Take Inventory of Your Brand

In my "full-time" position of providing speciality marketing products, my customers understand the importance of maintaining their market share; especially in these tough economic times. They have taken inventory of their brand by analyzing the effectiveness of their marketing tools. By taking inventory they have realized that either 1) the brand image has to be maintained, or 2) it needs to be tweaked. Even the smallest detail of your business can influence your brand. Take a minute to review all of your marketing tools. Here's a few of the things that you should look at:

• Business Cards - Although you can easily order cards on-line for a relatively inexpensive price, how unique are they? These business cards usually use template artwork, standard fonts and have the name of the card's manufacturer on the back of the card. Do yourself a favor and spend the extra money to have your business cards custom made. The investment will pay for itself! In addition to the quality of the cards, make sure that all of the pertinent information is included, without any unneccesary "fluff". Again this may sound elementary, but you'd be surprised at the amount of people who still feel the more the better. That's just not the case!




• Website Address/ URL - Is your URL too long or too hard to remember? Whether you use your name or your company's name as the website address, your URL should be easy to remember, contain key words and be relevant to your product or service. Although there is no hard rule to the number of characters allowed, you want to make sure your URL is google-search friendly. (More about that in a later post)




• Email Address - DO NOT use a free internet service provider for your business email address, those should be reserved for your friends and fanily! jane@companyA.com or kelly.green@proforma.com is so much more professional than a generic email address. Again, this investment will be well worth it.




• Profile Pictures - Another area that you may want to spend money on is to have your pictures taken professionally. The picture that you post on your website or social networking sites, says a lot about your professionalism. Nothing will turn off a potential customer faster than a picture of you at the club holding a drink!

These are just some of the things to check for when taking inventory of your brand. If you are not sure, ask for feedback from an objective source. If your intended message is lost, then it's time to change course. For more ideas on branding tools, go to kelly.green@proforma.com.

Happy Branding!