strategy Archives - Page 16 of 16 - Branding and Marketing

Increasing the Brand Value of your Business

Does your company work at increasing brand value?

Do you consistently and repeatedly communicate your message like a mantra?
Are you consistent in the use of the style of your logo? (don’t change colors, shape or style on a whim)
Do your customers get what they expect? Or do you often hear things like: “Oh, I didn’t know that’s what you guys did.”

After watching the commercials at the SuperBowl this weekend, I’m reminded that communication has to be clear, focused and consistent with the brand. You shouldn’t leave the intended customer wondering what you stand for, what you’re selling or why you’re even communicating it to them. If you are currently trying to work on your brand, then you could always check out this article here for more information and to help you make sure that your brand is perfect. When a customer is confused, you can tarnish your business’s reputation, as the customer will have no interest in your business. It’s important that you maintain your brand value and realize the importance of protecting your online reputation. Luckily, companies like Universal Business Reputation can help build your reputation online positively and protect your brand value. Every business needs a good online image.

Oh! You run a B2B business, so you don’t think you need to consider brand value?

Think again.

Josh Levine, Epiphany Engineer/Brand Coach at Neutron (a thought leading agency in San Francisco says this about invisible branding for the B2B company:

{invisible branding}… can have a huge impact on your company’s reputation. The list includes items such as CEO vision, employee training, pricing strategy, customer relationships, and sales force communications.

What does your brand stand for? Great Quality? Great Service? Great Price?

If you’re not sure, then what do you think your potential customers are thinking? And how can you increase the brand value if you’re not sure of the positioning? Not to mention how your employees must be feeling. If you don’t know how they are feeling then it might be easier to make use of something like this employee review form to help better understand your employees, you might find that this is helpful in the long run. However, with no brand value, there’s nothing for them to work for, which can tarnish morale. To keep employees on board whilst you’re building your brand value back up, you can read Sparkbay’s blog; employee morale will improve.

If you were to start the business again from scratch, would you find value in using the same name, philosophy and offerings? Would customers prefer to buy from you instead of the competition at the same price? Knowing why helps to give you the edge in increasing your brand value.

Other brand value blogger’s opinions:

Building Brand Value during a Recession by David Murphy. (Are we actually in a recession?!)

What do you do to increase the brand value of your business? Leave your comments below:

Watch your Marketing Program KPI’s and See Your Results Improve

Do you use KPI’s in your business?

Key Performance Indicators

What’s a KPI? It’s the number of things that you track that tells you that your business is … headed the right way or you need to do something to make the difference. In accounts receivable, a KPI would be number of days for collection and trying to make the number to go from 45 days to 30… or at least not heading toward 60 days.

KPI is but one of the ways a business measures its data and performance. Many opt for the OKR method instead, where they get help from articles from sites like Tech Breath to learn more about what this may entail. OKR stands for “Objectives and key results”, which works in a similar function to KPI, or a “Key Performance Indicator”. Some firms even choose to use both together. After all, we all know “what gets measured, gets managed better.”

Many firms choose to stick with KPIs alone, however. They find the way of working with them to be suited to their business needs, and all companies want to ensure that anything they are doing is working as intended. Having quantifiable data to help measure that helps immensely. What are your KPI’s for your Marketing? Some might be:

Website traffic
Ranking in Google for certain keyword phrases
Phone inquiries
Trade show leads
Press Release circulation impressions
Press Release column inch totals
Advertising impressions

What do you track for your business and how are you trying to improve it in 2008?

Mixing Strategy with Tactics

Jim Tobin at Life Is Marketing blog commented on my recent post about being a Marketer On THE Run (MOTHER):

It’s too easy on both the agency and the client side to get task oriented. You even have to schedule the task of doing some meaningful thinking. It’s ironic, particularly when I find that most of the answers in marketing are found when you pull your head out of the tactics and consider the strategy.

How true that is. Relationships. Strategy. Looking at the Forest, (not the trees.) Beginning with the end in mind (Stephen Covey.)

Good marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.

Thanks Jim.

Starting Tactics without Strategy is just Spinning your Wheels

In marketing it only makes sense to start with a plan, but you’d be surprised how few firms want to start with one.

They usually call wanting help with a tactic. “Create a brochure.” “Revise our website.” “Send out a press release.”

(Don’t get me wrong, we do that kind of work. Happily do that kind of work!)

But if the client doesn’t have a marketing plan in place before they begin to execute all the tactics, they wonder why “it’s not working”. Or why they continue to re-do things over and over.

A good marketing plan has a strategy. It needs to be based on market research and analysis. And on competitive analysis and SWOT analysis. And on a thorough understanding of the target customer — what they need, why they buy at what price, and why they might switch from a competitor to your brand.

If you want tactics, that’s great. But if you have a plan, you’ll be so much happier when everything is all said and done… and you won’t have wasted any time spinning wheels!

Technorati tags: Tactiocs, Marketing, Branding, Strategy, SWOT analysis

Rapid Change in Media — Pew Internet

We all know that the internet has had a huge impact on the media. This report presented by Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, today at the Washington Web Managers Roundtable really brings us face-to-face with that reality. I guess I knew that on-line news had grown and the National TV News was dropping, but wow… no wonder Katie Couric is having a tough time.

Check out the full PowerPoint presentation on the Growth and Impact of the Internet. It’s a “good” PowerPoint, one that Garr Reynold’s Presentation Zen would approve!