How to Brand Your Business And Make More Sales
Branding is "The total emotional and intellectual involvement your prospects and customers have with your business and products."
=> Branding by "Personal Experience"
Your customer service, front and back end offers must be of high quality, in order to create exceptional "Personal Experience". This starts a virtuous cycle.
Exceptional "Personal Experiences" lead to general public and market acclaim spread by word of mouth and other publicity. In turn, this feeds into a still stronger Brand, starting the cycle all over again.
=> Branding by "Indirect Experience"
For many direct marketers, "Personal Experience" Branding is difficult and not easily achieved because sales that lead to "Personal Experience" are not easily made !
The "Indirect Experience" strategy relies on creating a consistent, repeating association to the product in your prospects mind.
Jingles in audio \ visual media
Advertising through classifieds, display, press releases, and give away products and information.
Sponsorship of media, cultural, sporting and other events
On the other side of the coin, businesses have much more competition and must be more customer focused than ever before. Companies that thrive and stay in business recognize building lasting relationships with existing customers is more profitable, than always trying to find new customers.
A World of stronger consumers who by-pass your direct and indirect experiences with a click of the mouse, is difficult for Brand builders. On the Internet those that succeed make profits, the rest fail.
Brand building has a cost in time, money and effort. The cost of Brand building is easily quantified in Dollar terms. The value of a Brand is harder to establish because it involves measuring emotional and intellectual associations that might not necessarily translate into cash sales.
Not understanding the value, but clearly understanding the cost of Branding, some marketers decide to get round this problem by competing solely on price. This is a short sighted tactic because it invites "price wars", and if you get involved in a "price war" against an opponent with deeper pockets you are bound to loose. A better strategy is to compete on high product value and build quality Brand recognition over time.
Brand building is an ongoing Business strategy. The emotional and intellectual associations and recognition that together make up Brand loyalty wear off if not re-energized frequently. Brands are subject to fashion, fads and change, and understand recognition is not the same as popularity. Your market may recognize your Brand, but that may not translate into sales if the association is unfashionable.
The temptation, in such circumstances, is to spend less on Branding, cut prices, or , drop the business line altogether. These are knee jerk reactions to uncontrollable events when taken in the short term. A measured initial response is to re-invent the Brand, freshen it up and market it to a new generation of consumers. Many businesses re-invent, and re-brand themselves and go on to achieve new consumer acclaim.
Get a professional web site with customized headers, footers and logos - Make your "visitor experiences" happy ones.
Advertise regularly using paid channels where you can. If money is a problem, use free advertising, but advertise regularly !
Write useful articles and publish regularly. Invite visits to your site through your resource box.
Syndicate your articles and build personal name recognition using a tool such as Name Branding Syndicator available from http://www.highprofitsoftware.com/syndicator/
Visit http://www.simplyeasier.com/mbd to see how you can get this tool for Free as part of a product bundle.
Brand your business by associating and complimenting other successful products - Develop a quality reciprocal link and partnership strategy.
Try products like Zeus (http://www.cyber-robotics.com/ ) and Arelis (http://www.axandra.com/index.htm) for this tactic.
Use a good autoresponder service and communicate frequently with your customers and prospects giving useful, and personal information.
Use Zip Brander available from Russell Brunson of http://www.zipBrander.com/ to put your products, affiliate programs and other offers in front of your purchasers easily and frequently.