Lean Startup Branding: Marketing Your Startup—Idea Through Launch

Lean Startup Branding

WORKBOOK 2: BRANDING

Step 2 of the 3-Step RAF Marketing Method of

Branding and Marketing

an Offering of Value, for Profit

Real-World Marketing, Step-by-Step, Idea to Launch and Beyond

Copyright ©2019 by Entropy Press

All rights reserved.

Lean Startup Branding is a non-fiction, industry-specific publication. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise distributed without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to:

Entropy Publications, LLC, San Francisco, CA

[email protected]

Entropy Press® is a registered trademark of Entropy Publications, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-7325431-1-9 (Entropy Press)

ISBN-10: 1-7325431-1-9

1. Entrepreneurship. 2. Small Business Marketing. 3. Branding.

4. MVP, Minimum Viable Product. 4. Digital Marketing. 6. Social Media Marketing.

Printed in the U.S.A

Cover design by TargetMediaDesign

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Lean Startup BRANDING (LSB)

Workbook 2 CONTENTS

LSB WORKBOOK 2: BRANDING PREFACE

MODULE 13

Identity Development: Name your startup and offerings. Purchase URLs for your web addresses. Write taglines for your new venture and your offerings.

MODULE 14

Design Fundamentals: Utilizing the psychology of Design. Applying color theory to graphic design. Effective color reproduction, online and in print.

MODULE 15

Identity Design: Design your offering and startup logos. Working with type (typography). Rebranding your identities. Create Brand Standards for your products and company.

MODULE 16

Visual Content: Design effective layouts. Responsive design development. Identifying and creating imagery with impact.

MODULE 17

Image Capture: Obtain low to no-cost images and video clips. Create and maintain a visual content library.

MODULE 18

Online Marketing: User interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. Search Engine Optimized (SEO) content marketing.

MODULE 19

Online Technology: Understanding computing basics. Webhosting. Cloud computing. Utilizing free and low-cost content management systems (CMS). Setting up secure e-commerce. Working with VARs.

MODULE 20

Website Development: Develop, produce, and maintain your digital storefront.

MODULE 21

Digital Campaigns: Create cost-per-click (CPC) and low-cost click-advertising campaigns. Develop video branding and advertising campaigns. Utilize Landing Pages for sales and email capture.

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Lean Startup BRANDING

Workbook 2: Take Aim—BRAND

Step 2 of the 3-Step RAF Marketing Method of

Branding and Marketing Your Offerings of Value, for Profit

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-BRANDING Preface-

Do you have an iPhone? When you purchase tablets, laptops, and other electronics, do you only consider buying from Apple? Why? Perhaps you got used to their user interface—the layout and icons on their device screens. Or maybe, Apple convinced you that you'll be 'more creative' using their products over their competitors. Whatever your reason for buying only Apple devices, it's likely you have become one of their many 'brand advocates,' a true believer that Apple will continually deliver you offerings of value.

In just 30 years, Apple has become one of the most recognizable brands of all time. How did they do this? What convinced you to become a brand advocate of Apple? And if you are not an Apple devote, why not?

Branding is a powerful tool to market products, services, and messages. The Branding process—garnering awareness of your offering/s and business—is essential for startup success, but also to build a sustainable company.

LSB Workbook 2: Take Aim, in the RAF (Ready; Aim; Fire;) Marketing Method examines the process of Branding. This workbook takes you step-by-step in creating, producing and publishing branding and advertising campaigns with impact, that grab attention, and motivate the action your marketing efforts direct. LSB Workbook 2 also provides startups struggling to get traction with their marketing campaigns a clear and direct process to achieving much greater response on their marketing efforts, at launch and beyond.

Engaging in marketing your offering and company with branding and advertising campaigns should begin before your product is completely developed. You, or someone you hire, should be creating and producing your startup's marketing efforts for pre-launch and launch simultaneously with the development of your offering. But before we take the first step in the Branding process, we must review LSM Workbook 1—PRODUCTIZATION, to be sure your offering is READY to brand and sell.

LSE Series and the RAF Marketing Method

The Lean Startup Entrepreneurial (LSE) series is a three-step process that gives innovators practical, doable steps to build a marketable, sustainable business. Originally taught live at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and other accredited universities in L.A. and the Bay area, for the past six years the LSE series has helped hundreds of students launch and market a startup with the RAF (Ready; Aim; Fire;) Marketing Method.

1. Get Ready, and Productize your offering.

2. Take Aim, and Brand your offering.

3. Fire, and Launch your marketing efforts.

The RAF Marketing Method in the Lean Startup series has been developed to actualize marketing theory—put it into a step-by-step process. Each of the three workbooks, filled with slides, challenges and projects, are step-by-step guides you'll refer to again and again, to assure you are on the proper path to building a thriving business. Each workbook in the LSE series provides specific, low-budget, actionable steps for marketing your offerings, to sell directly, or launch your first offering, of many others to come, as a profitable company. Every step presented in each workbook guides learners through the process of creating and producing marketing tools and material that gets greater response to your campaigns, generates conversion (try; sign-up; subscribe), and ultimately sales for your new venture.

LSM Workbook 1: Step 1, examined the process of Productization, step-by-step, to actualize an idea, or effectively market an existing offering, for profit. Remember, implementing the RAF Marketing Method in order, will vastly increase your odds of startup success:

LSM Workbook 1. Step 1—Get Ready, and PRODUCTIZE.

LSB Workbook 2. Step 2—Take Aim, and BRAND.

LSL Workbook 3. Step 3—Fire, and LAUNCH marketing campaigns.

Simply follow the steps of the RAF (Ready; Aim; Fire;) Marketing Method, in order, and you’ll be able to actualize most any idea you have now, or any that may come in the future, into a marketable offering of value, for profit (kind of like working a math equation... ;-).

Getting Ready to BRAND your offering and startup begins with Productization. Productizing our ideas, or even fully developed offerings, helps us define 'product/market fit,' i.e. where our offering fits in the marketplace of sellable items. It also helps us pinpoint target markets and potential users who will find benefit, or value in the features of our products, services, and company. We perform competitive analysis during Productization, to make us aware of our competitors, and define what makes our offering unique, and better than theirs. We project horizontal and vertical markets so we'll have continuous groups of people to sell to. And we identify profit models, to be sure we'll make money with our offering, out of the gate and beyond.

After Productization is established, and well underway, we Take Aim in this workbook, LSB Workbook 2, and develop marketing efforts directed at the likely target audiences we've identified in LSM Workbook 1. We'll take the step-by-step process of creating and producing branding and marketing tools and collateral, from product and corporate names, identities and taglines, through establishing brand standards, to websites, as well as digital and video advertising to social media marketing (SMM) campaigns.

The LSE series assumes you have the knowledge and means to produce the offering you envision. LSM Workbook 1—PRODUCTIZATION does not require that your offering already be actualized. Producing branding and advertising campaigns during LSB Workbook 2—BRANDING, the development of your offering should at least be in the works before releasing your pre-launch, and roll-out marketing efforts. LSL Workbook 3—LAUNCH, however, you must have a complete and quality-tested offering to sell.

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STOP! Do CHALLENGE #1 before moving on.

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CHALLENGE #1: PRODUCTIZATION

A thorough understanding of Productization is required to effectively apply the principles and practices of BRANDING. Do NOT move on to Workbook 2: Take Aim—BRAND, until you've completed all the modules and projects in Workbook 1.

1. Eight (8) Productization lists for your productized offering:

• Features

• Benefits/solutions

• Target Markets

• Target Users

• Competitive Analysis

• Differentiators/UVPs

• Horizontal Markets

• Vertical Markets

2. A working draft of an ELEVATOR PITCH for your offering and company.

3. A PROFIT MODEL timeline of expected revenue in the first year through the fifth year after the launch of your new venture, including how your company will generate this income. What sources—target markets and users—will purchase your offering/s, and for how much?

If you are reading the LSE series hoping to launch a specific idea you are in the process of producing, or you want to get more traction with your marketing efforts on a fully developed offering, be sure to DO ALL THE PROJECTS in Workbook 1: PRODUCTIZAITON. Get Ready, and productize your offering before moving on to the steps in this workbook. The lists and documentation you produce in productizing your product, service, or nonprofit message are essential to effectively begin the Branding process.

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Step 2: Take Aim and BRAND Your Offering

Branding is the marriage of marketing and design, applied to build awareness of your product and company, and ultimately sell your offerings. Startup branding is the process of 'giving birth' to the marketing of your productized offering. Creating an identity for your product and business, you are effectively giving your offering a form, a body of marketing material, so it becomes something real, virtually physical, instead of just an idea or concept in development.

Have you actualized and productized a software application? An online bakery delivery service? A new widget that adds value or offers a solution to an existing problem? Whether a product or service, and/or new company, branding your offering/s begins with a name—like naming a newborn.

Your new venture must have a pleasing face, a look and feel that is attractive, and even better if the identity is striking, stunning, captivating. A corporate I.D., also known as a logo, must be as powerful on a Twitter feed, as the side of a building. You must create a logo for your startup, but also for each product or service your company releases.

We give children language to communicate. We must give our offering and startup a voice with Taglines—an essential component of the corporate identity, to communicate who we are and what we have to offer. Taglines are the voice that define the names and faces we create for our offerings and company, in affect, making the company whole. Taglines also provide the fabric, or skin that describe the primary mission or function of your products and business.

Beyond the corporate identity, you must produce branded marketing tools and campaigns to launch and grow any business. Creating advertising that builds brand awareness and gets response requires an understanding of graphic design, to produce effective campaigns that motivate action. Design and color theory, reproduction for print and digital marketing, layout, eye-tracking, photography, photo editing, video capture, are all covered, here, in LSB Workbook 2.

You'll begin a professional visual library of free and low-cost pictures and video clips to use in your marketing material. You'll add to this library with free music to enhance the messaging in your video campaigns. You'll include free typefaces in your library that reflect the tone of your words to garner your target audience's interest. You'll learn tips and tricks of SEO content for creating attention-grabbing click-advertising, email campaigns, and micro-posts that improve your search ranking, and get response.

Branding is an ongoing process. Marketing must be continually developed, produced and published for pre-launch, as well as launch campaigns, and beyond. LSB Workbook 2: Take Aim covers understanding online technology basics, from how to write and purchase URLs for your company that improve your search (SEO) ranking, to responsive user interface (UI) design that looks great on any computer monitor, as well as mobile devices. We'll explore effective User Experience (UX) design, to help you keep your audience engaged with your marketing efforts. Then we parlay this knowledge into building stunning websites and social media marketing (SMM) campaigns at little to no cost.

Step 2, of the RAF Marketing Method presented in LSB Workbook 2, gives you the tools, techniques, and step-by-step process to creating identities, and advertising and marketing campaigns that build awareness of your offering and company, and convert viewers to try, subscribe, or buy.

Projects for LSB Workbook 2: BRANDING

There are five multifaceted projects throughout this workbook. Completing each of the BRANDING projects will give both your potential offering and startup names, including one to several online addresses (URLs), a face—logo identities, and a voice with taglines for your offering and company. You'll implement brand standards that will keep you, and those you hire, producing marketing efforts that will build brand awareness of each offering you create, as well as give your new venture a memorable brand.

You'll learn how to produce websites, landing pages, video advertising, and social media marketing (SMM) campaigns for the pre-launch of your new offering, to sell directly, or to actualize a startup with your first product of many to come. (In LSL Workbook 3: Step 3— Fire, you'll learn how to LAUNCH the marketing efforts you create in both LSB Workbook 2, and LSL Workbook 3. You'll create multichannel branding and advertising campaigns and publish them online, as well as in print, for maximum impact, and the greatest possible response to your marketing efforts.)

Of course, it's your choice to engage in producing your own branding and advertising campaigns, or hire an ad agency or graphic designer to create the marketing required to launch your new venture. However, working the process of branding will help you intimately understand the branding process. So, even if you want to hire an agency or designer to create your marketing, I highly recommend walking the process of naming your offering and company, designing logos, coming up with product and corporate taglines, and starting a visual, audio and type library of usable images, video clips, music, and fonts, for your marketing efforts.

The knowledge you'll gain in producing your own marketing, even if you don't use it, will aide you in directing those you hire to economically produce advertising and marketing material for your offering, since you'll learn what it costs, in time, and real dollars, to produce a campaign by producing some yourself. You'll also be better equipped to direct the designer or agency you contract to produce tightly targeted branding advertising that gets the greatest response. A thorough understanding of the Productization and Branding process allows you to be the conduit that keeps marketing and design married, and producing better campaigns together.

You can read each of these workbooks twenty times, memorize them in fact, and not learn as much as you will from doing the projects. To really understand how something works—you must work the process.

Welcome to LSB Workbook 2: Branding. I hope you'll engage in this learning opportunity to BRAND your newly productized offering (LSM Workbook 1). It's time to meet your creative potential, give birth to the marketing of your new venture, and manifest a job you'll love.

Challenges

There are a few challenges scattered throughout this workbook, usually at the end of important content to remember. Completed challenges will not be used to market your offering or startup, but are provided as an adjutant to your understanding of the Branding process.

If you already have a complete offering, but want to get more traction with your marketing efforts, working the challenges will help broaden your knowledge of the intricacies of branding, as well as the marketing process.

As with the projects, I strongly suggest you do all the challenges! Beyond working each project to create and then produce your marketing campaigns, both the projects and challenges in the LSE series have been designed to accelerate your learning of the Lean Startup Marketing process.

The Private Language of Any Industry

Most every industry, from baked goods to software, has its own private language. Learning the language of business marketing is essential for startup success. Throughout LSB Workbook 2, as well as the entire LSE series, you will see words in bold. You'll also find acronyms—abbreviated initials of broader concepts—used every day in the entrepreneurial industry. It is imperative these terms and acronyms get inside your head. Pay extra attention to the words and phrases in bold, and the acronyms that follow them. Even if you don't always remember their meaning, over the course of the entire LSE series, you'll see them in context often enough to learn the language of Startup Marketing.

Access to LSB Workbook 2 Slides

There are only a few slides in this workbook due to Smashwords' (the publisher) file size limitations. You will find all the slides in LSB Workbook 2 at this URL address:

https://idea2product4profit/lsb-workbook2-slides

Password: LSBWorkbook2-Branding

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MODULE 13: IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT

-Personal Branding-

So, what is branding? Let's take it down to the personal level. YOU are being branded. We all are! From how you look, to the clothing you choose, to what you buy, and even say—the words you use both in-person and online—IS your brand.

You have a persona you wear in public. You'll likely dress different, and use different language at work than you will in your home environment. Your personal brand is your public persona.

Do you have a personal Facebook page? Is it separate from your business profile page? It should be! Apply for a job, a college, or going on a first date, and it's likely the business, university, or your upcoming date is looking you up to learn about you through your social media accounts. Your social media profile pages are part of your public persona—your brand.

Your public persona—your personal brand—begins with a name. It is wise to make up a fake name to separate your personal social media accounts with your public-facing accounts. If you choose to use your real name, be sure to keep all your posts 'clean.' Don't cuss online. Don't identify your religion, or get political, or take any position that will brand you as a 'liberal,' or 'conservative,' or an atheist. Don't get angry at a business for their poor products or customer service. Don't take an argument with your boss, or even your partner or friend online. Take your issues to your therapist and keep your personal problems offline. Trust me, it will not help your professional life, and often hurt you personally as well to brand your public persona as a whiner, or too outspoken, or angry.

It takes time to build a positive brand image, and only minutes to destroy it, like posting a rant, or engaging in a flame war (a hostile interaction) online. Protect and nurture your public persona—your personal brand. Represent yourself as you wish others to see you. Make no mistake about it, more than just a potential employer or date is looking at you, and watching your every move.

Marketing to Our Personal Brands

Your personal brand is valuable to advertisers. Marketing uses our personal brand—our public persona—to sell to us. LSM Workbook 1, Module 6: Target Marketing and Targeting Users, illuminated how marketing categorizes each one of us to fit into a segment, or group of people with similar characteristics to ours. All of us are likely segmented by advertisers with topic classifiers, essentially labels, from four primary data sources:

• Demographic—age, sex, education level, income level, marital status.

• Geographic— location, ethnicity, climate, environmental conditions.

• Psychographic—personality traits, values, attitudes, interests, beliefs, religion, lifestyles.

• Behavioral—purchase data, customer loyalty, web-surfing habits, social media posts.

As we age, our personal brand changes. What categorized each of us at 10 years old is going to be different at 15, or 21, or 35, or 50. Some of our demographic data changes, from our age, to our marital status, to even our gender, if we chose to change our sex. Our geographic data usually changes. We move from our parents house to living on our own, sometimes close by, sometimes far from home. Our psychographic data changes. What we think, do, and react to changes with the passing of time, and life circumstances. Our behavioral data changes over time as well, from our food choices, to our fashion statements, to our health requirements, to our web-surfing and purchase habits.

People have become a valuable product in most business transactions today. Our information is bought and sold for billions, daily. Marketers, and affiliate networks like Google, Microsoft, Apple, or Facebook, even the 'loyalty' cards issues by our grocery, or box-chain stores track our behavior. These companies gather information on each of us in real-time, on what we search for and look at online, to what we click on, try, and buy on the internet, as well as in-person with our credit cards. The only way to avoid tracking of what you purchase is to pay with cash, or cryptocurrency, like Bitcoin, as long as you don't allow your receipt to be sent via email.

With all this information businesses and affiliate networks are gathering about us today, you'd think it'd be easy to motivate people to buy our products and services with our marketing efforts, or at least remember our company name—our corporate brand. So why aren't response and conversion rates greater than ever before? Because people lie. We lie to ourselves—tell ourselves we need things we don’t, or make promises we never keep, like dieting, exercise, control spending, less time on our electronic devices, YouTube…etc. We lie to each other, because we believe it ourselves, or we want to appear smarter, kinder, wiser. We ALL fib, exaggerate, fabricate, remember wrong because memory has been proven to be faulty. Humans are fickle, which is what makes figuring out what motivates us particularly difficult when we often don’t know ourselves. Our public persona simply reflects what we want to show, to ourselves, and whoever else is looking at us. It doesn't necessarily reveal what we really think, or actually do in private (offline, and with no one watching), or will do.

Algorithms that collect and analysis all our data position each of us into segments—broad target markets that classify our personal brand with people similar to us, who are potentially interested in the same things we are. However, assessing and categorizing our behavior only tells marketers what we do—where we go online, and offline (your