Creating a Buzz Around Your Brand: Targeting as Many Potential Customers as Possible

August 7, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing & Sales /by StrategyDriven

Generating sales and profit is a challenge for any newly established brand. People are unaware of your existence or wary of your products and services. You haven’t had the opportunity to gain their trust and loyalty yet and competitors are reluctant to let them test the waters with your newly posed competition. So, how do you go about encouraging consumers to take a risk and purchase your products? It’s time to make a name for your company. Here’s how to create a buzz around your brand, drawing the attention of as many potential customers as possible.

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Corporate PR

Corporate PR forges the potential for relationships to develop between your brand and your customers. It opens up a conversation, then leaves you to make sales and prove your worth. A good corporate PR agency will ensure that your company appears in all the right places. It will land you reviews in widely read and influential publications and interviews with widely watched television programs. These agencies place you in the spotlight and give you the chance to really showcase what you’re about. Perfect! The more visible your company is and the more consistently it appears in the public eye for positive reasons, the more familiar consumers will feel with your image and the more likely they are to trust you with their purchases.

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SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a business technique that helps to direct as many people to your website as possible. Every single day, millions of internet users employ the help of search engines to find the pages that they’re looking for. If they want to find the answer to a question, they’ll use a search engine to find a site that will provide them with the relevant information. If they want to know what time a certain store opens, they will use search engines to direct them to the company’s site, preferably directly to the page detailing their store details. If they want a certain product, they will use a search engine to find the brands that supply it. It’s not surprising then, that to turn over the maximum profits possible, you want to be featured high in the search engine’s results. The closer you are to the top of the list, the more likely people are going to click on your link and the more traffic directed to your site. Once consumers are on your page, the products will sell themselves. So, how do you go about directing the maximum volume of traffic to your web page? The answer? By educating yourself. Take the SEO class online to gain a full comprehension of SEO. There are so many more factors that will help you to excel in the field than you could imagine: marketing personas, marketing funnel, search fundamentals, searcher intent, search framework, channel selection, branded searches, document relevancy, URL optimization, link neighborhoods. The list goes on and on. So, it’s time to start swotting up!

Customer Reviews

With increasing numbers of people gaining their information online comes another issue that your company needs to prioritize: online customer reviews. Nowadays, individual, non-professional reviews can have a more beneficial or negative effect on your sales than ever before. The internet has given everyday people a platform to express their love or disdain for a product, service or brand that can reach a worldwide audience. So focus on gaining positive feedback. If you offer high-quality produce and impeccable service, you can’t really go wrong. However, if you do receive a complaint or negative feedback, contact the individual who has made it. Discuss the problem with them. Question what they dislike about your service and how things could be improved. Chances are, you can easily rectify the situation by offering a refund, exchange or other means of compensation. This will ensure that you maintain a good relationship with this individual consumer (they will recognize your company as going above and beyond their call of duty) and encourage them to alter their review. Hundreds of thousands of people will have access to this and trust it, so it’s essential that you put wrongs to right. You can also use the situation to ensure that you don’t make the same mistake again. You will be able to constantly improve, ensuring that you don’t receive negative complaints in the future.

If you follow all of these steps, it won’t be long until your brand is part of the public consciousness. People will feel familiar with your company and place their trust in you to provide them with everything that they expect from their transaction. This means you will have more happy and loyal customers and the increasing profit that comes hand in hand with them.

Powerful Marketing Gems To Help You Build Your Brand

July 2, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing & Sales /by StrategyDriven

Good marketing can be the difference between a company that is just surviving and one that is flourishing. But with a glut of information out there on what the right way to do things is, it can be hard to weed out the gems from the dirt. That is where the following information can be useful.

Color is vital

So, it may sound a little basic to include color into your marketing materials, but it really isn’t. Color is much more of a complex thing that we often give it credit for. In fact, certain colors can evoke particular emotions, something that can have a huge effect on how customers relate to and feel about your business.

Marketing is the business of getting your company brand out there and getting potential customers to respond positively to it. That means choosing the right color or color combination for your brand is very important. For some more information on this check out this article on which color relate to which emotions and how you can utilize this is your logo and brand creation.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Money well spent

Marketing is a specialist subject. It is something that people go to college for years to study. It’s also something that changes all of the time very quickly. That means reading a few how-to books doesn’t qualify you to do the in depth detailed work that many campaigns need to be successful.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

It’s not that you can’t have an educated overview of what is going on. It just means that you do need to do is raid the coffers to invest in a professional to do things are pivotal for your company. Such as video making and contract creation.

Of course, many businesses struggle with the cost of employing the best marketing professionals, because they have to outlay the money before they get to see the results.

However, it is well worth finding the finances by reinvesting current profits or going to a provider like Swift Corporation for a loan or an advance that is easy to replay back in installments. You can even risk going into your business overdraft, for a job well done. As paying peanuts gets you monkeys, not really the caliber of worker you want looking after your vital customer facing image!

New content is king

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

As you may or may not know after Google’s recent Fred update, the way that search engines respond to marketing tools like content is changing… again. This means that you have to stay current and move with the times to remain relevant and high in the search engine ranks.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

To do this, consider the type of content you produce. Eschew the general and go for something that more specifically answers the possible questions that can spring up around a topic.

Also, the value of video content is now huge due to this update, so consider making clips that show the customer how to use your products, or make things relevant to the field you are in. Some great example of this are the Buzzfeed videos made for Pinterest, which play even when they aren’t clicked on, drawing people’s attention.

Struggling With Marketing? Here’s How To Improve It Immediately

February 4, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing & Sales /by StrategyDriven

There is no doubt in any business owner’s mind that marketing is a central part of the foundation of any company. Proper marketing does much more than just promote a product. On a grander scale, it enables a business to place itself in exactly the position it needs to be for greater ongoing success. Of course, it is not always this successful, and powerful marketing takes time, patience and no small number of failed attempts before landing on something just right for the business. All businesses also go through periods where the marketing is less than ideal in terms of its effectiveness. If this has happened to your business, then you might be wondering how to turn things around. For a start, take a look at these options for improving your marketing immediately.

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Embolden The Branding

You might see the brand as the vehicle with which the marketing does its job. As long as you have a working brand that does the job, all the marketing efforts are likely to be considerably more powerful automatically. That’s why taking a look at and emboldening your branding is one of the quickest ways to improve the marketing. As long as the brand is doing its job, you know that all else will likely fall into place too.

Drive Website Traffic

These days, there are few things more important to any marketing strategy than the website of the business. For most people, the website is the first port of call, so it is clear to see how important it can be for any business of any size. As long as you are drawing in decent numbers, and you’re providing good content, you’re happy. It is nowadays pretty much essential to adopt a strong SEO strategy. Here’s the thing about SEO Services: When You Get It Right, The ROI Is Phenomenal, and that is something that all businesses can benefit from.

Photo courtesy of Pexels

Improve Audience Understanding

The better you know your audience, the more finely tuned and effective you can make your marketing efforts. If you think about it, this makes perfect sense, as all it really means is that you know who you are talking to. Improving your understanding of who the target audience for your marketing is can be a powerful way of dramatically improving the whole marketing effort, so this is an essential tactic to take on board. To achieve this, you might consider asking your customers for feedback. This is one of the best practices a business can engage in anyway, and it is likely to help you get to where you want to go with your marketing in a much faster time.

Focus On Consistency

All your marketing efforts need to be consistent with one another, as this is how the brand develops most effectively. So if you are struggling with your branding, your marketing, make sure that you are being consistent in your efforts. This will likely make a huge difference in the long run.

Photo courtesy of Pexels

Four Ways to Get Your Business out in the Open

February 3, 2017/0 Comments/in Marketing & Sales /by StrategyDriven

You’ve tried networking, you’ve built relationships, you’ve asked for referrals — you’ve done everything you’ve been told will help you market your business. But you’re still coming up short in the race for custom with your competitors. Maybe it’s time you took another approach to marketing and advertising your business?

Obviously, the technological advances of today have made marketing your business online well a pivotal act for any owner. This shouldn’t be ignored, but it doesn’t mean you should completely ignore the au natural approach either. IRL (In real life) marketing is simply the act of leaving the office, going outside (as daunting as that may sound) and marketing your business and its products there. Here are four simple, yet effective ways to do so.

Handing out your information personally

Going old school by handing out flyers and posters in the local easterlies or public houses in the area in which you business is based may seem old school, but it’s still a way to make sure the general public are getting your information. Of course, they may just scrunch up your flyer and throw it in the bin as soon as your back is turned, but at least you know the information got to them in the first place. This strategy is most effective for businesses that are heavily involved with the local area and are oriented around it.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Creating a mural

Getting permission from the local council or governing authorities to be able to create a mural on the side of a prominent building, and then actually creating it, is a way of showing prospective customers you’re willing to go that extra mile. A mural is also going to last a hell of a lot longer than a normal advertisement campaign, like the ones found on billboards, so you won’t have to worry about constantly having to deal with coming up with new ideas. Of course, this idea all rests on whether you have an artistic flair, or not. Or you could just ask Banksy to do it for you.

Using flags and banners

Another interesting way of grabbing the attention of the passing public is by utilising flags and banners, those if which found at selbys custom flags and banners. Like the mural, this is an option that differs from the run-of-the-mill use of billboards for promotion as it’s something a bit different, and people like different. Different is more likely to catch the eye of the general public.

Photo courtesy of Geograph

Setting up Pop-ups

Although there is some debate as to whether this approach works based on how annoying and intrusive it can be, generally, it does. Getting out into the public and setting up, say, a stall at the local shopping centre is a great way approach all kinds of different people as well as having your information plastered around the area for everyone to see and not just those that you pick up the courage to approach.

The future of business is now, so now is the time to embrace it.

Your Look. Your Personality. Your Brand Voice.

April 13, 2016/0 Comments/in Business Communications, Marketing & Sales /by Dan Antonelli

The best brands connect with consumers and build long-term relationships through carefully crafted and controlled messaging. A logo, alone, is not enough. You see – once a small business has a strong logo, it’s important to bring the brand to life by developing a brand voice. No matter how small the business, putting a face behind the brand and building a brand voice is key to driving the conversation, building relationships, and standing out from the crowd.

Even more, a clear brand voice transforms a brand from just a product or service into a personality that’s consistent with the business’s values, target audiences and advertising goals. A brand voice can be used to inform all messaging choices a small business brand must make, from brochures and print advertisements to website content and social media interactions.

Why Is a Brand Voice Important for Small Business?

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About the Author

Dan Antonelli has over 20 years’ experience in small business logo design and marketing strategy. As CEO and Creative Director of Graphic DSigns, Inc., The Small Business Advertising Agency®, he’s helped nearly a thousand individual brands recognize the better side of business. The definitive industry expert on logo design for small business, Dan has authored three books on the subject, including his latest ‘Building a Big Small Business Brand’, and established his agency as the premier brand-building agency for small businesses nationwide.