Marc goes over why companies don't have to be great at every platform and how they can reformat content in different ways.
This is part 13 of a 13 part series identifying who Wildstory is, what the intricacies of branding are, and how this can all benefit you.
Video Transcript
Keith Roberts 0:04
What is your process look like? What is the Wildstory process?
Marc Gutman 0:10
Yeah, it's, you know, really based on three pillars of culture, brand, and content. And, you know, what we've identified is that those three things are really the lifecycle of a brand. They really impact the overall business and the business strategy. As I mentioned, we co-create, we prefer to co-create and so we go into work sessions, I don't call them meetings, they are definitely work sessions, where we are co-creating with a small group of leaders within a business typically starts off with either a discovery or a strategy session, depending on where you are in your life cycle, as a business, and then we get into through those work sessions, we get into developing the brand answering the eight questions.
Who are we here for who you serve? Why are we here? What do we do? And how do we do it? What's our backstory? What's our vision? What makes us different? What do we value the most, and what's our personality, and then we go ahead, and we just start to use that to develop core and targeted messaging concepts, which then we go and we take what we've learned from there, and we'll typically make what we call style escapes are three kind of mood boards of digital direction, so that we can really work with a client on that, we'd like to do a mild, medium, and a spicy version, so that we can kind of you know, hey, this is like, this is kind of by the book, this is where we think maybe you should be. And then spicy is, Hey, this is if we take a chance, this is what it might look like, this is like we're really pushing what the visual will look like when we move into taking everything we've learned.
And the reason we do that, that messaging and stuff, because then we can get into the visual design phase, and start in the creative start to test that, you know, and start to see how does that play out visually, does that work with a logo concepts that were that we're working in, they're kind of like working like this, you know. So like, if we start to get into something visually, that maybe isn't supporting what we came up with verbally, we can kind of go back and tweak it a little bit so that it all works, because you know, we want it to, to ultimately, you know, work really nicely together. And so, as I mentioned, we get into that design, because without great design, great strategy falls flat. So we want to make sure that those complement each other.
Once we get all the assets, you know, we usually deliver logo typography, color palettes, photography guidelines, iconography, signage, bat IDs, badges, email templates, like your decks, your newsletters, your social and, and that can come in a variety of different deliverables. For smaller clients that just might be, hey, here's your digital files, for a little bit of larger clients that need a toolkit and need to have everyone on the same page, I can go into style guides, brand books, brand, brand briefs, other other assets. And once we have that toolkit, and by the way that, you know, we can have a one page style guide and logos, which works for a lot of people.
That's how, you know, we started our company, we you know, we did logos and a one page style sheet. We didn't need to spend a ton of money, you know, but then over time, we start to build a brand book, kind of outlining, articulating the brand story, who are we some history, brand guidelines, especially if you're like a company that's really into a lot of content creation, a lot of times those brand toolkits will have guidelines for you know, emails, and you know, video and all sorts of stuff, right. So just depending on how big your organization is, you need more than and will deliver, you know, that story and the voice tone, look and feel the brand, you know, like I said, can be a six page brand book, on page style guide or brand beef, for Burberry brand beef, brand, brief social media Bible. A lot of times if you're big on that, like how do we sound? What do we talk like sample posts, it's really hard kind of organizing all that stuff to make sure that it's consistent. We have people out there communicating.
And as we've all seen, things can get sideways very, very quickly if someone communicates in the wrong way or the wrong tone. So we we do you know, we go out of our way to make sure that never happens. And then the real work begins. We move into the doing and telling that brand storytelling phase, that content phase. And one of the biggest outcomes our entire process, besides everything I mentioned, is this, this roadmap for what a business should do next, with regards to their content. Everyone has different customers showing up. Everyone has different customers and showing up where they are and how they want to be talked to is really, really important. And so there's this kind of weird message out there that you got to be everywhere you got to do all these things got to have a podcast, a video channel, you to be on Insta be on LinkedIn, well, that's that's just not true.
You know, like you need to be where your customers are. And in my opinion, you need to be really good at one or two things. So be like really, you know, if you think your customers are on a podcast, be awesome at that. You think your customers are really going to be on Instagram. Great, be awesome at that. And we can help you out with that and what that looks like. Once you get really really awesome at that maybe after six months a year, then you can start adding other things to your content. And by the way, once you're really awesome at that you start using that content in different ways. But if you're you know, I'll give ourselves example like I'm the primary content creator here at wildstorm. Really good at writing. And I've dabbled in YouTube like and you know, this is I wouldn't consider necessarily this YouTube like doing more kind of curated YouTube videos I'm, I've dabbled in all sorts of different things. And like what I found is like, I'm just not really that good at YouTube because got to edit it, you got to produce it. I love the format, but like it's draining on our business. And so the areas that we really focus on, are writing on our blog, thought leadership, and then we take that, and we can cobble that and start like, so for example, I just wrote a thought leadership piece called start with who, and it was all about putting your customers first, you know, and so that that started as a blog post. And then turned to that some of the gems that I thought were gems that I had written in that blog post into a 10, slide carousel, posted that Instagram, that that then that visual, I just export those 10, slides into one big JPEG right, telling that whole story that becomes a LinkedIn post, I'm not really on LinkedIn, I just kind of show up there. But that's not my focus.
But why I do that is, hey, I've got this content. Anyways, people on LinkedIn, haven't seen it. But I'm not designing this content for LinkedIn, per se, maybe the message that I post will be like, a little more business oriented, but I'm just making it worked for me. But really, where I'm focused is writing Instagram carousels. And then as you know, our Baby Got Backstory podcast, because those are the things that I'm good at, that I get energy from, and then I and then are easy, and that's where my customer shows up. So that's like, you got to be real, you know, you got to be there. And you got to be, you know, really thoughtful about a, what can you accomplish, and be where your customers and, and then thinking about how your customer is going to interact with us at every step of our customer journey, right?
So customers, you know, come in from awareness, stage and interest stage a purchase stage or repeat purchase. And then finally, hopefully, they become like a recommender or raving fan. And how they interact with us is very different in terms of content. And we need to map that out, we need to be very intentional about that. And in thinking about how we need to adjust our conversation, obviously, someone who loves your brand, you're not going to talk to them the same way that someone that knows nothing about you, much like a you know, a person in your life, you know, you have different intimate conversations with those people that love you, in our in our in your life, versus someone who used me to cocktail party and just trying to get to know you, and now they're open to it, but like, you know, how do you talk to them?
And so, from there, you know, how can we adjust our conversation, our verbal and visual conversation to meet and exceed customer expectations? And then how do we just build a content plan built based on all that with articles video interactive content, as I mentioned, how do we build that content plan so that we take your strong and your thing your strongest that and then make additional content from that ongoing, and then you get to do what you love to do, which is you know, build your business and further your own mission. As a business.
Keith Roberts 7:50
Man, this was incredibly insightful. I built an agency for 23 years, and I feel like I just went to the like advanced 401 class on branding. so incredibly helpful. Thank you so much for your time, Mark. Really appreciate it.
Marc Gutman 8:04
Thanks, Keith. Thanks for the awesome questions. And as you know, I love to nerd out about this anytime. So anytime you want to talk about any of this, I would love to do so.
