Tag: brand strategy

Personal Branding tools

11 Tools for Managing and Growing Your Personal Brand

1 Comment

You could easily spend hours upon hours a day working to grow and manage your personal brand online and offline. But you won’t have to spend such a large amount of time if you are use the right tools. I commonly receive the question about what tools I use to more efficiently manage my personal brand. Below is a list of some of my favorite apps, websites, and tools that I use to build my personal brand and managing market efforts in general. However, while these are my favorites, there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is important to try out different tools to figure out what works best for you and your goals; whether that is to grow your community, land your dream job, increase your client base, establish yourself as a thought leader, etc. Continue reading →

personal branding

A Marketer’s Guide to Getting Started with Personal Branding

1 Comment

A brand is not only a company, logo, or trademark; it is anything that identifies or differentiates one thing from another. That could be one company from another, such as Coca-cola and Pepsi, or  one person from another.  As marketers in the digital space it has become more critical than ever to develop and grow our personal brands. A strong personal brand shows that you know how to successfully market yourself, your skills, and your brand, giving you the credibility needed to land your first job, first client, dream job, or dream client. Continue reading →

How to Create Your Own WordPress Blog: A Video Tutorial

1 Comment

We all know that content is king, and its empire is growing by the minute. This is more true now more than ever since Google’s Hummingbird algorithm update. One of the best ways to add content to your website is to create and maintain a blog focused around topics relevant to your company’s industry. A blog is also a great way for professionals to build their personal brand by writing about industry topics and trends.  Continue reading →

3 Lessons in Brand Passion from Winning Brand Builders

1 Comment

Brand PassionWhat separates two brands in an industry, from one being successful and another not? Brand passion! The passion that company founders have for their brands is transferred to their customers, so customers not only purchase products but they become brand advocates because they are as passionate about the brand as the brand creator.

There is no one formula for creating a successful brand, and while passion is often a key factor, it does not guarantee brand growth. To achieve phenomenal company growth and brand awareness, brand founders need to strategically focus their passion for their product into the right marketing outlets, i.e. newsletters, social media, website design, product design etc.

To better understand how brand passion, combined with strategic marketing, can lead to brand success I want to look further into three passionate company founders: Brian Scudamore, founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, Pete Cashmore, founder and CEO of Mashable, and Susan Gregg Koger, founder of ModCloth.

Continue reading →

The Challenge of Creating a Connection Between Multiple Brands

4 Comments

So you have been developing your online brand identity, making sure that your website is both enticing and user friendly. But, now imagine this challenge:

“There are five brands within a larger corporate brand. Each brand is required maintain their own online identity, but must also stay connected to the parent company.”

Yeah, I would define that as a very large, but very exciting challenge.

However, this is only one scenario for a company comprised of multiple brands. For one company it may be better to keep the brands separate (not creating any connection between the online identities of each brand), while for another company it may be best to completely intertwine all the brands under one umbrella. There is not a single answer for if and how a parent company should connect their various brands online, but below are a few examples of possible routes. Continue reading →

Starbucks: Refreshers

3 Comments

The right packaging can make or break a customer’s decision to purchase a product. If the packaging is unappealing, a customer will not give the product a second thought. Instead, they will move right on to a competitor product, and a sale, as well as a potential customer relationship is lost.

Continue reading →

Marketing Explained Using the Laws and Principles of Physics

Dan Cobley, a marketing director at Google, gave a presentation at the TED Global 2010 conference titled “What Physics Taught Me About Marketing”. When I first saw the title of this presentation I was hooked, I had to know how can marketing and branding principles be explained using physics. Well, Dan Cobley explains just that using Newton’s second law, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the scientific method and the second law of thermodynamics. Continue reading →

Jenna Langer: 5 Ways to Humanize Your Brand

I recently read a great article by Jenna Langer, on how brands can better connect with their customers by creating a brand that is “human”. As we all know, humanizing a brand is not a small request; Humanizing Brand Imageas  medias (i.e. social media) and customer expectations continue to change, this challenge becomes more difficult.

In the article, Jenna breaks down 5 humanizing tips, why they are important, and ways in which companies can implement them. These tips can help companies not only connect with their customers, but also turn them into brand advocates. Continue reading →

Google’s Playbook for Winning at Mobile

2 Comments

Mobile Applications For Mobile MarketingMobile usage is on the rise as more and more consumers are purchasing smartphones and tablets. Mobile marketing, whether through advertising, a mobile site, or an app, is the best way to reach your customers at the exact point of purchase. With mobile marketing you can reach customers at the moments that matter the most.

Google understands the importance of mobile marketing and also that it can be quite intimidating to those of us that have not ventured into this media before. To help people understand and build their own mobile marketing strategies, Google has created “The Mobile Playbook: The Busy Executive’s Guide to Winning with Mobile“.

The playbook is broken down into 5 easy sections – the 5 most importance mobile questions a executive should be asking:

  • How does mobile change our value propositions?
  • How does mobile impact our digital destinations?
  • Is our organization adapting to mobile?
  • How should marketing adapt to mobile?
  • How can we connect with our tablet audience?

This playbook offers great tips and resources for serving the mobile customer, creating mobile-optimized websites, building branded mobile apps, developing a mobile search strategy, understanding mobile brand building, integrating on-line and off-line marketing channels, and adding tablet to your strategy.

In each section Google includes great examples and case studies on how other companies have successfully reached their mobile customer, including:

  • Chase
  • Walgreens
  • Delta
  • Starbucks
  • Walmart
  • 1-800-Flowers
  • Dominos
  • Coke

For a concise to-do list for implementing what you learn in the playbook, check out the conclusion section for a checklist of the top 10 things to remember when diving into mobile marketing.

  1. Define your value proposition by determining what your consumer wants to do with your business in mobile. Benchmark against others in your industry for ideas.
  2. Build a mobile website. Once you have a mobile website, check the stats and optimize based on consumer usage.
  3. Build an app for a subset of your audience after your mobile site strategy is in place. Don’t forget to promote your app.
  4. Assign a Mobile Champion in your company and empower them with a cross-functional task force.
  5. Set up a meeting with your agencies about what’s working and what’s not for your brand on mobile and tablets.
  6. Search for your brand in mobile, as a consumer would. Take 5 minutes and do this today. What’s working? What’s not?
  7. Separate mobile-specific search campaigns from desktop search campaigns so you can test, measure and develop messaging specific for mobile.
  8. Run rich media HTML5 ads to extend your branding message to reach the mobile audience.
  9. Assign everyone in your marketing org the action item of reviewing their programs through a mobile lens.
  10. Check out your tablet consumer’s experience with your brand. Take 5 minutes today and search for your brand on a tablet as a consumer would. What’s working? What’s not? Maximize the tablet environment with rich media creative.

Does your company have a mobile website? How do you plan on using mobile marketing in the future?

Image: suphakit73 / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Future of Branding – What Goes into a Branding Framework

“The future of branding is marketing with people and not at them.” This is one of the great quotes included in this new article from BrandGrowth. This post is based around the book Brand Against the Machine (which I am definitely downloading onto my Kindle when I get home).
This article does a great job explaining the 6 Steps to Building a Branding Framework from the book and how they apply to your brand:

  1. Know your audience
  2. Define your position
  3. Create a solution
  4. Content
  5. Promotion
  6. Over-deliver your value

I highly recommend checking out the full article, and I can’t wait to write about what I learn from this book as well.

Related articles