver your talking points, you may occasionally experience pushback from an audience. Objections are a fact of life, and it’s always best to be prepared to address counterarguments. Spend time thinking about potential weak spots in your business narrative. By doing so, you can be ready to rebut the rebutters!
Best practices for delivering talking points
Once you have your business’s talking points fleshed out, it’s time to sit back and relax. Just kidding! Getting these messages written out is only half the battle. You still need to practice and refine your delivery. Here is a good process you can follow:
Practice makes perfect: There are no shortcuts to being a great speaker or advocate for your business. Instead, practice makes perfect. Practice your talking points in front of people you trust, in front of a mirror or even by recording yourself. Try doing this repeatedly until you feel calm enough to speak about your business in any context and at a moment’s notice.
Stay loose: Have you ever heard that it is not really what you say that matters; instead, it is how you say it? Keep this in mind when delivering your talking points. This does not mean that you should be flippant or overly casual, just that you want to avoid sounding monotonous or like you’re reading from a script.
Refine and edit: As you practice your talking points, stay open to constructive feedback. Think of your talking points as an ever-evolving process rather than something static and fixed. Accept feedback in good faith and use any criticism to improve the next pitch.
Be ready to pitch and reap the rewards
In today’s fast-paced economy, you need to be ready to pitch at a moment’s notice. By developing clear, concise and compelling talking points, you will be ready to spread the word about your business and position yourself to capture new leads and growth opportunities.
To obtain the greatest return from your solutions, make sure they are connected and cohesive.
When it comes to a modern tech stack, remember these words: integrations and interoperability. Why are these terms so important? Well, a connected tech stack holds undeniable advantages over segmented point solutions. In this blog, we will touch on the biggest advantages for end users, as well as how you can ensure you gain the interoperability necessary for your business to succeed.
Data-driven decision-making
The first advantage a connected tech stack offers is access to better data. The truth is data makes the business world go round. Without it, making strategic decisions about your company becomes much more difficult. An interoperable tech stack solves this problem. When your solutions are integrated, decision-makers within your organization gain real time insight from multiple sources simultaneously. This leads to quicker, more efficient, and better-informed choices on how to operate your business.
Expanded scalability
It can be tempting to think that implementing point solutions over time is the best approach for a growing business, but the reality is much more complicated. Interoperability allows you to add components or applications without disrupting the entire system, meaning you can adapt more quickly to increased workloads and larger volumes of data.
Lower costs
Prioritizing interoperability from the get-go also makes sense from a fiscal perspective. When you purchase multiple point solutions, integrating and maintaining them after the fact can quickly get pricey. With an integrated approach, you can consolidate your efforts and expedite any patches, updates or fixes much more seamlessly and at a lower cost.
Data governance
For title companies, effective and reliable data governance is a must. Yet diligently protecting sensitive customer information can be challenging without a tightly integrated tech stack. Centralizing your data allows for you to easily apply uniform data governance policies across every aspect of your organization, which, in turn, can reduce your exposure to data breaches.
How to ensure proper integration
When you embark upon a tech stack modernization project, there are a few things you need to keep in mind to maximize connectivity.
First, take a rigorous inventory of your existing systems, solutions and data pipelines so you can answer critical questions about what you need to integrate. Then, prioritize what you will tackle first by mapping them onto your respective business’s goals and needs.
Once you have the lay of the land, you can start putting together a tangible plan that describes your modernization and integration efforts in full detail. This will give you a better understanding of your timelines, resources and potential risks.
Next, work with a technology implementation partner that deploys open APIs. These interfaces promote interoperability and allow for different systems to communicate with each other and easily exchange data.
After that, collaborate with your technology vendor to develop a data-migration plan. Having a robust and well-thought-out plan is integral to mixing old and new system data and ensuring that everything synchronizes correctly.
As with any technology project, following the initial implementation period, you will want to work with your provider to test and validate your systems. This is an ideal moment to double-check that all integrations, APIs and data flows are operating as they should and that you will be able to gain maximum benefit once you go live.
In the post-go-live period, take the time to develop proper documentation and training for your staff so they can use your connected tech stack correctly and efficiently. While this step may feel cumbersome, it helps your business not only onboard existing staff but also guarantees that you can bring new hires up to speed as quickly as possible.
A connected world demands a connected tech stack
Over the last few years, the world has grown increasingly connected and complex, and the economy has certainly not been immune from this period of rapid changes. Today, both internal and external stakeholders expect that businesses will not only have the right technology infrastructure in place but that it will be cohesive and integrated in a way that allows for better service and higher levels of personalization, security and support. Prioritizing integration and interoperability at every step offers a company the best way to meet and exceed those expectations. And I can assure you: Those that do will reap the benefits.
In today’s battle for clicks and conversions, personalization is key
By now, pretty much everyone knows how important digital technology is to the modern economy. From streamlining communication to improving product lines, digital makes the business world go around. Yet while digital technology has been a net benefit for companies, it has also raised customer expectations significantly. Today, it is not enough to merely offer the best product or service, you must also use your digital infrastructure to create unique, seamless and personal experiences for your clients. Here are some simple ways you can start doing so today.
Bring in the bots
I’ve previously written about the immense benefits of using chatbots on your website. From a customer service perspective, it just makes sense. In today’s “always-on” economy, you need to support your customers around the clock. Thankfully, chatbots have advanced enough to now answer a variety of user questions, direct visitors around your website or even provide educational or product resources.
Personalize content assets
One benefit of the digital age is that it has never been easier to deliver personalized communications at scale. Take email marketing. There are small, pre-written code snippets that you can insert into your subject lines or body copy that will populate with each email recipient’s personalized information upon delivery. The data shows that this simple action can have a big impact on the overall ROI of your email marketing campaigns, with some studies depicting a bump of nearly 50% in open rates.[i]
Gather feedback
Always leap at a chance to solicit and collect customer feedback. In doing so, you’ll gain valuable insights to improve your processes, operations and service delivery.
This is another area where digital technology can play an invaluable roll. Many standard CMS platforms offer built-in customer contact forms. The drawback is that this method is inherently passive – meaning your customers may take the time and effort to respond but also may not. A more active approach would involve creating a customer feedback survey that you disseminate directly to your customer base. SurveyMonkey or even Google Forms have made it a breeze to accomplish something like this, providing free or low-cost tools to help you connect with your clients and gather valuable opinions.
Create meaningful landing pages
An often-overlooked element of a given marketing or customer journey effort is landing pages, which is unfortunate for a variety of reasons. Not only can a shoddy landing page harm the overall impact of your marketing campaigns, but it wastes a chance to further personalize your client’s experience. While you shouldn’t overload your landing page with extraneous links that distract visitors from the action you want them to take (such as filling out a contact form), including a few other strategic resources targeted to their unique goals and pain points can help you create more valuable experiences.
Personalization and optimization = better business
It’s tempting to put personalization and optimization initiatives on the back burner, especially when you have many other competing priorities. Yet even making small tweaks to your digital ecosystem can go a long way toward developing more powerful connections with your audience and creating modern brand experiences.
