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!

I Know This Might Sound Crazy!

I know this may sound crazy, but I had a career in marketing for 13 years and it wasn't until I left that I fully understood what branding meant. After I was downsized (fired!), I went through a long period of trying to "find myself". Even though I knew I should stick to what I did best, just doing marketing didn't seem to be enough. Everybody was doing marketing! Somewhere, on some level! What was going to make my marketing services stand out? It wasn't until after attending several networking events that I realized not many people know how to market themselves (even entrepreneurs!). Nor do they realize the importance of marketing. Most people fall into what I call the "chotch-key trap". They believe that the more stuff they have to represent their company, the better marketers they are - that's just not the case. In fact, by doing that, you run the risk of sending multiple marketing messages and never reaching your target market. That's why building a brand is so important. Most entrepreneurs think that branding is only important for big companies, but how do you think they got to be a big company? Building a brand starts with 3 questions you must ask yourself:

1. What is the message I want to convey? Ask this of your self first and then your company. The two answers should relate to one another. For instance, if you want to be perceived as a celebrity stylist who's on the cutting edge of fashion, identify what unique quality you and your company can bring to your client.
2. What message are my clients/ customers getting from me? For this question, you really need to take personal inventory. Ask your clients/ customers for their honest feedback. Ask specific questions and ask them to give you specific examples. Once you get that feedback, compare it against what you do day-to-day in your business to get the message out. This may seem obvious to some, but what you do with that feedback makes all the difference in the success of your brand.
3. And finally, if those two answers are different, then you need to devise a strategic plan to get them on the same page. Whether you provide a product or service, your target audience should be able to spell out exactly the message you are trying to convey.

When venturing out on your own, building a brand is more important than ever. Spend the time and make the necessary investments.

Happy Branding!