Sourced from Speaker
Big data and big marketing are becoming one. What does that mean for your privacy? We’re seeing advanced data modeling concepts applied to consumer databases, which provides companies with the ability to identify and expand their target markets. It also results in less junk mail, less spam and less telemarketing calls. Perhaps there is a bright side to this after all.
Listen to “Craig Huey Big Data Meets Big Marketing, Who Wins? #4425” on Spreaker.
Sourced from Inc
With the amount of competition you face to get your email seen by your target market, you need to eliminate the noise by grabbing your audience’s attention. People are attracted to different options for different reasons. A/B split testing will tell you what your audience prefers, so you can create successful email campaigns.
A/B testing is when you compare and test two different versions of your email to see which brings in higher conversions and why. This allows you to create future campaigns that increase engagement and expand reach, because you’re giving your audience exactly what they want.
Consider testing your subject line, call-to-action copy, call-to-action button color, color scheme, and images. It’s important to test only one element of your email at a time; otherwise, it will be difficult to track why conversions went up or down, because there are multiple variables to consider.
Feature Image Credit: Getty Images
By Jared Atchison.
It’s hard to create a business without the consumer in mind. If anything, it’s downright impossible. You need to know what your audience wants if you’re going to provide them with solutions to their problems. To know what they want, you have to dig deep and find all the dirt you can get your hands on.
Target marketing comes in handy because it gives you crucial information about your customers that will help you serve them better. Without knowing details about who your target market is, your business is bound to suffer and not reach its goals in time. According to Google Trends, the search for conversion rate optimization continues to increase year by year as businesses struggle to gain the conversions they want. With proper target marketing, you rid your business of many of its conversion obstacles.
Let’s look at four common mistakes marketers make when performing target marketing and how you can avoid them.
You don’t know your customers.
The art of target marketing is that it knows everything about the customer down to their most recent issue. It gives you crucial information so you’re able to tailor your content and products to their needs.
Marketers create buyer personas to nail down the pain points of their audience so they can come up with solutions. These are detailed, data-driven profiles of your ideal customers or target market. To create buyer personas, you need to consider all the details of your audience, including their demographics and psychographics.
• Demographics: Your audience’s demographics are matter-of-fact details about them, such as age, gender, profession, race, location, education, income and relationship status.
• Psychographics: Your audience’s psychographics include personal details about them, like their buying behavior, hobbies, interests, values, attitudes and personality traits.
All of these details are essential in building accurate representations of your target market.
You aren’t engaging with your audience.
It’s difficult to understand who you’re targeting and how you can solve their problems without interacting with them first. Take advantage of email, social media and question-and-answer platforms where you can ask questions to get to know your target audience. This will allow you to serve them better as you narrow down your target audience.
If you have existing customers, email them with a survey or questionnaire that asks them what you don’t already know. Reach out to your followers on social media to get their thoughts. Follow hashtags in your niche or industry and scour users’ questions. Use Q&A platforms like Quora or Reddit to see what questions people are asking and what they have trouble with. Google Trends shows you trending topics locally or around the world.
The more information you can collect on your target market, the more refined your business efforts will be.
You haven’t spied on the competition.
As a new business, it’s crucial to know what’s going on with your competition. You want to understand their strategy so you can create one that’s even better. This allows you to optimize your brand to fit your customers’ interests more appropriately, which will increase your conversions.
Take a good look at your competitors’ audiences to see what they’re about. Who are they targeting? What do their customers look like? What are their audience’s needs and most pressing concerns? How do they price their products and services? How big or small is their following?
When you figure out their target market, make yours more refined and streamlined. The deeper you can delve into your niche, the more specific of a group you can target, which can lead you to a pool of devoted, loyal customers. Spying on the competition can help you look closely at who’s being ignored in your industry so you can be the one to serve them.
You aren’t analysing your data.
If you have existing customers, you have a goldmine of important data you can use to refine your target market. Tracking your website analytics will tell you all sorts of useful things, such as what content is performing best, which products are most favoured, how well your traffic is doing, level of engagement and more.
If you find that your business isn’t performing at the level you were hoping, it’s time to review your data to figure out where the issues are. Google Analytics will give you the important metrics you need to evaluate your website such as bounce rate, engagement level, views and more.
Analysing your data will also help you answer questions like:
• Am I marketing to the right group of people?
• Can my products and services be solutions to their problems?
• Do I need to change my business idea to better appeal to my audience?
• Are there enough people in my target market? Do I need to broaden or narrow my target?
• What drives my audience to take action?
When you have a clear understanding of who you’re marketing to, you’ll be able to create marketing messages that appeal to your intended audience. The more streamlined your target, the better you’re able to serve them and bring them solutions. Marketing to the right buyers is the most efficient and effective approach and will help your business growth accelerate quicker. Conducting extensive research on your target buyer will ultimately bring you the revenue and numbers you want to see.
By Jared Atchison.
Jared is the co-founder of WPForms, a drag & drop form builder for WordPress that’s being used on over 400,000 websites.
By Ben Jacobson.
Are you converting as many people as your product is capable of converting?
It’s a question I think about a lot when I’m working on my marketing projects. Is there a gap between the quality of the product and the quality of my marketing? Is my marketing funnel underselling a phenomenal product?
It might seem like a silly question, but it’s something many marketers struggle with. Some 61 percent of marketers list “generating traffic and leads” among the top challenges they face, and 39 percent select “proving the ROI of our marketing activities.” And those are challenges that cripple the very core of a marketer’s purpose (to generate leads and improve ROI).
But from my perspective, it seems like most marketers are making the same mistakes – common funnel-draining mistakes that are fixable over just a few weeks or maybe months.
From my experience, these are three of the most common snafus.
Perhaps no industry changes as quickly as the marketing industry. The psychology of why people buy doesn’t change, of course, but the methods do. Not long ago, for instance, only deluded marketers would have hedged their bets on the lead-generating prowess of LinkedIn. Now, it’s a platform representing 500 million members with tips emerging from every corner of the web with a quick “generate leads on LinkedIn” Google search.
Facebook advertising, SEO best practices, and even the up-and-coming Tik-Tok have changed and are consistently changing the marketing environment.
If you stop paying attention, you fall behind.
But that doesn’t just apply to the marketing space as a whole, it applies to your market specifically – the people who stand to benefit most from your products.
Every company is different, and so too is every market. And if you don’t pay close attention to how your prospects are interacting with your marketing touchpoints, you’ll convert less people than you could – it’s that simple.
Sadly, 74 percent of marketers admit that they don’t know how to track their data. Don’t be one of them. Install and fully understand Google Analytics, use a heatmap and A/B testing tool like VWO or CrazyEgg, and use UTMs to track links clicks. Your lead generation volume will thank you.
The bottom of your marketing funnel is going to leak like the Titanic after a long voyage if you don’t put the right people in that funnel.
From my experience, the reason that people sign up for your email list should be very similar to the reason that they buy your products, or at least related. If they sign up for your email list because they want to win a free trip to the Caribbean and then you try to sell them enterprise-grade IT automation software, it might not be the best fit.
Similarly, I’ve found that using PR to get mentions on sites relevant to your target market (i.e. where your prospects spend time) and working with influencers who already have a following full of your ideal customers are two great ways to ensure you’re attracting the right people to your funnel.
This point is well illustrated with the power of the Facebook pixel, as explained in this case study. Paleo Bakehouse was a modest home business based in Miami.
Looking to boost sales, the couple behind the business sought the help of Juice, a digital advertising agency, which changed up the way that Paleo Bakehouse was running their Facebook ads. Simply by switching campaigns to the conversion ad objective, adding a Facebook pixel to the client’s website, leveraging lookalike audiences, and retargeting stickier website visitors, they were able to make sure their paid media reached people who had already demonstrated interest in Paleo Bakehouse’s products. This change alone resulted in a 260 percent increase in purchases and over $311,000 in revenue lift.
Of course, that’s just one example of what can happen when you focus your time and energy on converting people who have signalled interest in your products. But this simple truth applies to all of your marketing efforts and your funnel as a whole. Attract the right people to your funnel in the first place, and they’ll be far more likely to buy your products when the time comes.
It’s easy to assume that you understand your target market – that with some quick visualizations and inference-making, you’ll create a useful customer avatar.
And to some degree that’s true. There’s certainly something to be said for putting yourself in your target market’s shoes.
The problem is, 80 percent of consumers don’t feel understood by the average brand. Which means that you have to be the one that really gets them. But you know the most surefire way to understand your market?
Ask them what they want, what they fear, who they are, what they do, how many kids they have, why they’re on your list, and lots of other revealing questions. The more you really know about your market (rather than just think you know), the better you’ll be able to cater your marketing materials specifically to those people and their needs.
Surveys work wonderfully. So too does calling your customers, spending time in the forums where your target market hangs out – even looking at competitors who are trying to communicate with a similar market can help you understand the people you’re trying to convert.
ConversionXL is proof of this. After launching CXL Institute, the company watched as purchases and engagements plummeted month after month for a full quarter. As a final hail mary (before calling it quits), CXL used surveys to try and figure out why people weren’t engaging with the new product like they had expected. Eventually, they found out that people weren’t buying for two primary (and easy-to-fix) reasons: the price was too expensive and they didn’t have time to actually use it.
With that, they changed their targeting for the product to focus on bigger businesses with more generous budgets, and now, according to a case study from Hotjar, the CXL Institute’s business is healthy and sustainable. But they never would have known how to fix it if they didn’t take the time to understand their market.
The reality is, most funnels leak for only a few reasons – the same reasons. And it’s rarely because of a bad product (even a terrible product can sell like hotcakes with the right marketing) or lack of product-market fit. More often, it’s because you’re ignoring the data, people are entering your funnel for the wrong reasons, or you don’t fully understand your ideal market.
Fortunately, plugging those holes is relatively simple. Pay more attention to the data (and set up tracking if you don’t already have it), create interest consistency across the entire customer experience, and send surveys to your past customers.
With that, you’ll be head-and-shoulders above most other marketers.
Ben Jacobson is a marketing strategy consultant based in Israel. His specialties include social media and branded content for the B2B sector. Ben can be reached via Twitter @osbennn.
By Jennifer Spencer.
That big red button is just waiting to be pushed: Maybe it’s the Facebook Ad “Start” button, intended to drive leads to the sales funnel for your brand new product. Maybe it’s the AdWords “Start” button, intended to collect search engine leads for your sales funnel. Maybe it’s something else.
But whatever the case, you’ve been working toward this moment for months, maybe even years. And it all comes down to this moment: Will your product-launch succeed? Or will it fail terribly?
The truth is, most product launches fail for two very simple reasons: Either the messaging for your product doesn’t clearly explain what problem you’re solving or how you’re solving it (think of the social media platform, Google+); or, worse, there’s no market need for the product you created at all (*cough* Google Glass *cough*).
And these negative outcomes befall optimistic startup entrepreneurs all the time. In fact, 42 percent of businesses fail because there is no market need, according to CB Insights research.
But being able to gauge whether your product is aboard an already-burning boat is easier said than done. So, to help you determine your product’s fate, here are four signs that your launch won’t be a success. Are you in the clear?
Why should people buy your product? What single problem is your product going to solve? Who are the buyers in your target market and what are they currently experiencing?
If you can’t answer questions like these in just a couple of sentences, things do not bode well for your product launch. You might have a great product that people want and need, but if you can’t explain why they need it, what your product does and why people should buy from you, you’re in trouble.
Take the Google+ social media platform, for instance. Everyone was excited about the prospect of a new, perhaps improved social media platform competing with Facebook — until it actually launched, that is.
With an uninteresting and almost apathetic slogan — “Real-life sharing rethought for the web” — and an experience that left us all thinking, “So… how is this better than Facebook?” Google+ had an uninspiring product launch. Even today, it’s hardly anyone’s favorite social media platform (90 percent of people with a Google profile have never publicly posted on Google+, according to Stone Temple).
Here’s the deal: If you don’t even know why your product is awesome, there’s no way that your target market is going to happily hop onboard to find out themselves.
There’s certainly something to be said for launching fast, with your minimal viable product in tow. But launching with a minimum viable product is different than launching with a clunky or unclear marketing funnel.
If you’re going to convert your target market and have a good runway ahead, it’s not enough to know what you’re selling, you also need to know how you’re going to sell. And that’s something you should have lined up well before your official product launch.
A clear, well-thought-out sales funnel, for example, increased sales by 412 percent for Mary Hong Art, an online business that sells ShardWorx art kits. As a case study on PageWiz noted, the business’s funnel for consumers was arranged in a kind of chronological order: epic content, lead magnet, tripwire (low-cost offer), core offer, profit maximizer (or upsell).
For Mary Hong Art, a strategic funnel like that made a big difference (412 percent, to be exact). Clearly, every successful product launch needs clear, logical marketing and a sales funnel that guides each consumer to purchase.
What’s the best way to determine whether your product will be a success before you launch?
Answer: by creating a beta and/or alpha version to test with your target market. So, create your minimum viable product, do a soft-launch pre-release to a limited amount of people and collect feedback.
Based on the feedback you receive, you can iterate your product and ensure that launch day is a major success. If you get a lot of negative feedback or confused responses, though, you might be better off shifting to a different product altogether.
An example? Had Nintendo spent more time allowing beta testers to play with the Wii U before it launched, the company probably would have known that the Wii U would be less than impressive to consumers. In fact, it sold only 400,000 units on launch day up against its previous system’s (the original Wii) 600,000 units sold at launch.
But ultimately, Nintendo seemed to learn its lesson. After it launched its wildly successful next gaming system (the Nintendo Switch), Bill Trinen, Nintendo of America’s senior product marketing manager, spoke about the experience with Business Insider. Said Trinen:”With Switch being something that you can take with you, it made it really important that you could play it instantly… That to me is an example of a direct lesson from the Wii U era, where Nintendo said, ‘That’s something we’re gonna zero in on and make a dramatic improvement on.'”
In short, Nintendo learned what its market wanted. And its engineers altered their next product launch to be a success. Learn from their experience and do a soft-launch of your own product or service to test and iterate before you fully bring your product to market.
Being honest with yourself about how you think launch day is going to turn out is absolutely critical to your product’s success. Most of the time, you know intuitively what your market buyers are going to think of your product, how they’re going to receive it, and what they’re going to say.
How is this intuitive? It’s because your market will have the same concerns you have about your product in the back of your mind — that itching lack of clarity, that muddy user experience or thatcheap look and feel.
The lesson here: Do not ignore your gut instinct. I love the way that Irene Barrera, founder of Stay Fit With Irene, put it in an email to me: “If you know in your gut that your product or service won’t resonate with your audience, if you hate or even dislike the experience it will give your target market, then why would you launch it? It’s far better to take additional time to launch a product that you’re proud and excited about to announce to your audience.”
So, a launch might seem complicated, but it really isn’t. Launches go sour for two simple reasons (usually): Either the market doesn’t have a need for the product at all, or you need to get the messaging for that product dialed in.
Of course, knowing whether your product will succeed before you launch is easier said than done. But treat the above four signs as indicators that you should rethink your product before bringing it to market, and, in the end, you’ll have a successful launch day. Even if it does take you a bit longer to get there, the effort will still be worth it.
Feature Image Cedit: VectorHot | Getty Image
CEO of Energent Media
Emily can almost always spot an influencer #ad on Instagram – even when the tell-tale hashtag is buried at the bottom of a lengthy caption. The giveaway, she says, is the tenuous nature of the post. “I usually begin to read a caption and start to feel that it’s very disingenuous or flimsily linked together. That’s when I think, ‘This has got to be an ad,’” says the 25-year-old, whose preferred content creators tend to be lifestyle and interiors influencers like Liv Purvis. “Sure enough, when I scroll down, the post will be hashtagged ‘#AD’.”
Emily describes a scenario that’s likely familiar to those of us who while away our lives looking at pictures of other people’s. Since September 2018, whether consciously or not, anyone following UK-based influencers on Instagram may have noticed a rise in the amount of paid marketing – AKA spon(sored) con(tent) – that these professionally Shiny Happy People churn out.
And that’s because last autumn UK advertising bodies the ASA – who apply the codes of advertising as written by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) – and the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) issued stricter new guidelines for online influencer marketing. Easy-to-follow language left no room for confusion about what counts as an advert – and no loopholes for influencers to plead ignorance with, if caught flouting the rules. And so they state: any content paid for (whether payment is financial or in goods) by a third party is an ad. If an influencer is promoting their own products – e.g: Zoella hawking her own brand cosmetics – that’s an ad. Giveaways? Ads. Freebies? Ads too, unless there’s no affiliate relationship with the brand and it has no editorial control over what influencers post (often this can be something as ‘small’ as just having final approval or the influencer agreeing to post a specified amount of times).
The new guidelines also spell out exactly how such a post should be labelled; either as ‘AD, advert, advertising, advertisement or advertisement feature.’ Influencers who soften the impact of declaring paid content by only tagging their posts as ‘sponsored content’ or ‘sponsorship’ risk falling afoul of the CMA or ASA and having their account features limited by Instagram (ie: ‘shadow banning’). Phrases like ‘in association with’ or ‘thanks to [brand] for making this possible’ are explicitly called out for being too vague. Equally, just @-ing the brand doesn’t cut it. “The main thing to remember,” the guidelines say, “is you need to make it obvious [emphasis their own].”
As someone like Emily knows, this leaves influencers little room to hide. But, for her, that’s not a big deal. Research has previously found that sponsored content and non-sponsored content receive equal interaction (measured in the form of likes); instead, the glaring factors that made sponsored content perform poorly was text placed on photos, unnatural product placement and poor photography. Influencers also have long mastered the art of blending ‘genuine’ content with uploads they’re contractually required to make. Yet Emily also admits that knowing content is paid-for doesn’t necessarily make a world of difference to how she engages with it.
“If it’s an influencer I follow who I have genuinely seen recommend the thing anyway, or I feel they’re authentic enough that I’d truly believe they’d like/use the product then I wouldn’t care,” she adds. “[It’s only] if the link between their love for this product and their partnership with the brand feels forced then I’d absolutely pause.” Unsurprisingly, users say their reaction to spon con differs depending on how well they perceive it aligns with the influencer’s brand.
“It depends on the picture whether I engage or read on,” says 28-year-old publishing PA Indre, who cites her favourite influencers as lifestyle and/or empowerment bloggers like Amelia Perrin (full disclosure: Amelia is a friend of the author) and Megan Jayne Crabbe. “If it’s interesting to look at then yes, I’ll engage. If it’s just them holding the product, I’d actually consider unfollowing them straight away – especially if it’s something that looks random or not their typical area.”
Indre has noticed the influx of new #ad tagged posts (which she says puts her off – “I prefer gifted”), but is torn. On the one hand, she says advertising feels ‘normalised’ and she’s happy to plug into it – but only when it appears ‘genuine’, which she admits is somewhat oxymoronic. But recently she’s mass-unfollowed a bunch of influencers because their feeds had become over-saturated with #ad posts and little else.
“I felt like there was no honesty left there, like I was being constantly sold and lied to,” Indre tells me. “Why would I voluntarily follow what’s essentially an ad page? I rarely unfollow influencers just because of the spon con – I unfollowed Louise Pentland when she became a parenting influencer because her content was no longer relevant to me – but if the spon con is for shit that’s way out of my budget, or if their posts become mostly spon con, I smash that unfollow button.”
As that research showed, pretty or well-made sponsored posts don’t put people off liking or interacting with them. Instagram has quickly turned into a giant shop, warm in your back pocket and ready to be opened at any time. Its shift from strictly image-sharing to a tool for big businesses and influencer marketing was never expressly detailed to Insta users. Rather, the change crept up, from the odd post here and there, to the swipe-up features for business and verified accounts, to the full in-app shopping features used by boutiques and brands. Anyone who opens the app, following people outside of their direct friendship circles for personal reasons, steps into this marketplace automatically. And at times, followers are more than happy to engage on that hyper-consumerist level.
“Sometimes I engage with an ad – I don’t comment but I ‘like’ it without intending to buy if it’s a product that isn’t really for me but seems of good quality and I like the influencer” says Rebecca, a 31-year-old Londoner who works in marketing, making her more conscious of the power her engagement with paid posts carries. She describes her tastes in influencers as ‘feminist,’ citing Florence Given (@florencegiven) as an example. “I’m aware that interaction with a post is something that brands who work with an influencer will consider,” she continues. “So I see a ‘like’ as my way of providing very minimal support for their career.”
Rebecca’s also not too bothered by influencer ads, so long as they’re balanced with alternative content. “I care about being ‘sold to’ because I see it as a sort of relationship,” she says. “I want to support interesting people who seem authentic and who care about what they put their name to. It feels disrespectful to your audience to try and shill any old crap.”
Rebecca’s stance reflects a sentiment I continue to hear, where following influencers implies an acceptance of a certain level of spon con. It’s not seen as ‘selling out.’ As 21-year-old student Lachlan puts it: “It doesn’t tend to bother me if it’s a subtle post and they’re not bombarding you with ads; gotta get the bread somehow.” Capitalism is so embedded in the fabric of our lives that few of the digital natives I speak to sound particularly thrown by influencers ‘just doing their job’.
However, as Lachlan continues, “There is nothing worse than a ‘genuine’ caption paired with an ad; someone trying desperately to convince you a beautiful river they’re stood over reminds them of a cool beer or something.” That being said, she still feels the constant hum of advertising. “I get targeted ads all the time on social, using my most personal information that they’ve skimmed out of my messages. So I’m not going to get that bothered about someone I like enough to follow on Instagram, earning a bit of cash if they can.” Followers just want to buy into the idea that the ads and persona their chosen influencer has presented to them is ‘genuine’, no matter if deep down, they know it’s not.
Feature Image Credit: Collage by Chelsea White for VICE, featuring photo by Benjamin Egerland via Alamy Stock Photo
By Colleen Egan.
To create happy, loyal customers, small businesses need to know who they are. Not everyone who buys your products or services will fit the same profile, but it’s far more effective to focus on a core customer base than spread the net too wide. Beyond helping you streamline your offering, it equips you to give those customers the best possible experience.
Another way to describe your core customer base is your ‘target market’. These are the people whose desires, values and needs most closely align with what your business can offer them. Ultimately, they’re already looking for what you have. Understanding your target market requires research over assumption. It’s about trying to grasp on a much deeper level who those people are, what motivations they’re driven by and how you can reach them.
Demographics such as age, gender, education level, occupation and family situation give you a broad idea of their lifestyle. Beyond this, consider the minute detail of their daily lives. Where do they work? What gives them enjoyment outside of work? What are their goals in life? The answers to questions like these help you create an authentic understanding of who they are instead of relying on a hunch.
Hoping for a certain demographic or using guesswork won’t help you determine your target market. It requires an in-depth review of your products and services, the behaviour of existing customers and the marketplace as a whole. Breaking down the process will give you focus, direction and maximum insight.
What do your products and services solve? In turn, to whom do they appeal and why? Try to be as granular as possible when you’re answering these. For example, a gardening business helps people manage their outdoor space. If that business is based in a city, its services become specifically useful for busy professionals wanting to make the most of limited space, and people without the means to travel to out of town garden centres.
It’s important to drill into the detail when you’re running this analysis. Make note of everything you stumble across — the niches and finer points will be crucial in giving your business a unique edge against competitors.
To analyse your target market fully you need to go beyond your customers and understand the marketplace. Analytics tools like Quantcast, Alexa and Google Trends identify and assess potential competitors, helping you find new customers and determine ways to improve your competitive offering.
Well-known sites like Yell help you see what competition exists in your business’s locale — and don’t underestimate the power tools like surveys, focus groups and in-person discussions. These are a great way to tap into the mindset of people who are already buying from your company or competitors: what they need, why they are (or aren’t) shopping with you and what you can do to make your offering more appealing.
With an integrated POS system you can also look into the specifics of what people are buying from you, when and how often.
Market segmentation is the process of organising a group based on various categories, such as demographics and psychographics.
You’ll find yourself with more accurate segmentation and profiling when you consider both demographics and psychographics in your analysis.
Use the online tools discussed above to get a comprehensive view of the competitive landscape. Who are the businesses offering comparable products and services? How much do they charge? What are they doing differently?
You could create a SWOT analysis chart to demonstrate weaknesses, strengths, opportunities and risks for both your business and theirs. This will give you a good idea of what improvements you can make, and where you’re excelling already.
If you’re going after customers in a densely competitive space, make sure you’re well aware of your USPs. It’s harder to succeed when you’re contending with numerous others, so thoroughly develop an understanding of how why you excel above them.
Once you’ve completed your analysis, put that data to work. Here are some ways to use the insight you’ve gathered to grow and improve your business:
Colleen writes for Square, where she covers everything from how aspiring entrepreneurs can turn their passion into a career to the best marketing strategies for small businesses who are ready to take their enterprise to the next level.
By Linda Orr
Brand equity or its value is based on how much profit a brand makes, how strong the brand is in comparison to the competitors and the role that the branding plays in the product purchase. A Nike logo matters for shoe purchases, a Keebler Elf matters a little, but not as much in cookie purchasing. The number one brand in the world, Apple, is presently worth $214 billion.
Branding is the process of creating a name, logo, symbol, and personality to represent your product or service. Brands become valuable when customers associate high value and quality products or services with your brand. Branding is vital because it creates a memorable imprint on the consumers’ brain that helps establish awareness and long-term loyalty. It provides a consistent image so consumers know what to expect. Satisfaction is based on meeting or exceeding expectations. A stable, positive image is essential. New entrepreneurs spend so much time building their new products that the importance of branding is often forgotten. The branding process can seem daunting for a new entrepreneur, but a few simple steps can start the process.
Base your brand identity on the product’s key value proposition, which is the number one reason why customers purchase your product or service. The proposition should be able to be stated in a clear, succinct manner. Base all subsequent communications on this image. Lyft stresses, “Rides in minutes,” whereas Uber claims to be “The smartest way to get around.” Thumbtack “helps you find experienced professionals.” While conducting sales training, I found that veteran sales reps typically struggle to state their company’s value position. The reps would usually report what product they sell, in feature-specific terms. For example, the reps would say, “We sell after-market automotive parts.” They would struggle to say why the customers buy their product in value-specific terms. Instead, the value proposition should be, “We sell auto products that cannot be found anywhere else, to repair your antique and valuable vehicles easily and quickly.” Value and quality always matter first and foremost.
Part of a brand identity involves the visual representation of it, which includes the logo, the colors, type font, and other design aspects. Research on the effects of color has shown that color is a critical aspect of branding. Between 62 and 90 percent of the customer’s initial product assessment is based on color. For example, red represents power and energy, or passion and love, and green exemplifies nature, health, fertility, and good luck. These meanings are culturally based. Keep color consistent throughout your webpage and any social media you use so that customers associate these feelings with your brand.
Font and logos can create a great deal of emotion. Google fonts is a library of 915 fonts, most of which are available for use with an open license. Many sites demonstrate the best Google Fonts to use. The most important thing is readability and accessibility. Creativity can lead to pretty, artistic fonts, but these are not as easy to read. Studies have found that Arial is easiest to read, but harder to read fonts, are more memorable because you have to slow down to read. Again, be consistent across all sites and postings. Make sure that that your branding strategies are distinct from competitors and memorable, like the Lyft mustaches.
Once you have your brand’s value proposition and image, you can use the Internet to build awareness. Know where your target market is. Know what sites they frequent online and what influencers they follow. Some of these data can be found by merely spending time browsing and doing research. For any B2B business, customers likely use LinkedIn and trade associations or organizations unique to that industry. If you are looking to start an online catering service, your customer might be frequenting wedding websites or other party idea sites. Secondary data sources like Nielsen provide much of this information for a fee.
Start producing content on your sites and as many external sites as possible that your target market might read. Produce as much different content as possible that may provide value to your customer. Give readers a reason to come back and learn more. Referring to the catering company example, discuss wedding planning topics at least weekly. Businesses that blog regularly get 97 percent more inbound business. Link to as many other social media channels that you can. Make it easy for other people to share or link to your material by using linking buttons. Press releases are especially useful and can increase your search ranking with Google. If appropriate to your company, post online videos and podcasts. The more you saturate the Internet, the more likely the customer can find your product.
Once you begin to establish your clientele, make sure you consistently provide outstanding customer service and products. Customers will come back time after time if you provide a quality product and add value. Create a referral program. Give customers rewards to bring more customers to you. This tactic works by both bringing in more customers and keeping your current customers happy because they are receiving added benefits. Promote your product by encouraging happy customers to rate your product and provide feedback online.
As you continue to build your business, do not change your brand. Do not change the logo, slogan, or any part of your brand identity. You spent all this time and money building awareness and loyalty. Why would you intentionally throw that away? Changing the brand or re-branding will erode this value. Coca-Cola has the fifth most valuable brand in the world, and they have never changed their logo. PepsiCo is known for frequently changing their logo. While PepsiCo has the 22nd most valuable brand, its brand equity is $40 billion less than Coca-Cola. The only time it ever makes sense to rebrand is when a brand has been destroyed beyond repair (Valujet). If you think that changing your brand on a slumping product will improve your sales, you do not understand your business.
Keep your customers engaged long term. Keep your conversations active and current so that customers want to participate in your communication efforts continually. The more people are involved, the more other people will want to be included due to social proof theory. Repeat customers spend 300 percent more on average than new customers.
Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Akron
By Maria Rapetskaya,
I’ve been a creative entrepreneur since 2005. My first design company was a partnership with my significant other. It was largely a freestyle experiment in running a business, conducted in public over the course of five years. As a business, it was marginally successful. As a learning experience, for me it was the equivalent of a masters of business administration.
So, by the time I had started my second and current company, I had a pretty good blueprint of don’t’s for running a small business. I had been fortunate enough to make the mistakes that have yielded five valuable lessons learned — lessons that have truly paid off the second time around.
It was only after my original partner and I parted ways that I recognized that we should never have had a professional partnership in the first place. Just because someone is your best friend, long-time coworker and / or significant other hardly qualifies that person as the perfect candidate for maintaining a business. I say “maintaining” because it’s far easier to get excited about the prospect of starting a company than being able to handle the day-to-day reality of running it efficiently.
The best partner is typically someone whose skills and approach are the polar opposite of yours. The first ensures that you are able to cover a lot more ground without additional employees. The second may create conflict, but it will force you both to defend your business instincts and weed out lesser ideas before you waste resources.
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Feature Image Credit: 10’000 Hours | Getty Images
Founder and Creative Director of Undefined Creative
By
My entrepreneurial experience as a consultant has been quite a wild ride with many ups and downs, both financially and emotionally. I have learned by now that business is cyclical with ebbs and flows. So how can other consultants like me make the best use of their excess capacity when business is not as strong as they would like? Personally, the answer was “invest in yourself.”
For the past four years, I have run my own consulting business that focuses on helping leaders to manage their workplace culture. Last year, I had an increasing number of clients and colleagues ask if I could provide individual coaching services. As a leader and entrepreneur with a background in human resources and leadership development, their requests seemed logical and in alignment with my skills and talents. However, I have hired my share of coaches in my own career with mixed results. I knew that whatever I chose to do, I wanted to do it with the right knowledge, credentials and credibility. My journey to coaching and my advice to others can be summed up in five essential steps:
1. Find a coaching course.
In an initial online search, I learned that demand for coaching was growing faster than supply. That gave me confidence in my timing. To ensure I was doing it properly, I researched coaching certification providers and enrolled in an online class. There were many certification classes available, so I selected one that fit all of my criteria: It was accredited by the International Coach Federation, had positive student reviews and offered courses online with a feasible class schedule. I loved it so much that when the first class ended, I immediately signed up for the next one. These courses commanded a good chunk of my time for two months, but because my client count was manageable, I had the time and energy to commit.
As I progressed through each class, I also rediscovered a love of learning. This was the first investment I had made in myself since completing my MBA some 12 years ago, and I had forgotten how fulfilling and rewarding it was to venture into something new. At the end of the courses, I became a Certified Master Coach (CMC), thereby taking the first step in creating a completely separate business line to complement consulting.
2. Define your target market.
In addition to learning the ethics and proper techniques of effective coaching, the courses helped me define my target market, which was different for nearly every student in the class. Coaches specialized in health and wellness, marriage and relationships, career transition and — my specialty — business leadership and executive coaching. Knowing your target market will help inform your overall marketing strategy and approach.
3. Create a coaching agreement.
Next, it was time to establish packages and pricing and create my coaching agreement. I conducted my own anecdotal research in my hometown of Houston, Texas by polling my network on whether they had ever hired a coach and at what price point. That data, coupled with my own experience of previously hiring two coaches, solidified my pricing structure. The coaching course also allowed participants to review and compare one another’s agreements. From that exercise, I streamlined and reduced my lengthy legal document and took pieces from several in our cohort to include clauses I hadn’t considered, such as cancellation, refund and record retention policies.
4. Market yourself as a coach.
Once I had those components solidified, I strategized with my marketing team on how to showcase our new coaching offering and build a client base. We began with an email campaign announcing coaching opportunities and my new coaching credential. We then updated all sales documents and my website to include the coaching option as a complement to consulting. I also worked coaching into the conversation with existing and prospective clients to practice and hone the messaging.
5. Encourage others to invest in themselves.
This journey has served as a reminder that our employees desire to be invested in as well. That feeling I had rediscovering a love of learning is not unique to me, and it inspired me to be more intentional in supporting my clients and my employees in their ongoing development. I was reminded that, as leaders, we have the privilege of setting the example and showing our employees that you’re never too old or too established in your career to try something new.
There’s a saying that goes like this: What you choose to do when you have nothing else to do reveals your true character. Today, I have as many coaching clients as I have consulting clients. It is my hope that other professionals can learn from my experience and use a slow season to master a new skill that can propel you forward.