Focus Media » Focus On Marketing

Focus on Marketing: Strong brand essential to attracting customers

Josh Sommers — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:02:35 +0000

In tough times, and even in good, finding new customers is an ongoing challenge. When positioning your company or product to be top-of-mind in your arena (so that new customers come your way), having a strong brand is essential.

As outlined in last week’s column, your brand is more than your logo and tagline. It’s many things, like the quality of your product or service, how you dress for a presentation and the customer service experience you provide. Your brand is the external perceptions by the public of your company and product.

While quality, and even things out of your control, impact your brand, there are marketing strategies you can deploy to enhance your brand-building. Here are some ideas:

Public relations

Good publicity will establish positive perceptions of your company with your target audience and therefore be extremely effective in creating a brand. Good publicity is more credible than paid publicity (advertising). So, do something newsworthy. Having a third party, like the news media, tell or validate your story provides credibility to your image and product in a way that is priceless. Good publicity provided through a valid third party, such as a newspaper, motivates potential customers to take action.

Social media

I’ve written many columns on leveraging social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs. Yes it is another touch point for your marketing messages. Join communities that are full of your target audience. Have your own pages on social media, do podcasts, have a blog, post on others’ pages and blogs, and continue to be very active. This type of activity will make your efforts more visible. Be consistent across all your social networks with your messaging, and that will help you establish your brand. And of course — it’s free.

Email marketing

Make sure your email communication is professional, helpful and targeted. Make your customers feel special. Give them relevant advice and even re-purpose some of your public relations work in your email marketing.

Email marketing is about building a close brand relationship with someone, so they will be a repeat customer. Plus, it’s another free touch point that reinforces your other marketing strategies and messages.

Advertising

Creating and placing paid advertising and deploying direct-marketing initiatives (like direct mail) can protect and further build your brand by establishing that steady drumbeat of messaging, keeping your company at the top of your target audience’s mind. Think of it as something similar to the regular maintenance on your car. Change the oil to keep the car going — and to make it run better. It’s the same for advertising. Regular advertising, aimed at your target audience, builds your brand.

Building a good brand is so much more than creating a logo and a tagline. That’s part of it, of course, but public relations, third-party credentialing in the press, social media, email marketing and advertising are the communication vehicles that help build and strengthen your brand.

Josh Sommers is president and CEO of Focus Media, a leading Hudson Valley advertising and public relations agency. He can be reached at josh@advertisingandpr.com or 294-3342, ext. 303. Read his blog at www.advertisingandpr.com. His column appears Fridays.

Focus on Marketing: Your brand is always on the job

Josh Sommers — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:11:17 +0000

Often, my office phone rings and on the other end of the line is a person who tells me they need branding for their company or their product. Unfortunately, most people think of branding only as a logo and a tagline. Your brand is a lot more than that, and it is a work in progress — forever.

How the public sees you

Your brand is the external perceptions by the public of your company and product. And there are many touch points that impact your brand, some of which you can control, and some of which you cannot.

It may be someone reading about your company in the newspaper that shapes that perception. Your brand can also be shaped by how you look or dress at an event or what your website says and looks like. It can also be affected positively or negatively by your customer service team and how they interact with your customers. And, oh yes, even your logo and tagline will have an impact.

Credibility is important

Your brand needs to be credible. If your brand makes claims, you need to deliver on them, or your brand will suffer.

Think of Toyota. Their brand has long stood for quality and reliability. And it wasn’t just what they said in advertising. Toyota vehicles delivered. But when massive recalls were conducted to fix quality and major safety issues, Toyota’s brand was directly impacted. The integrity of consumer perceptions of Toyota was spinning out of control, and sales suffered. But what did Toyota do to fix the brand? Sure, they bought some ads, and they finally disclosed what they needed to disclose to the public. Most importantly, they fixed the problems. Fixing the product is what they had to do first, to rehabilitate their brand. Then, leaning on their historically good reputation made recovery of their brand possible.

A brand is only as good as your company and your product. It evolves, and it’s something that you have to manage. Your brand is who you are and who your customers expect you to be.

Next week I’ll discuss how to positively influence a brand.

Focus on Marketing: Use the right media mix

Josh Sommers — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 13:08:43 +0000

To build an effective marketing program, you need to attain critical mass of positive impressions. Great marketing is about using multiple touch points to reach the largest audience — and the right audience. Do that and the momentum in gaining new customers will become self-sustaining and likely grow.

However, when determining how to divide your marketing time and resources, remember that putting your effort and resources into one marketing avenue will limit your success. For example, putting all your resources into one advertising medium or even just networking creates limitations on your ability to reach your customers.

For some small businesses, this might be acceptable if your business is only focused on targeting business-to-business sales. But if you have a business that is generally selling to consumers, you need more marketing touch points that are wide and diverse.

One needs to think of both earned media and paid media when devising a plan with multiple touch points:

Earned media

Publicity touch points are what we call “earned media.” They not only will reach lots of people, but they will do so at no cost to you and, most importantly, are more credible than placing paid advertisements.

That credibility is important. By getting your company’s name and products in the news, you position yourself as an expert in your field and product lines. Portraying a professional image and showing your expertise then creates confidence in your potential customers. Those potential customers will turn to you when it is time for them to become an actual customer.

You can build that credibility by providing ongoing press releases that talk to your audiences about what your business is doing and what it is offering. Put yourself out there in the news. Stay on top of trends and be available to reporters and editors.

Also build relationships with the media by having regular communication with them. Get to know them well and know what their needs are, so they will come to you when they have a story on a company or product that relates to your business.

Paid media

Whether you are PepsiCo or a Main Street business, no one has an unlimited advertising budget. The key is to leverage your resources with what you determine to be the most efficient use of those resources, or as they say on the street, “getting the most bang for the buck.” Through research, you will find what is most effective and efficient.

You also need to utilize a wide number of marketing and advertising vehicles (print, radio, TV, search-engine marketing such as pay-per-click advertising) to reach a larger audience and to enhance the potential of someone seeing your message multiple times from different sources.

Not everyone’s formula should be the same. All businesses, however, should have multiple marketing touch points to reach their customers. And, for business-to-consumer companies especially, that means creating as many impressions across as many media as possible to create that critical mass and awareness.

Focus on Marketing: Email blasts keep your name in front of clients

Josh Sommers — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:59:25 +0000

I recently got an e-blast from a men’s clothier offering me expert advice to help me in my career as a businessman. The headline was “How to Dress For a Job Interview.”

This was just one in a series of email blasts that have come to me in the past few months.

In this email blast, it tells me what type of suit to wear (micro-pattern or subtle pinstripe), what type of shirt to choose (white or blue with a spread collar or point collar), a silk tie (not too loud), and what type of shoes to wear (black when wearing a navy blue or dark grey suit with a matching belt).

The company wished me the best of luck and asked me to consider them in the future if I should have any apparel needs. Done.

In a one-to-two-minute read, they’d provided all the information a man would need to dress in a standard, appropriate way for a job interview.

If I am inspired to act based on the information, there are buttons where I can forward it to a friend and locate a store near me. And, that’s the idea.

If you want to create a campaign that provides top-of-mind awareness and presents your latest products to your customers, you should consider writing a column regularly and distributing it through email blasts. You will become a valued resource to your clients and stay in front of them with trends.

You are shaping yourself as an expert with your deep knowledge of your field. Tell your current clients and future ones information that relates to your field and that will help them do their business or even give them an advantage over the competition. Your thoughts will help them make decisions. Then, when it comes time to enter a contract or make a purchase, they will more than likely come to you or your business, because they view you as an expert in your field.

Make sure to choose relevant topics for your recipients. They need to be topics that they will care about, and the advice has to be something they truly can use.

It’s a soft sell, but another touch point in your overall marketing strategy. Through these email blasts, you’re letting your potential customer know what you are about and that you are there for them when they need you.

Focus on Marketing: Make your mobile website finger-friendly

Josh Sommers — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 15:19:20 +0000

Are you where you need to be to be seen by your customers and potential customers? More specifically, is your website mobile-ready so your customers are seeing you?

More and more people are receiving their Internet information on their smartphones; even more so than on their desktop computers. According to a study by dotMobi, in 2008 there were 150,000 mobile-ready websites; in 2010, there were 3 million.

Many are now predicting that growth in mobile use will be bigger than the rush to use the Web on desktop computers. From 1996 to 1998, desktop websites grew in number from 150,000 to 2 million. That’s a 1,233 percent increase, compared with the 1,900 percent increase from 2008 to 2010 in mobile websites.

These statistics prompted Morgan Stanley to say in a report that the “mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did and will be bigger than most think.”

There’s room for growth: 35 percent of people in the U.S. own a smartphone. That’s a large number, but it can go a lot higher.

So, obviously if you are in business and want to reach your customers, you need to go where they are “hanging out.” Here are a few things to consider that will ensure that your mobile website is phone friendly:

Make it a simpler version of your company website. Choose some elements from your website that you will not use on the mobile site. For example, large images and intricate scripts like JavaScript slow down a page’s loading time. You want a mobile site to load fast. People want to spend less time waiting for a page to load on a smartphone than they do at a desktop.

Make the site clean and organized for easy navigation. Again, mobile users have less patience for anything cumbersome. Shorten titles, have a search toolbar and reduce advertising if you use it at all.

Give readers the option to see the site in its entire regular form.

Put contact information at the top of the page rather than the traditional bottom of the page for regular website pages.

Make the site finger-friendly. Make sure you keep in mind people will navigate and activate links by using their fingers on touch screens.

Make your standard font size 14-point, rather than the typical 12-point.

Most importantly, test your site on a smartphone. See how it looks, determine if it is easy to navigate. Go looking for certain pages and information to determine its usability.

Want to see how your website is doing? Track its performance through Google Analytics and you’ll see how many hits you are receiving through mobile devices. The numbers will tell how important a fast, effective mobile-ready website is.

So, is your website ready to warmly receive potential customers? Grow your brand and grow your visibility by creating that mobile site you’ve wanted to create for the past couple of years “» or, tune up or redo that mobile site that isn’t turning on potential customers the way it should.

Focus on Marketing: Make your mobile website finger-friendly

Josh Sommers — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 13:57:36 +0000