Swiroset.com

So, you know what a brand is. You know what constitutes a brand and what parts of your company you could exploit, I mean use, to define and manipulate your brand and the way you are perceived by the public. But hey, how?

The combination of a successfully developed brand and the implementation of a great marketing campaign will do wonders for your business. Think about those TV commercials that stick in your mind: what makes them that way? What have they done differently? If you make a list, you will notice that each and every one of them has tapped into creative and innovative ideas. It’s not enough to just have a great logo, or great radio ads. The entire marketing package, when done correctly, is the key to making your business a wonderful success.

There are a large number of commercial tools that are widely accepted as forms of advertising. The key here is to put your brand on everything. It may not even mean putting your logo on everything (although in most cases it’s recommended), but just making sure that all your business material fits with the business image you’ve already determined. For example, if you have a particular corporate color that’s fairly unique (ie, it’s not black), you can use it to your advantage by placing all your correspondence in color-coded envelopes. If your brand is a particular scent or perfume, be sure to always use it when you meet with your vendors or potential customers. Check all.

You should have two main ports of call, depending on your industry: your business card and your website. These are the first places your customers will look for your information. If your brand is not evident through these two mediums, you probably have some marketing problems. Stop reading, find a brand name developer (I know one I could use! ho ho) and have them redo them. Right now. No apologies.

You must use your logo, or some manifestation of it, on your business card. Your business card is your little personal identity that people can carry with them. A part of you is written on your business card. Work on it and work on it until it’s exactly right, or you’ll regret it as soon as it comes back from the press. You should be proud to hand over your business card; it’s even better if people go “oooh” when they see it. Point to “ooh.”

Regarding your website, above all else, it must be attractive and easy to navigate. It doesn’t really have to be flashy, but chances are people will be more interested in it if it’s not ugly. So if you have an ugly website, you’ll want to fix that too. It doesn’t need to be beautiful, but it does need to be harmless. If you want to do it yourself, there are tens of thousands of web design tutorials that you might find useful. Otherwise, hiring a web designer or developer to create an effective site for you is your best bet. Just be sure to check out their previous work, to make sure they can actually provide what you need. Web designers seem to be a dime these days, and it can make it hard to pick one that’s actually skilled!

Now leave and come back when you’ve got your business cards and website sorted out. I will wait here.

Once you’ve worked out your initial touchpoints, you can see everything else. There are so many options for marketing your product or service that you couldn’t possibly cover them all, even if you wrote a book about it. So let’s talk about options and examples. I’ll use myself as an example, then I can disguise brainstorming as writing an article and feeling accomplished afterwards.

The most obvious form of marketing seems to be print advertising. Print advertising is available through different media: magazines, newspapers, mailboxes, flyers, brochures, pesky pieces of paper under people’s windshield wipers.

There are benefits to all of these, depending on who your target audience is and how much you want to spend. For example, a quarter-page color ad in a magazine might cost you $1,500, but it might also give you more opportunities to target your specific audience (if you were, say, a brand developer, you might advertise in a start-up company). ). magazine). Obviously, the benefit here versus a newspaper is the specific audience that reads the magazine. But the newspaper may only cost you a couple hundred bucks, so there’s a benefit to that.

Mailers are fairly inexpensive to develop (especially if you photocopy and mail them yourself), but most people may just throw away your brochure. And then the people who actually read your brochure might not be interested, which can make it a huge waste of time. On the other hand, if you have a low-sales, high-profit, high-margin type of business, even a few sales from your downfall can make you profitable, so it might well be worth the time and money you put into it. .

Brochures allow you to showcase your full range of products, but they’re expensive to produce, and like mailboxes, many people just throw them away—at $4 each, they’re nothing to laugh about. If you post your brochure at your local grocery store, it will probably only cost you 20 cents for the photocopy, but it can be detrimental to your professionalism. The pesky bits of paper under your windshield wipers are, well, annoying, and should probably be reserved for door-to-door salesmen.

It’s not just about advertising though, of course. As I mentioned earlier, your brand is made up of much more components than just collateral. Get creative with your marketing – when you sell a product, add your own personal flair to it. Make sure your packaging material has your logo on it. When you’re out and about, wear a T-shirt or earrings in your company color. If you do this kind of thing often enough, people will start to notice. Every minute of the day is an opportunity for your brand to be recognized.

Do you feel more positive about businesses that are active in the community or with charities? How would participating in a campaign like donating a percentage of your profits to a non-profit organization reflect on your brand? Consider that if you sell children’s clothing, for example, donating part of each sale to SIDS & Kids may well encourage parents to think that your business cares about children and is involved in the community. And of course it makes you feel good, and SIDS & Kids will benefit too. everyone wins

Take advantage of free marketing opportunities. I recently bought a book called Marketing Without Money (not a bad book, worth reading!) and out of sheer irony, I put my business stickers on the front and back, with a little comment about what I do. When the people on the bus are interested in what I am reading, they will also see an advertisement for my company. Take your business cards with you everywhere and hand them out at every opportunity, even if you don’t hand them out during necessarily business-related conversations.

Make sure you are well presented as often as possible. I know we all have those days when our noses are a little stuffy and we just want to get out of bed and go to the supermarket in our sweatpants for some chocolate, but if you can give it an air of sophistication and “I took the time to be presentable, because I care about the image of my business”, that will have a profound effect on anyone you talk to. You can never be sure when a business opportunity might arise; give yourself the best chance to make a good impression when it happens.

Consider writing signs for your car, which is fairly inexpensive and can be very effective. People may not stop you to talk about your company, but if you do some driving in your local community and have a well-developed logo, it will create a sense of familiarity. Then complement your car campaign with a well-designed logo in the Yellow Pages or in your local community directory. When your potential customers go looking for a supplier, you can trigger their memories and invoke that same sense of familiarity in them: they’ll choose you, not someone they don’t know completely.

The key marketing characteristics to look out for, then, are:

• Consistency – Consistency is absolutely the most important characteristic of well-developed brand marketing. You want your customers to be able to recognize your brand in everything you offer.
• Uniqueness: Developing a campaign that adds something new will encourage people to investigate your company and discover what makes it different. Obviously this isn’t always possible, but think outside the box whenever you can. The humor is also great.
• Overkill – Definitely use overkill with your brand! You will most likely affect different groups of people with your different media, so use as many as you like. Make people familiar with your company.
• Make it Memorable – You want consumers to come back and develop a relationship with your brand. Make sure your logo and other branding material is well developed, with a key theme in mind, and is easily reproduced. Some of the world’s most recognizable brands are also the most down-to-earth (like Nike).
• Think creatively: Don’t limit yourself to the “usual suspects” when it comes to marketing your business. There’s no reason you can’t screen print a t-shirt with your logo and wear it everywhere. Get yourself some temporary tattoos and stick them on your kids. Even when sending very boring and impersonal letters to places like banks, include your logo on the envelope or use color-coded envelopes. You never know when postal workers might need to use your product.
• Marketing your brand doesn’t have to be incredibly expensive or difficult. If you can understand that your brand is in everything you present to the public, you’ll be increasingly attuned to the ways you can alter their perception of your business, or at least make them aware that it exists.