If you’re building a brand in the language learning market right now, you’re doing it digitally. Pandemics and lockdowns notwithstanding, the internet isn’t going to be uninvented, so how else will you do it?
The thing is that the internet, and even your corner of it, is a crowded space. There’s a lot of competition. So there’s lots to do.
But for the purposes of this piece, we’ll concentrate on two areas of your brand - the product/service and the values. The two are linked, of course, but they can also be delivered digitally in slightly different ways as you seek to build a reputation and trust amongst your clients (existing and prospective) and stakeholders (ditto).
Put basically, it’s how you talk about the things that you do, and how you talk about why you do it.
The first thing is to look at your service - let’s call it experiential language learning. What is it that you do that is better than the rest? It will, of course, be the quality of the product, but it might be the way you deliver the learning, the nature of the experiences you create around it, or the atmosphere of the team, the fellow students or the support services. You need to understand that, fully, before you can tell it to others. And you need to understand the best way to deliver that - whether its words, video, audio, picture or, most likely, all of the above. Working on your content design is a good way of working that out.
But your brand is not just about your corporate journey, it’s about your values. The things, other than making a living, that you care about. Lots of companies have ‘causes’ they attach themselves too - sometimes cynically and temporarily, and sometimes sincerely and for the long term. In that (also) crowded space, you have to stand out, you have to make sure people know who you are and what you stand for, in order to earn trust in your services and in your company.
So, how do you build up an understanding of how good your products are and how clear your conscience is?
Tell people. This sounds obvious but you have to tell people what you’re about, and you have to tell that well.
The USP - the product
The product or service is what pays the bills and it needs to stand out amongst your competitors. The first way to do that is to sell something that is, quite simply, better than everyone else - better educational values, a stronger experiential context perhaps - and then be better at saying so.
A strong ‘Our services’ page on your website is something that feels so obvious that it’s sometimes done with too little thought. But it’s the key reason why people are interested in you. So get that explained well, in terminology that your audience will understand - which might be students, but also agents, parents and secondary schools or universities. Give them each the information they will need about the academic value of the course, the nature of the learning experience, the quality of the support services and all the rest so that all the elements of your audience have what they want.
And make sure it’s visible to search engines. Not much point in having a beautifully crafted sales pitch for your brand if no-one can find it. We can help there too.
The brand values
There are many companies who care about, say, climate change or diversity and fewer companies who articulate it well. The place to start is your own website, with a dedicated values page. It’s much better than trying to weave those values into content across the site. Saying, ‘We’ve always cared about the environment, which is why we built a language-learning app’ is so contrived. Separate them out. Your values should be reflected in your product and how you deliver it, but don’t exploit the values to sell more of your services.
Your brand values page should include clear statements:
Your purpose: Why you exist. You may want to teach young people languages as a way of making a living. But you may also believe that language skills hold the key to greater international understanding. Don’t assume everyone will spot this.
Your vision: What is the big picture for your company and how that fits into your view of the world. This may be something about how you deliver your services, or the audiences you have in mind. Something which elevates you in the minds of your customers.
Your values: How do you create that vision? What is it about you or your organisation that makes you uniquely qualified to deliver on that mission.
Show that you mean it
For both product and values, it is, again, obvious, but if your brand has meaning, then prove it. It’s not enough to simply say that you’re on a mission to save your corner of the world, you have to prove it by showing how you have put those values into action. And you can’t say that the courses you are selling led to better outcomes, unless you can prove it.
So if your brand is about delivering a service, but your values are about diversity, then make sure you talk about your excellence in the first and your commitment to the latter. Show how you walk the walk - with testimonials from staff members or clients on how satisfied they were, and with postings from fund-raising events or with case studies on work you’ve done in support of your wider mission on your values. If we hear it from others, we just believe it more.
Be consistent
If you want to appear true to those values, then consistency is key. Don’t work with clients who cut across that vision, don’t say things which contradict that vision. That needs oversight in what you do and what you say - not that you aren’t sincere, but if you run a team, then others may not have it in the forefront of their minds in the same way. Slip-ups happen.
Operationally, you should have that under control, and editorially, that’s simply a question of a second pair of eyes over all that you publish digitally. That’s simply a matter of content design and content delivery structures. Again, we can help.
Tone and transparency
The editorial tone you adopt affects the perception of your brand. How you ‘speak’ to people digitally. What you say, whether it’s in writing, video, audio or photos tells people what sort of organisation you are. The tone you adopt is dependent on what you want to portray, but also who to. If you are talking to students, it might be different than talking to agents. When messages are aimed at both, it’s a careful calibration and you don’t want too much variety of tone across your platforms. That sort of content approach is best done as a collaboration - what sounded great in your head may not work once published. We can, obviously, talk about that…
And when it comes to your brand values, transparency is key too. The reasons behind why you do what you do and the way you do it can be explained as a personal journey and the compromises and challenges it throws up can be talked about openly too. People value an honest company and will instinctively want to support you.
As the starting points for setting your values, this can all get you a long way - to building an audience of customers and stakeholders who can support your business. Amplifying these messages is another blog post entirely, so keep watching this space.