This story isn’t easy to share and we’re still not one hundred percent sure where things went wrong. We never got the chance to talk it through or fix the misunderstanding we had along the way. Because of that, we stand by what we created. (click here to see it for yourself)

We also always tell our clients: give us as much feedback as you can.

A Cautionary Tale: Always Give Feedback

This Holistic Marketing Strategy project started out like any other one. We were shared on the conversations with the designers, had several calls about the Quirk look and feel. We learned that they felt embracing the Lisbon culture was important, so Aub went to Lisbon. She spent a couple of days walking the city and meeting with the founder. Everything made sense and we felt very connected to the direction the brand was moving.

But we were wrong.

Our Holistic Marketing Strategies have always been built around brand goals and audiences. And this was no different. We followed our process and held our initial presentation to ensure we’re all on the same page, before we built the social post index and finalized strategy documents. Though feedback was requested, we didn’t receive any, we also didn’t push for it and carried on with our project timeline.

We took no news as good news.

Detailed feedback helps all parties to improve and get better results. We assumed that our client would work in collaboration with us, alert us to active changes in their business, and let us know when we’re off base with our deliverables.

This project taught us that we can’t hold assumptions.

It turned out that there was more behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of. We didn’t fully understand the direction all stakeholders wanted to go in – and we never got the opportunity to learn. Although we asked the right questions and offered follow up calls to remedy our missteps, this story has a very quiet ending. We just never heard back.

Now, before we start working on a strategy, we make sure to let our clients know about the importance of feedback. And we make sure that our clients are actively involved during the ‘same page’ presentation. We treat moving forward with a strategy as a consent – it’s either an explicit ‘hell yes’ or we need to talk about it more.

When it’s all said and done, we are still super proud of the work we did. Especially with the most actionable piece of the strategy, the Social Post Index. We are confident that if this brand had implemented our recommendations, it would have grown to be a profitable, sustainable business.

What is a Social Post Index?

Before we give you a sneak peek at the Social Post Index, we want to take a moment to tell you what it is. A Social Post Index is an index of inspiration for a brand’s social media presence. It’s one of last pieces (and everyone’s favorite) of our Holistic Marketing Strategies and one of the most actionable.

In each Social Post Index we define several bespoke “post types” that can easily be dropped into a content calendar. Each post type comes with a recommended frequency, inspiration for the imagery, the voice and content for the caption, the goal (and CTA) of the post, the brand audience the post relates to, and which platforms the brand should tailor them for.

We use these daily for our own social posts and for our clients because it helps with planning and creating a container for creativity to thrive when executing a social media marketing plan.

See the SPI We Made

The post A Great Social Post Index with Nowhere to Go (Download It!) appeared first on Dandelion Branding.

“We’re the only trade association in the advertising industry that is focused exclusively on sustainability, particularly how do we decarbonize the advertising industry and get the whole industry to net zero, which is a 90% reduction.”

In this episode of EnvironMental with Dandelion, we welcomed Rachel Schnoor, the Membership Director for Net Zero, to our show. Net Zero is a non-profit trade association with a mission to decarbonize the advertising industry and achieve a 90% reduction in emissions. They operate as a coalition, bringing together various stakeholders such as trade organizations, advertisers, agencies, and ad partners to create solutions and inspire sustainable consumer behavior change.

This is one of the first times we’ve had another marketer on the show and it was really refreshing. Like a lot of sustainability professionals, we often find ourselves feeling alone when we talk about our mission with other professionals in our industry. Not today! We were able to have a conversation about the roles and responsibility of advertising in the sustainable transition!

The Role of Sustainable Advertising

We know that globally advertising results in about 2 to 3% of emissions…and we know that those operations really impact the other 97 to 98%.

Rachel Schnoor about the impact of advertising

One of the reasons that we operate Dandelion the way we do, and why we wanted to bring Rachel onto the show, is because we see the impact that marketing has on people. And not just consumer behavior, but on belief, on action, on self identity – truly on every part of our world. We are sick of fear mongering media and the constant inundation of consumerist ideals. They’re not good for people and they certainly perpetuate the supply and demand system that pays no heed to how we gather and use (or steal and abuse) the Earth’s resources.

We all believe that a focus on sustainable advertising can help change the way we browse, the way we consume, and the way we live. Our largest (and loudest) societies are built around growth as defined only by their GDP. Is it any wonder that people listen to the brands they trust?

We saw this plainly during COVID when folks looked to their favorite businesses to offer guidance on how to protect themselves. A lot of brands picked up on that and migrated to communicating about protection, wearing masks, and staying part of a community. We saw less sales in the short term, but a massive boost in trust that lead to retention later on.

We believe using this same sustainable advertising method for the climate crisis will make a big difference in consumer behavior! Instead of constant sales and spending effort on greenwashing, companies should be taking care of their communities, educating about protecting our planet, and investing in building safer social systems. That’s how we move the needle realistically.

The Challenge of Measurement

Transitioning to a sustainable world presents many challenges, one of which is the need for measurement tools to calculate the digital carbon footprint of media.

We struggle with this ourselves. We want to have our emissions calculated along with our impact, but because we’re almost exclusively an online company we have a hard time finding an agency that can give us accurate calculations. And we don’t want to settle just to be able to put numbers on our website.

That’s why we were so excited when Rachel told us that Ad Net Zero is working with sustainability consultants, measurement companies, climate scientists, and the British Standards Institute to evaluate different tools and develop a framework for measuring media emissions. The goal is for these tools to align with a standard set by Ad Net Zero, to provide confidence in the calculations they use!

Get Involved – Get In Touch

Net Zero operates through five actions: getting their own house in order, making sustainable production choices, embedding sustainability in events and awards, and driving consumer behavior change. Collaboration within Net Zero happens through working groups for each action, where brands, advertisers, partners, and trade associations come together to discuss challenges, solutions, and progress.

Ad Net Zero also shared their quick action downloadable with us, which you can get by clicking here

If you want to join the Ad Net Zero cause, get in touch with them!

Rachels LinkedIn: Rachel Schnorr | LinkedIn
Ad Net Zero US LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ad-net-zero-us
Ad Net Zero website: adnetzero.com

The post Sustainable Advertising with Rachel Schnoor | EnvironMental with Dandelion appeared first on Dandelion Branding.

Well, we have a lot of thoughts on this. In short, yes, marketing funnels should be a factor because they can be incredibly beneficial to grow your business and expand your audience.

With that said, funnel building can easily get overcomplicated and unsustainable. There are platforms out there that promise a simple solution for funnel building, but those likely aren’t the best option if you’re looking to operate your business holistically.

What is a Marketing Funnel?

A funnel is a marketing term for a lead generation or sales campaign. It gets the name because the goal of a funnel is to cast a wide net with your campaign, and move users through several marketing touchpoints to build a connection and ideally convert them into a loyal, long-term customer.

A funnel typically consists of one or more social media campaigns – either paid ads or organic marketing, a landing page, and a set of automated email marketing campaigns. This can certainly get more sophisticated, but that’s the basic structure.

Benefits of Funnels for Lead Generation

Marketing funnels are typically used as a way to quickly grow your audience or increase sales. Depending on what you’re offering, and if you’ve properly planned your launch, they can be incredibly effective.

Because of their effectiveness, there is a whole industry built around “helping” business owners simplify or consolidate their funnel operations.

3rd Party Funnel Building Software

These 3rd party funnel builder platforms offer all-in-one solutions for simple roll out. These programs can be great for business owners who don’t have a website yet, or aren’t able to easily edit their website. If you fall into one of those categories, then a funnel building platform could work well for you.

There are many cons to these platforms though that should be considered.

• Using a standalone funnel builder means you’ll likely be duplicating messaging from your website. If something needed to be updated, now you have two places to make those changes, this is not efficient and could be an issue.
• You’ll likely need to upload all your brand logos and image files to this new program as well, increasing the amount of digital storage space used for your business unnecessarily.
• You don’t own the content that’s stored on a 3rd party website. If they were to close down, would you lose everything? That’s a scary thought but it is a possibility!

If you’d like to operate more holistically and build a sales and lead generation process that’s repeatable and operational long term, then we definitely recommend a different solution – holistic marketing funnels.

Holistic Marketing Funnels

Dandelion’s concept of Holistic Marketing started because we were focusing on lead generation and retention with our client work. We started seeing how well it worked on an individual campaign level, and then we started asking, “what if we applied these ideas to everything in a business?”

Operating your marketing holistically means you already have a website that you’re regularly updating, you have engaging marketing emails and you’re actively working to new and improved offers for your audience. Holistic Marketing treats every piece of marketing almost like a mini funnel because you’re always ensuring you’re giving clear CTA’s to send traffic to your site, and you’re focused on giving them a thoughtful and personal experience no matter how they interact with your brand.

Viewing funnels as just larger versions of your normal holistic marketing efforts helps to cut out the overwhelm!

Let’s get planning! Schedule a call with us here!

The post Marketing Funnels: Are They Necessary? A Holistic Perspective appeared first on Dandelion Branding.

In this article, I’ll talk a bit about how we strategically build target audiences and why we put so much emphasis on this part of our Holistic Marketing Strategy.

One Target Audience? Try Three. Our Audience Philosophy.

A target audience is a clear definition of the people you’re trying to reach with your brand. A lot of marketers say that businesses need to define one audience and stick to it. We don’t agree.

We think it’s a bit lazy to lump everyone into a single target group. People are multifaceted and their reasons for loving a brand are distinct. Those distinctions should be explored with care. So when we’re thinking about who a business is targeting, we typically build three target audiences. We have found that creating three allows for those important distinctions but doesn’t over-segment the brand when it comes to communications.

Additionally, because we’re a holistic agency, our target audiences are always based on the long and short term goals of the business – not just the people the business happens to be calling in at the moment.

Our philosophy is that whomever you build for is who you will call in.

How fruitful is calling in a massive audience that is lovely but doesn’t serve the goals of the business? Not very.

Time to Call: Building a Voice Around Your Target Audiences

One thing that sets us apart is how incorporated our audiences are into the voice, content, and strategy of a brand.

How many articles have you read that says “you need to define your audience” but then doesn’t tell you how to use those audiences in your business.

For us, the target audience is everything. I’m not just talking like, “speak their language.” Although that’s sound advice, it isn’t quite spot on.

For example, the voice of the brand needs to hold the level of authority that the audience expects to hear from you. Authority is definitely brand-specific, but sometimes it changes per target audience. This is especially true for our clients who have multiple stakeholders, multi-faceted goals, and holistic business plans.

Using our newly defined target audiences coupled with brand values and goals, we create a single unified brand voice that appeals to each distinct group while unlocking the personality of the brand.

I know – it seems like a small thing when it comes to branding. But a voice can be just as show stopping as a logo, font, or color scheme. It isn’t your visual identity that keeps people coming back, it’s the story you tell and the way you tell it.

What Story Does Your Target Audience Want to Hear?

This is when most marketers start talking about painpoints and positioning. We came up in this school of thought, and while we agree that painpoints are important to understand, we value transformation more than pushing on bruises.

Our goal is to help an audience member see themselves standing next to you. If you give them a traumatic shock every time they get close, they’ll eventually stop getting close.  But, if an audience member self-identifies as part of your target audience, they are much more likely to continue showing up.

So we work their story into your story. We look for spaces to give them agency to make the choice to join your story and transform their [insert their problem] with [insert your solution]. It’s a subtle difference, but by asking, “what story do they want to hear” we design true brand loyalty through holistic content and communications.

The Dandelion Holistic Marketing Strategy & Target Audiences

I’m going to be a bit forward here. Truly understanding target audiences and building brands around them is the essence of our Holistic Marketing Strategy. It’s the essence of what we do at Dandelion. It’s what makes us great marketers.

I say this because I am the person behind audience and strategy creation. For me, detailing each audience for a brand isn’t just creating a list of demographics and activities. It’s a deep channeling of creative empathy that defines a person with likes, fears, and a history. They have unique relationships with authority and family, and there is something specific about their expectations of the brand. (I could go on – it’s one of my favorite parts of what I do).

You can imagine how building a whole brand strategy around those bespoke audiences is special! The Dandelion Holistic Marketing Strategy is not just a means to the end of your content calendar, it’s a design of the whole experience an audience member will have with your brand.

I’m gushing- I know. I love what I do.

If you want to talk to me a bit about what that looks like for your brand, schedule a call with me.

The post How Dandelion Creates A Target Audience appeared first on Dandelion Branding.

“The evidence is so clear that climate change is real and that the second largest polluter is food production, our food choices have a massive impact. So as a chef, I kind of see my role as helping people understand that that food is so much more important than our personal desires or what it is that we think we can get away with.”

In this episode of EnvironMental with Dandelion, we welcomed Christina Pirello to talk about sustainable cooking. Christina is the Emmy Award-winning host of the national public television series, Christina Cooks, which has been airing across the USA since premiering in 1998, and the best-selling author of 13 cookbooks.

We loved having Christina on the show. Not only did she bring an inspiring energy to the podcast, Christina’s dedication to sustainability in food is infectious. The food we choose and the way we prepare it is one of the few ways we can impact our personal carbon footprint and Christina makes it easy to make delicious, vegan, low-footprint meals.

Christina’s Journey to Sustainable Cooking

Christina’s journey towards sustainability began at age 14 when she became a vegetarian after learning about her father’s experience working in a slaughterhouse. However, her commitment to a plant-based diet took on a new dimension when she was diagnosed with cancer at 26. After being diagnosed with only a few months left to live, Christina managed to heal herself with the help of her coach (and now husband) and a total food revamp.

This pushed her life in a totally new direction – her focus became the connection between food, health, and the planet. Now she has been on TV for almost 30 years, teaching about food and the impact it has on our health. She is an advocate for a plant-based sustainable lifestyle and has dedicated her life to helping people make a change for the better.

“I feel like in the beginning my role was simply to get people to make better food choices for personal health. Now I think my voice has become make better food choices for the generations to come. Make better food choices for the health of the planet and for the people around us.”

Christina Pirello

The Role of Food in Sustainability

There are two daily choices that have a massive impact on our personal digital carbon footprint – our travel and our food. While choosing public transport and walking aren’t choices everyone can make day to day, choosing a plant-based diet is.

Choosing to lower your meat consumption and use fresh fruits and vegetables in your daily meal planning is a sustainability choice that you can take into your own hands. Not only is it a great place to start on a sustainability journey, it’s a daily decision that can help keep us on track with our overall sustainability goals.

Christina also highlighted the obvious need we have to heal our food system. She talked about agriculture in France and Italy, where family businesses prioritize sustainability and waste reduction. It isn’t something new or fancy, it’s just business as usual! She sees the importance of regenerative farming and feels like it’s her place to raise awareness about the healthiest (and yummiest) ways for us to farm and eat.

We’re all optimistic that if we can create a large enough movement towards food safety and regeneration, we can heal the world.

The Challenge

Despite her optimism for the future, Christina acknowledged the challenges of promoting sustainable cooking, even in 2023.

We talked about the influence of lobby money in keeping the sustainability message suppressed. It feels conspiratorial, but it’s true. There is a massive push by power hungry agriculture giants to glaze over the sustainability message. Greenwashing is a big problem in the food and agriculture world. It’s an exploitative industry, full of inequality, and food still isn’t considered a human right – it’s a commodity.

If we allow our people to starve and our planet to be destroyed, there will be nothing left to exploit. There will be no power left to gain, or people to hold it over. Money won’t hold the value it does now when people in charge are finally feeling the impacts of climate change.

“Did I do enough for your generation and the generation after you that’s coming, or am I part of the guilt of the generation that’s after the 60s said, ‘Well life’s a party’?”

Christina Pirello

We resonated with Christina’s questioning about whether she’s done enough. Every advocate feels insecure sometimes, especially when we’re looking at this looming climate crisis. We talked a little bit about this when we spoke to Sue Inches. What do we do when we don’t know if we’ve done enough? Find a community! Talk to each other!

Connect with Christina!

Christina does her level best to get back to all the messages she can, especially about food security and sustainability.

If you’d like to connect with her, here are the places to do it:

Website: https://www.christinacooks.com/recipes/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/christinacooks

The post Cooking for Sustainability with Christina Pirello | EnvironMental appeared first on Dandelion Branding.

We met Amy and Sarah, the Founders of both Fearless Farmers and Deeply Rooted Ranch, in a moment like this.

They were feeling the growing pains of operating two interconnected business. Not only were they unhappy with recent website updates, they were trying to do all of their own communications and struggling to separate the voice and marketing efforts of each businesses.

That’s where we come in.

Our plan was to separate these businesses with a combined Holistic Marketing Strategy and Website Audit! We will always feel honored because Sarah and Amy trusted us to take on this project for both Fearless Farmers and Deeply Rooted Ranch.

This was a first for us. We’ve never worked on such interconnected businesses before, and we quickly learned why this has been such a challenge! We did the projects simultaneously because they really wanted one team to understand the full scope of their work.

How We Separated Rooted and Fearless

We didn’t want to jump into the holistic strategy and website audit immediately because their differences weren’t immediately clear. Until now, the two companies had been operating with a similar message, voice, and content. Additionally, both are dedicated to growth through regenerative agriculture. At first glance, it almost felt like they were competing with each other instead of bolstering each other. We couldn’t have that!

So for us, the solution of separating these two businesses came down to their goals and their location.

Deeply Rooted Ranch is a physical location, so a lot of their strategy is focused on being hyper local. We recognized pretty quickly that while they can set themselves up to be a ‘destination’ for guests or an ‘influencer’ in the regenerative farming space, most of their time and revenue will be from events and pickup CSA farm boxes.

Fearless Farmers is predominately an online education platform. They aren’t tied to a physical location or a local audience at all. In fact, their whole goal is to teach people from all over the globe how to farm using regenerative practices.

With the two businesses laid out like this, they’re quite separate, right? So then, we needed to figure out how to maximize the interactions they do have.

Where these businesses truly intersect is when Fearless Farmers offers a physical event. These are things like Fearless Farmer Program Intensive, Free Fearless Farm Tours, and the Fearless Fundraisers. In addition to being its own business, we also started to think of Deeply Rooted Ranch as headquarters and the proof of concept for Fearless Farmers.

Once we had this clear, making a holistic marketing strategy and a website audit became a lot more straightforward.

What is an Audit and Strategy for Dandelion

First some definitions:

A website audit is centered around one question. How likely is your audience to like you, trust you, purchase from you over and over again? We give platform and page feedback about user experience, usability, accessibility, SEO, and current marketing initiatives. And it isn’t just feedback, we create a prioritized list of action items that helps our clients optimize for their target audience.

A holistic marketing strategy takes a brand’s whole digital presence into consideration. We build these strategies around an ideal audience, first and foremost. Then we consider the short term and long term goals and how they relate to each other, the best digital and analog platforms for them to be on, and a manageable schedule for content. What sets our strategies apart is that we also help our clients optimize their workflow so they can get more done with less energy.

Why a Website Audit and Marketing Strategy Made a Good Pair

Website audits and holistic marketing strategies always pair well together. The marketing strategy is focused on driving the best traffic while the website audit is focused on optimizing the customer journey once they’re at on the website. In other words: Traffic and Sales.

This pairing was particularly impactful for Fearless Farmers and Deeply Rooted Ranch.

We started with the individual strategies because we needed to create space between the businesses. This allowed us to look at each business and the marketing around it totally separately. In fact, in the beginning, we would schedule one call to talk about both businesses, but about halfway through the strategies we started splitting up the calls into one call per business! This is because it became clear that we were talking to different audiences with two very distinct brands.

The strategies gave us a clear framework to work with. We understood the goals of each business and how to achieve them. This allowed us to look at the individual websites with fresh eyes and new clarity for the website audit. We could see what was done well and what was missing. We were surprised to find some things on the Fearless website that belonged on the Deeply one (and vice versa!).

In this case, the resulting documents were exponentially more impactful than if we had just completed a strategy, or even the website audit and strategy pairing, for one brand. We believe that separating marketing strategies and reframing ‘ownership’ of specific marketing campaigns will allow both brands to grow together and separately without creating competition between them in the long term.

Interested in an Audit + Strategy Pairing?
Click Here to Schedule a Call with A Dandelion Founder

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