Category: Marketing

The definition of a brand has come a long way from the days when cattle ranchers used ‘branding irons’ to identify which cattle belonged to who. A century and a half later, the definition has become significantly more complex and, unfortunately has therefore become a lot harder to understand!

To address some common misconceptions, a brand is not just your ‘brand name’ and it’s not just your ‘logo’, although both of these attributes contribute toward your brand.

Your brand is a perception; it exists inside someone’s mind. It’s how people perceive your company, products, services and experience, in both a rational and an emotive sense. ‘Branding’ is the process of defining, maintaining, strengthening or changing that perception to positively influence their buying decisions.

So why are brands important? Brands differentiate your offering, build loyalty and improve recall and recognition over your competition’s products. You can see this in the baked beans category, for example where Heinz is by far the best selling baked beans product in the UK (where they sell more baked beans than the rest of the world combined – over 1.5 million cans a day!). However, as far as the product is concerned, it has come in just third in taste testing on multiple occasions (see for example https://www.village-bakery.com/best-canned-baked-beans/) demonstrating the power of a brand over the quality of a product.

Furthermore, when people connect meaningfully with a brand, trust, loyalty and emotive engagement will increase which will build protection from negative influences such as competitive activity, pricing disadvantages and poor media exposure. Take the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 recall in 2016, for example. The high profile event wiped out 98% of the profits in the mobile division and dragged company profits down by 30%. However, it did little to damage Samsung’s brand loyalty. A poll later that year found that Samsung’s customers were still fiercely loyal to the brand with 91% of current Samsung users saying they would be likely to purchase another Samsung smartphone, and 92% of current users saying they would probably buy another Samsung product in general. Despite a disastrous product failure, the company was forgiven by its customers, thanks to the value of its brand.

To successfully build a brand, it must be communicated consistently across all touchpoints a company or product has with its customers. If the brand message and experience are not consistent across all touchpoints and interactions, your unique brand advantage will be diminished. Within your marketing collateral, this means consistent messaging, visual styling, tone of voice and brand personality across your proposals, brochures, website, social media, business stationery, office or shop interior, customer service style, staff uniforms, advertising and even non-marketing communications such as invoicing. Every touchpoint should tell the same story.

A well thought-out brand will effectively portray what your business stands for and what makes it unique and appealing to your customers. It expresses the qualities, strengths and personality of your business and if strategised well, it will appeal directly to your target market, drawing them in like a moth to a flame.

What is involved in developing a successful brand?

The process in creating a powerful brand involves thorough market research to profile your customers, understand their motivations, map their buying journey and substantiate why they should be attracted to your business.

A unique brand essence, or company/product DNA, can then be defined which will provide the framework for all brand communications. This is the emotional heart of your brand, combining rationale and emotive reasons to buy with the clarity of a defined and relatable personality and brand archetype. This is the core upon which your brand purpose, positioning, value proposition and other elements of your brand strategy will be built.

Ultimately, your brand strategy will be translated into brand standards including your logo, tone of voice, brand visuals and other tangible brand elements.

An investment for business growth

The typical mindset many people face when starting up a small to medium business may be to save as many pennies as possible until the profits roll in. This unfortunately means some businesses will miss the window in creating the correct foundation required for a successful and sustainable business. It may be hard to appreciate that part of your marketing budget should put aside for brand development and that taking the leap and hiring a professional to build your brand may in fact prove to be one of your most valuable investments for long term business success.

So how much does it cost to build a unique brand strategy for your business? Well, if you are BHP, the answer would be in the $millions! But for an SME, it is really an affordable proposition that should return the investment many times over in the future. If you’d like a firm quotation and proposal for your business, simply give us a call.

SOURCE:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4548674/Heinz-left-trailing-place-blind-taste-test.html
https://fortune.com/2016/11/21/galaxy-note-7-recall-samsung-brand/
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/samsung-galaxy-note-7-recall-exploding-phones-profits-a7382786.html

For many years, we have advocated Mailchimp to our clients as one of the best value options for managing emarketing programs (amongst a few others we also recommend). With the free version offering a competitively high mailing volume of 2,000 subscribers, great analytics and the opportunity to customise eDMs, it has proven to be one of the best free platforms around.

However, earlier this year Mailchimp made some significant changes to its plans which have impacted both pricing and available functionality. If you are currently on a Mailchimp platform, we don’t necessarily suggest changing to an alternative provider but you should be aware of the following:

1. Every contact in your list now counts towards your contact total – this includes unsubscribes, subscribes and non-subscribes. Free accounts still allow up to 2000 contacts but to keep within this total, you should now go into your mailing lists and clean them up regularly, deleting unsubscribes and non-subscribes so they won’t be added to your total.

2. You now only get one audience (list) with the free plan. If you have maintained different lists for customers v prospects v VIPs, for example, you may now want to look at upgrading to the Essentials Plan from $14.64 a month as this level allows for 3 audiences.

3. Importantly, for most clients who have had an eNewsletter or eDM template designed by us, the free version no longer allows new templates to be custom -coded, leaving you with the only option of basic templates. If you want to take advantage of more interactive features and a better user experience, you will now have to subscribe to the Essentials Plan as a minimum.

4. Multi-step automations are no longer available unless you are on the Standard Plan or above which starts at $21.97 per month.

5. Insights and analytics have been limited to the basic level and don’t include A/B or multivariate testing.

On the positive side, Mailchimp has expanded its services recently to now offer retargeting through Google, Facebook and Instagram, enabling you to integrate your marketing campaigns within one platform. If you haven’t explored the power of retargeting, why not ask us to provide a marketing proposal for you. According to Google, combining retargeting with other advertising programs can increase your conversions by as much as 50%!

As we race towards the finishing line for 2019, it’s bewildering to realise just how fast the year seems to have gone! For some sectors, it was a slow start with various state and federal elections destabilising market confidence but we have been delighted to see that, for many of our clients, business is now on the rise and they are looking forward to a stronger 2020.

Despite the tough year, it has been a time of growth and improvement for many businesses; for others, it’s been a time of change and a chance to get ready to take advantage of better conditions ahead.

If your business is going through the latter, here are some simple tips for achieving growth even in slow times:

1. Look after your existing customers well – they are invaluable in both good and bad times and very costly to replace.

2. Reduce your risk by diversifying your customer base if you are reliant on too few customers.

3. Be proactive in your marketing – while your competitors are quiet, you have a great opportunity to be heard.

4. Take the time to improve your service and operations so that you are well-positioned to cope with the influx of business when the good times return.

5. Use quiet times to train your staff so that your customer service is a key competitive advantage.

6. Keep staff motivation high – show your staff they are valued as it costs a lot to replace well-trained, quality staff.

7. Keep a tight grasp on your finances – know how you are progressing, protect your cashflow and maybe pay a few extra visits to your accountant.

8. Think innovatively about the products you sell, the services you deliver and future market needs. A quiet period is a chance to think differently about your business and, as long as you research and test well, it can be time to make beneficial changes for a more sustainable future.

We’re very proud of our clients who have done so well against the odds this year – see our story below on how many of our clients who have won much coveted awards, for example! If you are looking to take advantage of improved market conditions in 2020, come and have a chat with our Director, Barbara Ketley. She has worked on growing hundreds of brands across a diverse range of sectors for over 25 years and would be delighted to help you to jump-start your business growth for the new year!

Knowing where your business sits within a market and how you compare to your competitors is a critical part of your marketing plan. A competitor analysis can provide you with the needed insights to help shape your business’s approach and give you a leg up on your competition. Below is an outline of the five steps you can take to conduct a competitor analysis for your business.

Step One: Compare your website

• What web pages do you and your competitors share? What pages don’t you share?
• What features do your competitors offer on their websites?
• How do your competitors make sales through their websites?
• How do your competitors use their websites? (Is it a landing page? Do they sell products on their site? Do they even have a website?)

Step Two: Compare your social media accounts

• How many social media accounts do you have compared to your competitors?
• How many followers do you have compared to your competitors? (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube)
• What type of content do your competitors share? (Videos, images, blog posts, quotes, tips, industry insights?)
• How often do your competitors post on their social media accounts? (Once a month? Once a week? Multiple times a day?)

You can use this information to base your social media campaign off.

Step Three: Compare your strengths/weaknesses

• What do you do well? What do your competitors do well? (Use this information to see where you can improve or where your strengths are).
• What do you not do well? What do your competitors not do well? (Use this information to understand where your business could improve. You can also use this information to understand opportunities where you could improve on what your competitors are doing).

Areas to focus on:

• Price
• Product/Service Range
• Product/Service Quality
• Convenience
• Longevity
• Brand Awareness
• Customer Service Standards
• Hours of Trade
• Turnaround Time
• Marketing Collateral

Step Four: Competitive advantages

• Review the factors that provide your business with a competitive advantage over your competitors.
• Establish whether this is a sustainable competitive advantage or one that could be easily replicated by your competitors.
• Review your competitor’s competitive advantages and do the same processes as above. What features, services, details or actions do your competitors have as an advantage over your business? How do they provide a superior service over your business?

Use this information to understand how your business could improve and whether you can replicate any of their advantages.

Step Five: Bring it all together

By the time you get to step five you should have a clear understanding of how your business stacks up against your competitors.

• You will know whether your website needs work or if you are providing features beyond what your competitors are.
• You will have an understanding of how your competitors are using social media and what you could do to improve or continue leading your social media campaigns.
• You will know what your strengths and weaknesses are and whether your competitors share any of these. You can use these strengths and weaknesses to refine your business and improve on areas you may be lacking in.
• You will have an understanding of how your competitive advantages compare to your competitors.
• You will also be able to judge if your advantages are sustainable for future growth or whether they can be easily replicated by your competitors.

Every day, 3.5 billion searches are made on Google – which translates to 1.2 trillion searches per year! With so many searches being made, it’s critical that your business takes steps to ensure your website is showing up for your customers. There are two popular ways of achieving this – SEO and SEM. These two methods use the power of search engines to increase your website’s visibility and attract more visitors. As they are so similar, SEO and SEM are often confused as the same process so we’ve outlined each and provided information on how they can benefit your business.

What is SEO? – ‘Earning traffic through unpaid or free listings’
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO for short) refers to the tactics businesses use to give their website the best chance of ranking highly in search engine results. Google is often the first place people turn to when they are searching for information – whether it’s to find the answer to a question, confirm a business address or view a product they hope to purchase. Showing up on the first page of Google results can significantly increase the number of people who discover and visit your website – it’s for this reason that SEO is so important for your business.

Search engines rank websites based on a number of factors that influence the legitimacy of the site. These can include:

• Page loading speed
• Content length/quality
• Backlinks (other websites linking back to your website)
• Mobile view (websites that offer mobile compatibility rank higher)
• Social media links
• HTTPS – read our article on the importance of HTTPS for your business

SEO’s goal is to ensure these factors have been met and refined to improve the chances of a higher ranking.

What is SEM? – ‘Buying traffic through paid search listings’
Rather than relying solely on the chance of appearing amongst the top-ranking organic search results (through the use of SEO), a business can have its website advertised above organic listings by opting for paid search or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This is known as Search Engine Marketing (SEM for short). SEM has become a powerful marketing tool as the advertisements not only display at the top of search pages, but they can also be targeted to specific customers through keywords and copy

PPC: As the name suggests, the level of traffic directed to a website through its advert dictates how much the business will pay. Unlike traditional advertising, SEM provides immediate feedback about whether the advert is working or not so the business can continuously adjust the ad until they find results.

SEM is valuable as it can connect your business with customers who are searching for similar companies to yours but might not know you exist yet.

Which one is better?
As both SEO and SEM will provide different results for your website, it’s difficult to suggest that one will be better than the other. You should instead focus on discovering when your business may need to use SEO or SEM.

• SEO – your website should have some form of search engine optimisation to ensure it ranks well in search results. The sooner you implement SEO, the better.
• SEM – search engine marketing is effective when you want to increase your amount of visitors and gain more exposure. It’s also powerful to advertise a new product launch or a sale you are currently running.

Businesses have always been told to differentiate themselves from their competitors to remain individual and attractive in a busy market. However, our competition can sometimes hold the key to our success by allowing us to see how they operate, what they do well and what mistakes they make. Below are five key lessons you will learn by ‘keeping your enemies closer’.

1. What your website should include
   For some businesses, their website is their shopfront and is how the majority of their customers interact with them. Take a look at your competitor’s website and see how it differs from yours. Understand what makes their site more (or less) attractive and what sort of content or features they use well. Also, consider how the style of their website may affect their visitor’s perceptions of their brand.
2. How to engage on social media
   Social media can provide great insights into a company’s success based on how many people interact with their posts. How does your social media profile compare to your competitor’s? Consider the types of posts they are sharing and the frequency of them. There’s a fine line between over-sharing and not sharing enough. Use these details to improve your own social media pages and add elements your competitors lack.
3. The price range you should be targeting
   One of the most important elements of a product or service is the price – and if it’s too expensive or perceived too cheap, consumers may head towards your competition. Consider whether a premium brand image sets your competitor’s price or if they are selling their products as a cheap alternative. Understanding where your competitors sit can provide a great idea as to which price range you should target.
4. What segments are not being catered to
   Chances are you share most of your target customer segments with your competitors, and all compete to attract the highest number of clients within that market. However, analysing your competition can highlight the segments that are being overlooked and that haven’t been targeted yet. By moving in on markets your competition haven’t recognised, you can gain an advantage in the overall market.
   
   
5. The importance of reputation
   The way your business is reviewed online can be the deciding factor for a potential client looking for your products or services. Scope out how your competitors are reviewed online to see where your business stands. Also look at how they reply to customer feedback. For example, if your competitor’s customer service is more highly rated than yours, consider how they typically respond to comments and questions (both positive and negative) as you may be able to implement this into your business.