Remember the Little Things with Brand Development

 

Silver Miniature Poodle By Belinda (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Did you know brand development is more than just a logo and a tagline? It is a persona you create for your business and it is extremely important to your success. And as the world changes and your business adapts to those changes then so should your brand. Let us take a moment to explain what should be considered in brand development.

Where do you start? How do you define yourself?  It is vital to start with market research. There is a timeless question asked in a focus group sessions. If I were a (fill in the blank), what kind of (fill in the blank) would I be? In this case, ask yourself, if I were a dog what kind of dog would I be? A Rottweiler who fights to get business, a Poodle who is beautiful and attracts business through its visual appeal, or a Beagle who is fun-loving and friendly and pulls in customers just because they are nice.

Once you have your persona defined then it has to be reflected in everything that you do. And we mean everything.

More obvious examples of brand development:

• Logo
• Letterhead
• Website
• Advertisements
• Signs
• Print Marketing Materials
• Phone App
• Social Media Pages
• Trade Show Booth

Less obvious examples of brand development:

• How your phones are answered
• On hold message or music
• How your staff speaks with the customers
• Email signature
• Physical space from where you do business

And one more that really isn’t considered very often is how your delivery drivers, if you have them, drive and treat others when they are out on the road. Stay alert; and if the world creates new ways to market or gain business exposure, then your brand development should adapt to those changes.

So don’t forget the little things with brand development; remember everything you do and say should be a reflection of the Rottweiler, Poodle, or Beagle that your business has become.

If you have questions or want some assistance with your company’s persona the please contact us.

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Consistent Brand Messaging When Building Your Personal Brand

Building a powerful personal brand starts with you. How you present yourself publicly and online strongly affects how your brand is interpreted by the masses. Because your personal brand is a reflection of who you are personally, you must be aware, the totality of your actions will determine your brand.

Nurturing Your Brand Through Authenticity

Your brand is your legacy. Once you establish what you want your brand message to be, you must own it. How you present yourself to the world will define your brand culture – make it memorable. Your actions, expertise, and emotional connection to your brand will define how it is viewed. Offer something valuable only you can provide to the public; live it, and you will garner true authenticity.

Build Character – Online and Off

In the digital age, your online presence with social media has become your touchstone. This is where you engage those interested in your brand. Make sure the design of your online outlets closely aligns with your character and brand message. Whether you have a design team or one person working on creative, make sure there is an understanding of your brand’s uniqueness, your character is clearly interpreted, and don’t forget, a picture is worth a thousand words and this is your moment to shine. It will aid in your social media marketing campaign.

Consistent Brand Messaging

Current and potential clients want consistency. They want to know you will deliver each time with the same or better results. Your clients want to trust you, they want to count on you to be the answer. Consistency in your communications gives clients something to rely on. If you deliver strong and consistent communications, your clients will become evangelists of your brand. 

For more information on how you can build a powerful personal brand, contact the professionals at TwoGirlsConsulting LLC. We understand your physical and digital image must exude your brand. Enticing and consistent communication of your personal brand relies on a carefully crafted strategy. At 2GC, your image is everything.

 

Brand Development through Relationship Marketing

Relationship Marketing is an important part of brand development, focused on the long-term benefit of customer retention. This strategy places an emphasis on building customer relationships. In the modern age, marketing has evolved to include many technology-based methods, including email, video, and social media. There are benefits and challenges to relationship marketing across these various means, although it could be argued that connecting with customers has never been easier than it is today.

Relationship marketing is of particular importance when there is a competitive market for customers. When faced with many choices for the product or service they desire, customers seek to make a connect with a brand or company. That connection will fuel their consumer decisions in the future, and is often built on unique features of a brand. Some customers may gravitate to popular, well-know brands; others may gravitate to local, niche brands.

Relationship marketing usually features a combination of customer retention and customer satisfaction. Customer retention focuses on repeated transactions between customers and companies, building long-term relationships. Repeat customers are often less price sensitive and less inclined to switch companies. Because long-term customers are familiar with goods and processes, these relationships are cheaper to maintain when compared with the cost of attracting new customers.

An added benefit of customer retention is the likelihood that long-term customers will bring additional revenue to companies by word of mouth. Ensuring customer satisfaction, by building customer relationships with many positive associations to a specific product or brand, gives a worthwhile return on investment. Knowing the specific interests and desires of customers is done by accessing names, addresses, demographic information, buying history, and many other variables available with today’s analytic technology.

For help implementing relationship marketing as a brand development strategy, contact us today!

 

Storytelling for Creative Business Growth

Many businesses use tools and techniques like SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities) analysis to examine competitive actions and to plan business growth initiatives.  Yet, these meetings often conclude with few actionable or innovative ideas.

Consider a new tool, “Kill the Company” based upon Lisa Bodell’s new book of the same title.  In Kill the Company, employees are encouraged to take an outside view of their own firm and create ways that they, as a competitor, would put them out of business.  Employees are energetically engaged in the activity and with their inside knowledge can come up with great ideas.

Killing the company begins with storytelling as employees design ways to put the firm out of business.  Knowing that the company has a weakness in its distribution chain, employees will craft narratives to exploit the weakness.  Employees are often more engaged and creative in an environment where they design stories to kill the company rather than a dull competitive analysis resulting in lengthy to-do lists.

For example, a kill the company idea might be to offer products at no charge to customers.  That certainly would put a firm out of business!  Yet, the idea has a seed of an innovative marketing campaign built into it.  The company might consider giving away free products when the customer buys a service package.  Or a retail firm could offer “buy one, get one free” promotions to target customers.

Business growth depends on creative ideas and staying one step ahead of the competition.  Considering a new viewpoint – as a competitor from the outside of your company – might just offer a keen insight to a strategic growth path you’d never before examined.

For more information on competitive analysis and business growth, please contact us.

What’s My Organizational Culture?

If you want your company to be successful, you must have a good understanding of your organizational culture. Culture is the common values, beliefs and most importantly the behaviors within your company. Culture is how your employees interact with one another, what they feel is important at work, or how effective your employees are at getting tasks completed. Generally, there are four categories of culture: networked, mercenary, fragmented, and communal. Different forms of organizational culture are for different environments and different types of companies. Understanding which culture best defines your organization will give insight into if your company is being the most effective it can be. A company’s culture can be buried, hidden and hard to examine but here are the definitions of each type of culture.

 1)      The networked culture values friendships, relationships and helping your coworkers when they need it. In this type of environment, people like and care about each other, they display empathy and are informal with one another. Conversations around the water cooler and break rooms are common and meetings typically start with asking how everyone is doing. Job responsibilities can get a bit blurry in this type of environment because everyone helps everyone, team meetings and decisions are important and no one likes to say no to their friend. Leaders thrive on being liked and appreciated and so often times the downside to a networking culture can be lack of productivity or lack of accountability.

 2)      The Mercenary culture is the opposite of a networked culture. In this type of environment, individuals are focused, determined and highly motivated to complete job tasks. A common driver within this environment is increasing revenue. These organizations expect more than 40-hour weeks, making things happen no matter what, hitting goals and work is about work. Often individuals who thrive within this environment are those who see networking as a way to obtain information, advice, or insight but not as a friendship. A highly positive aspect of this type of environment is the types of goals that are set. For example, the manager might set the goal to increase new memberships by 30 percent by a certain date. Goals are defined, clearly outlined and expectations are set in the beginning.

3)      The Fragmented culture is both low on the networking scale and the mercenary scale. People aren’t typically friends with their co-workers but often don’t have a drive to increase the company’s bottom dollar either. They work at a company but for themselves. In some instances, this type of environment, employees feel like they have freedom, flexibility and fairness. Common beliefs within this type of culture are to make you valuable and judging on the quality of work. Often companies with this type of culture are law firms, reporters, or academics.

 4)      The Communal culture is the culture that is most appealing to most managers but is one of the most challenging cultures to maintain. It’s a networked and a mercenary culture combined. Employees are friends but also want to be driven and successful. In this type of environment, friendships are abundant and so is productivity. Often in start-up companies this type of culture is prevalent because they’re small and they hire their friends who they know will work hard. Employees love working for the company and love their coworkers but they also are passionate about increasing company earnings and making things happen. Communal leaders tend to be inspirational, visionary and have a lot of charisma.

 There are several different characteristics that are used to examine your culture including how the office spaces are set up, how people communicate with one another, how effectively time is used and how people express themselves at work. There are several different tests that we can use to help you identify what culture your company is working within. Once you identify what type of culture your organization is, you get a better understanding of how to market and communicate your product and your services. Contact us today to have a cultural analysis completed.

When Bad Things Happen to Good Businesses: Reputation Management

You have developed your business so it delivers what people want when they want it. Not only have you established your product and services, you have also advertised and promoted your company effectively through traditional media like newspapers, radio, and television, as well the Internet. As a result your business is growing and prospering.

However, the unexpected happens. It can be a natural disaster such as a flash flood or having a defective product slip out the doors to the public. Or perhaps, an irate customer or group of customers threatening to sue your company.  Challenges to the health of your business can take a variety of forms. Nevertheless, you will need to be ready to deal with them.

When bad things happen, the media might be coming to you. They will come at a time that will not be convenient and will ask questions. This will be a time when all the good work you have done in creating and developing your business can be threatened.

It is at those times you need to be ready to deal effectively with both the media and the public. TwoGirlsConsulting can be a crucial asset for you during those times. From effective executive media training, to handling and advising on how best to deal with media and the public, 2GC can help you weather the storm intact. Reputation management during times of crisis is one of the many things we can do for you.

TwoGirlsConsulting is committed to helping you grow your business and make it successful, while helping you avoid the misfortunes a business can face. Contact 2GC for more information on how we can accomplish this for you.

 

What Makes You Newsworthy? Making Sure You Benefit From Earned Media

To promote your business and brand, paid media isn’t enough.  Although powerful and creative ads are still important for engaging and retaining customers, you can’t rely exclusively on them.  For a well-rounded marketing strategy, you need earned media as well: news reports, feature articles, blog posts, and a strong social media presence that places a focus on you and your company.

When people hear about your business via social media or by reading an article in a respected publication, the impression left on them is likely to be deeper, as they engage more with the content, discuss it, and pick up on what others are saying about it. McKinsey Quarterly has reported that word-of-mouth is a significant driving force behind consumer behavior, and the 2013 Edelman Trust Barometer has found that people are generally most likely to trust reports originating from fellow consumers, particularly on blogs and social media; academics, experts in a particular field, and traditional media spokespeople (e.g. a news anchor), are also perceived as relatively trusted sources.

To experience the greatest benefit from earned media, you need to make sure that people can easily write about your business and find fresh and compelling information to share about it.  In addition to promoting yourself through paid media, providing interesting news releases and engaging website and blog content, that people will be moved to tell others about, is an important strategy that will only help you to build brand awareness.

To encourage the development and propagation of rich, newsworthy content, consider the following questions:

• Does your business have an inspiring or fascinating story about how it was founded?
• Is your business producing any important innovations?
• How has your business improved communities or changed the lives of individuals for the better?
• What differentiates you from your competitors? What is your unique vision?
• Have you or any of your employees recently achieved honors, awards, or other forms of recognition?
• How have you and your employees’ demonstrated ingenuity, leadership, strong teamwork, and/or social commitment in the business world and beyond?
• What developments do you foresee in your company and in your field more generally?

If your answers to these questions and other relevant ones are positive or remarkable in any way, the public needs to know.  Pique the interest of both existing and potential customers and attract attention from media professionals.

Contact us to develop a comprehensive marketing campaign that includes high-quality earned media.  With our personalized service, we’ll meet the specific needs of your business and commit ourselves to your growth and promotion.

 

Reputation Management and Habits of Successful Leaders

Forbes magazine recently published an online article titled “The Most Successful Leaders 15 Things Automatically, Every Day.” Leaders know how important reputation management is, both personally and professionally, and they become experts at doing these 15 things every day to ensure success.

 

1.  Make others feel safe to speak up. Successful leaders are confident enough to give those around them a voice.
2.  Make decisions. Successful leaders don’t waste time and “make things happen.”
3.  Communicate expectations. Successful leaders communicate clearly and make sure all team members stay focused on the goal.
4.  Challenge people to think. Successful leaders keep people on their toes.
5.  Be accountable to others. Successful leaders are willing to take responsibility for themselves.
6.  Lead by example. Successful leaders do what they ask others to do.
7.  Measure and reward performance. Successful leaders don’t take team members for granted.
8.  Provide continuous feedback. Successful leaders pay attention to team members and help them grow.
9.  Properly allocate and deploy talent. Successful leaders put people where they will shine!
10.  Ask questions, seek counsel. Successful leaders are willing to admit they don’t know it all.
11.  Problem solve; avoid procrastination. Successful leaders get things done!
12.  Positive energy and attitude. Successful leaders eliminate negativity from the workplace.
Be a great teacher. Successful leaders are always learning and teaching.
Invest in relationships. Successful leaders reach beyond themselves for the greater good.
Genuinely enjoy responsibilities. Successful leaders love leading!

TwoGirlsConsulting is on your team as you manage your reputation and implement these leadership principles. We can help you become the leader you want to be, the leader your business needs you to be. Using solid communication strategies, we will develop community awareness and open new avenues for your business to expand. With a personable and experienced approach, TwoGirlsConsulting will help you achieve your dreams!

We are committed to listening to you and helping you achieve your goals! Contact us today and tell us your story!