Believing In Your Brand Strategy

I have been to many seminars that speak about business in general and sometimes about my industry. But there is something that I have noticed that is consistent in their mentions, which I don't find strange, but what is more surprising is that people almost hear it in passing and never recognize that this is an integral part of their business survival. The finest example that comes to mind is the "Stone-Pet" that sold like hot cakes about a decade ago. This was a normal river rock and they designed a fancy box for it. Then had a very good marketing strategy, but the bottom line is that they believed in their product, so much that it started convincing others that this might be a good idea to purchase the rock, rather than making one for themselves. "Believe" is very contagious, very addictive and most definitely attractive.

This is exactly what you must do when you have a new brand strategy that you need to implement. Believing is like one of things that defies science, they cannot be explained or proven in a formula. They are just one of those instincts that we have inherited from our Creator. When you believe in your brand strategy, you will start to see benefits and gaps where you can service your niche and your belief will start to be come more contagious, more spoken about and certainly more people will be attracted to your brand. Even when industry professionals say the business is dead, believing allows for you to be innovative, creative and relevant. You will find a way when you believe in your strategy. Small businesses, often have limited resources and their brand strategy is printing flyers and servicing a small client base. But without fail, they have a budget to print flyers, and if you were to ask them how they know that this campaign works, they would not be able to elaborate. But they believe that, that particular action has and will  bring them more business and it has made a mark in their respective environment. They start acting in a different way, and that is the attitude that not only draws business, but it attracts sustainable business. Simply by Believing.

But "Believing" is not enough to have a sustainable strategy, you need to act in conformity to the strategy. As the saying goes, "If you love the end, you will love the means". Believing without doubt takes quite some energy, and it does not have to. But today to make a client believe in their strategy, it take a subscription to analytics, a fancy implementation schedule and a complex demographics research report, and not forgetting an even more intricate ROI forecast, for a simple flyers handout to local businesses.

There are 3 reasons why anyone goes into entrepreneurship:

1. For the Money
2. For the Passion
3. For the Recognition

Sometimes all three applies and when none applies to you, then you are in the wrong field, and a brand wants to achieve all three. All businesses seek to be profitable and it is those who seek for recognition that exceed the expectations of the of the themselves. Your brand believes that it could be recognized as a world class entity. Branding is for those who believe their business will make a bigger impact on their community, society and the world. Branding is for those who don't only want to be recognized, be in the position to influence trends, and society buying patterns. When companies like Google, Adobe, Twitter, Skype and Hoover brands are used as verbs, the brand evolves to become a brand giant. Google it, Photoshop that picture, Tweet this, Skype your family and Hoover that carpet. They got there by asking themselves the right question and believing that their brand strategy will get them there. 

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Social Media Intelligence: 7 Key Strategy Elements

Since we have started our blog, many readers have asked me to be specific on what we do when we develop a social media strategy for a client. And Enlyne Branding likes simplifying everything in 7 steps, if it is more steps, then it starts becoming complicated and too much or what we do is simplifying it to 7 tasks on every phase. On this article we are going to reveal 7 simple key strategy elements that make your social media strategy both valuable and profitable. From Enlyne Branding's perspective, it is easier to manage your social media status from a campaign to campaign perspective, than a long on-going, endless project. The campaign is focused and has specific deadline dates, similar to a television series with 20 episodes, and have a different focus on the next campaign. The strategy elements we are presenting are based on a campaign to campaign basis.

What is most important is to remember that this exercise is a outcome-based project. If something is not working, be flexible enough to know that you need to change your offering to suit your target audience. Also to keep in mind that if it does not make money, it does not make sense, so profitability should be balanced with attracting the audience. And they are as follows:

1. Do Your Research

Doing your research is always a good idea. You are able to offer a solution that is directly focused to your target audience. Take a look at the services that you are offering, and determine how best to package them, and be packaged in such a way that your audience will be interested in them. If you don't know how to, then this will be part of your research. Depending on how extensive your offerings are, Google is always a good place to start, but as a professional, you would know who holds your industry stats, for instance, Adcorp is good place to start when you want to find information on the South African employment index. There are also research houses, that deal with industry standards of specific industries. What is also valuable is to find White Papers of released papers by several professionals in your industry, usually their papers are rich with information that is well researched and well written. Most of the time, when your product or service is unique or you want to have specific outcomes that are only unique to your business, you will have to conduct this research yourself. There are also several ways in which this could be done, you can have focus groups, you can send surveys to your customers and internally and you can use direct marketing and direct interactions with your customers.

2. Determine Who You Want To Target

Sometimes you might be running a business and you think you only have one set of people who are your target market. But most of the time, you have several people who are your target market. Take a toy store for instance, you might think that their target market is kids, but it often is not the case. Their target market are parents with kids between ages 3 to 10 years (as these are parents who purchase the most toys), and you need to know how to attract these parents, so that they can purchase the toys for their kids. And music stores are targeting ages 13 to 35, as this is the age group that purchases music the most. Also know that there are exceptions to the rule, example, a 40 year old DJ will purchase music far more than a regular person who enjoys music privately. Be very clear who you want your social media campaign to target and what you want them to do with the information, and start mapping out a clear road on how they are going to end up at your finish line.

3. Develop Content That Sells

Some business success is dependent on Location, Location, Location. In the case of social media, your campaign's success is Content, Content, Content. I cannot stress how important your social media content is, if you have to, you must hire a writer, someone who will take what you want to say, and put it in such a way that it is attractive and can sell. Please do not mistaken developing content that sells to acting too smart for your audience. Always keep it simple and straight to the point, and always be sincere and honest. People can sense when you are not sincere and when you are not honest. And your campaign will fall flat on its face, with not a single lead or success. Again, always keep in mind the goal of the campaign, it is to generate more leads and it is to have loyal customers, and other objectives you have set for the campaign, if it is going to be a series of campaigns, keep in mind what this specific campaign is going to achieve.

4. Choose Your Social Networks For Best Communication Effectiveness

There is enough information on the internet to tell you which tools to use when trying to communicate your campaign's objectives. If you are one of the people who follows Enlyne Branding on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn, you will know that this week was a week of social media stats. To be brief, I will give you a few, if your business is a B2B business, you should focus on LinkedIn, as it draws the best leads and conversion rates above all social networks. LinkedIn converts 61% compared to 55% from the company blog. Please also note that people on the same grouping have different tastes and different social media appetites. So, when LinkedIn is your best tool for attracting leads and converting them, it does not mean you must ignore, company blogs, Facebook and Twitter. After choosing which social media tools you are going to focus on, ensure that you are aware of what are the rules of engagement for each of the social networks. Know on how you can use each of the social media optimally, if you are not going to use it at least 70% of its capacity,  you might as well not use it at all.

5. Optimize Your Content

Even today, SEO, AdWords, and PPC are still  foreign concepts to most marketers, which is a skill that every marketer must possess, in my opinion. You don't need to know the various algorithmic formulas that are used, but you have to understand why your content needs to be keyword rich. Keyword rich content is content that has the necessary keywords that people type when searching for similar products and services. There is software that can help you with what keywords certain types of companies in a particular industry.  The most important thing about this element is understanding what your research has given you and optimizing content that will attract them to your products and services.

6. Feedback

Content that is most effective is content that engages your customers, therefore you need to understand a tool and content that is the most effective in giving you the most effective feedback. Again there is software that will be able to help you with the most effective feedback strategy. There are several ways to get feedback, either through direct marketing, landing pages or through social networks. The most effective is Facebook, which is the most effective in sharing content. When your objective is just to share content, Facebook should be your main focus of that particular element of the campaign.

7. Measure And Continually Analyze

We have all heard of the saying that says, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". And we are so fortunate that social media has got all the stats that are necessary for us to make informed decisions. All the main social networks have got their own kind of stats, from geographical areas, the number of hits, stats from live, daily, to weekly and monthly. You will be able to make any type of analysis from the information. I would suggest that for even your website, you need to have stats that will determine its ROI. Also use your stats to determine your customers' favorite product or service, and have an emphasis on the particular subject, because it is clear that they want to hear or learn more about what you are giving them. Set yourself a schedule and only for 15 minutes daily, where you read the feedback and the stats and continue to give your customers what they want to hear.

If you follow these simple steps after you have done your research on your audience and a particular social network tool. You will enjoy success beyond your imagination. Cold calling will be a thing of the past, and you will enjoy more qualified leads and more conversions. Remember, what your brand promises them, it must deliver. Do not promise them Milk and Honey, and give them Lemons and Salt Water.

Marketing Your Small Business Through Social Media

I often forget how valuable the things that I do on social media until I am reminded by the followers about the articles or they ask me to elaborate more on the status I updated on all my social networks. And this is how every marketer feels at some point in time in their career, sometimes you are afraid to explore a new strategy or  adventure into a new idea because you are afraid you will not be able to get the response you are expecting to get. As creatives, we should know better than to doubt our instincts and provide clients with fresh innovative ideas that will sustain their brand for months, even years to come. Recently, I have seen marketers who are very cautious on social media, some companies are using one person to communicate through their strategy or even social posts. Because they are used to strict outbound marketing rules, they want to apply them on social media. It was embarrassing for some company's CEO, who was asked about an article they posted on their blog which was posted by her, and she could not answer them, because the company has a policy that all communication about the company is only posted under her name. I wonder if they will review this ridiculous policy.

In this article, I am going to touch on some features of different social network platforms and their benefits which allows you to effectively market your small business to a wider audience. For the sake of the article, I will assume that you can use the rest of the features as they are linked to your success.

Facebook Timeline

We all know that Facebook is a powerful social media platform that can change the perception of your business to your benefit. And, I am pretty sure you know that Facebook has introduced the Timeline on Business Pages and there are tools you need to know about it and it will help your brand grow vertically an horizontally.

1. Set Your Cover Photo - this feature can offer your brand some flexibility, like a picture of your champion product or other things you can advertise. But there are some guidelines you need to follow. and they are as follows: 
• No contact information
• No Call to Action
• No Price or Purchase information
• No references to Facebook features or actions
2. Set your Profile Picture - Adjust your profile picture, the image that will get shown next to each of your updates on your wall and in users' news feeds, 
3. Organize Views & Apps - The new design features photos, likes, and apps at the top of oyur page, below your cover photo. Photos are automatically featured in the first spot, but page admins can rearrange the rest to feature the most important ones first. You can only show 12 apps. 
4. Star, Hide, Pin -By hovering over individual stories, you can make them wider, hide them from your Timeline with the pencil icon, highlight them as important with the star icon, or delete them entirely. 
5. Enable Messages - You can now have private conversations with your fans, which is very good, when people want to ask something very specific. 
6. Feature Milestones - The new design also allows admins to feature what are called "milestones" on their page. This allows page admins to highlight some of their business biggest accomplishments. 

All of these are very useful to your small business, firstly because it is free, but it will cost you in terms time. Through these new features you can show them how much you care and the quality you can offer. And with certain strategies, lure them into customers who will always be your own brand loyalists. 

Pintrest

Pintrest is a visual social network, so you will need to create a pinboard that highlights some of your best visual content. Remembering that your goal is to gain brand recognition, drive traffic to your website and be successful at converting the new visits into leads. Get your creative juices and let people see what you are doing and you might never know what people might fall in love with. A lot of brands are taking notice of the power of online visual content for marketing and the emotions images elicit in readers. Remember that you can explore and whatever images are good. Make it super easy for website visitors to share your visual content or images on Pinterest by adding a "Pin It" button to your site. Just like other social media sharing buttons, this will help to expose your brand to a new audience. 

Twitter

Twitter is one of the most exciting social networks in the industry at the moment, because it allows people to post things that are direct and gets to the point quick, which is what visitors want. But you can also use it to attract leads for your business and here are a couple of ideas. 

1. Tweet Offers - often as a small business owner, you want to advertise your offers forget about Twitter. But please read the guidelines to ensure you don't land up on the spam bot. 
2. Connect your blog to your Twitter Feed - There are tools that can help you achieve this, and you would be keeping your audience updated at the same time. 
3. Landing Pages - respond with landing pages that are related to the offers that you have posted on Twitter. 
4. Build Reach - What's the use of following any suggestions if you're not reaching anyone? This is where you need to revisit the basics of Twitter and remember to spend time building your following. The more people you sending information to, the higher your chance of generating leads. 

And the most important is to make sure you know how to measure you ROI and review if these are the results you are looking for. 

Although social media is relatively relaxed and easy going, you need to be careful on what you put out and know what parameters of the social network. When you have achieved this, your small business is well on its way to marketing success and most importantly, income generating initiatives is what keeps your business trading.