Should you be using social media to build your brand?

The answer is…it depends.

Your question should not be whether or not you should be using social media to build your brand. It should be, “Is my ideal customer using social media?” If they are, you should be too.

Here are some stats from the Social Media Examiner that show the growth in social media:

• By 2010, 26 million (1 in 7) U.S. adults will use Twitter monthly (eMarketer)
  
  
• In September, Facebook officially hit the 300 million-user mark, making the social networking site nearly as large as the U.S. population. (eMarketer)
  
  
• Americans spend 17% of their online time on social media sites (Center for Media Research)
  
  
• Blogs are the most useful social media tool, say 51% of businesses (McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey”)
  

If your business or organization is targeting consumers, whether you’re a grocery store or a charity, there are likely huge benefits to utilizing social media to build your brand. Creating a blog, a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account (for starters) will provide new access points to engage with your ideal customers. If you are targeting businesses, you should also look at LinkedIn, as it’s a social networking tool for businesses.

A few points to keep in mind:

1. Social media takes time
It will take time to develop content and time to attract fans and followers. You must commit to set aside the time to produce consistent content on a consistent basis.

2. Aim to provide value to your ideal customer
The organizations that succeed in social media are focused on providing valuable content for their audience. The ones who fail tend to just talk about themselves.

3. You can streamline content delivery
Using RSS feeds, you can set blog posts to automatically update your Facebook page and Twitter account. Using HootSuite or TweetDeck, you can add new Tweets and update your Facebook page. I wouldn’t advocate relying solely on automation for content delivery, but it provides a consistent base, while making your life easier.

4. Focus on building your brand
Remember that you are building your brand by shaping your ideal customer’s experience with your organization. Your content and conversations should support your brand platform and emphasize what differentiates you from the competition.

5. Remember the objective
By engaging in social media, you still want to lead a customer along the path to conversion – a sale, subscription to an e-newsletter, attending a webinar, etc. Don’t hesitate to include a call to action…but demonstrate the value to them first.

Need help using social media to build your brand? Contact me for a consultation.

Choose Your Customers, Choose Your Future

I recently added a post that asked Are You Marketing to Your Ideal Customer?

I just saw this post online by Seth Godin that speaks to the same idea. Trying to be all things to all people is a common problem with many businesses that will likely lead to mediocrity, but if you strive to be great to a finely defined ideal customer, you'll have a better chance at success!

Search Engine Optimization that Builds Your Brand

5 Tips to Optimize Your Website while Building Your Brand

Before thinking about search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to establish your branding platform (e.g. being real and remarkable), know who your ideal customer is and match your brand messaging to that customer. If you haven’t established that, your SEO effort will likely lack focus and discipline, so I’d encourage you to go back and read those blog posts. If you have, you’re ready for these 5 tips to utilize SEO to build your brand online.

First, a word about SEO. There are many tactics you can employ to optimize your site and increase traffic, but it’s vital that the traffic is relevant – comprised of your ideal customers – or chances are that the visitors will essentially be “window shopping”. Many SEO experts are only focused on traffic, so before you contract one, be sure that they understand how to attract your ideal customer.

Google, by far the #1 search engine, ranks pages based on a combination of relevance and page rank. Relevance is largely controlled on your site and is calculated based on your optimization of the particular keyword term. Page rank is driven mainly by links from other sites to yours. These tips will deal with both factors.

1. Do your homework
Before optimizing, do some research to determine the keyword terms your ideal customers will be searching. Write down five keyword phrases that you think your ideal customers will be searching and run them through Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Tool to see how popular those terms are, how much competition there will be for each term and which related terms you may want to consider. This will give you a strong indication of which terms you should optimize for best results.

2. Develop dedicated landing pages for each search term
By setting up a separate page in your website dedicated to each term you have decided to optimize, you will have a much better chance of having that page being deemed relevant for that term by Google. For example, if you have a New York law firm, you may wish to have a page dedicated to one particular area of law within your practice if the search terms are telling you that your ideal customers are likely searching for terms related to that area.

3. Incorporate the search terms in 3 key places
Ensure the search terms are utilized in 3 key places: page titles, page headers, and body content. When doing so, be sure to use language that will appeal to your ideal customer and stay true to the key message you’ve developed for your brand platform. The trick is maintaining a balance that will be effective for search engines AND your ideal customers.

4. Build links to your site
In general, the more links that point to your site, the greater your Google page rank will be, thus helping your site get higher in Google search results. There are simple ways to build links (e.g. via directories, industry member sites, etc.) that should be your first steps. You can also build links through social media, a blog, online press release services and other means that you can control. These will all help.

5. Create relevant content
The best way to garner worthwhile links is to create great content online. If your ideal customers find the content valuable, they will share it with others. This could be via blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc., all of which will increase your page rank. If a site with a high page rank links to your site, that’s likely more valuable than all of those directory links.

Hope that helps demystify search engine optimization for you. These are basic tips, but if you follow them, you’ll be well on your way to attracting more relevant traffic to your site. If you'd prefer to contract this task to a specialist, our team at ICON can help you build traffic and build your brand.

Are you marketing to your IDEAL Customer?

Move your focus from a target market to a target individual

From Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, come this illustration of the ideal customer:

Trader Joe’s is a specialty food market that carries inexpensive, but exotic, foodstuffs. At Trader Joe’s you might purchase Moroccan-flavored simmer sauce or a quart of red pepper soup.

Trader Joe’s describes its ideal customer as an “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.” The image is a simplification, obviously - at any given moment there are likely zero of these actual customers in Trader Joe’s. However, the people who frequent the stores share some of the values and characteristics of the fictional ideal customer.

A crucial element of every strategy is deciding which markets and customers a company will serve. The “unemployed college professor” speaks directly to this issue. Trader Joe’s could have referred to its customers as “people who are high socio-economic status and are quality-conscious, but also budget-conscious, and who value variety and new experiences.” But this adjective-filled statement is nowhere near as vivid an image as the unemployed college professor with a very, very used Volvo.

Trader Joe’s then makes branding decisions based on this caricature of their ideal customer. For example, if they were making decisions on whether or not to carry a new product line, they would ask how would it appeal to the unemployed college professor. If they were developing a promotion, they would tailor it to appeal to the unemployed college professor. It provides focus and direction for their branding efforts.

So how would you describe your ideal customer? At ICON, we find it sometimes helps to start thinking about fictional characters from TV shows or movies who may apply and then to fine-tune that character into a customized and vivid image. One thing’s for sure, once you know who you are trying to reach, you’ll have a better handle on how to best reach them and capture their attention.

Be Real!

If you read the last post and watched the Seth Godin video, you saw the importance of being remarkable in your branding strategy. But there's a caveat...you can be remarkable, but be perceived as fake, just as I would look at the community in the video that is building a giant lava lamp in their community. You may go to see it once, which I concede has some merit, but why would you ever go back?

We believe that an enduring brand has to be REAL and REMARKABLE.

The first component to being real is being true to yourself. Is your business or organization designed around your passion and purpose? If not, what would make you excited about getting out of bed to build it each day? In the Jim Collins book, Good to Great, one of the key characteristics of great companies (and it's backed by his team's research) is that the company is driven by a common sense of purpose and passion. It's critical for long-term branding success.

The second component to being real is being what you say you are to others, in other words, delivering on what your brand promises. Also in Good to Great, Collins outlines how great companies decide what they can be the best in the world at and then diligently stick to that focus, regardless of any seemingly good opportunities that may come their way, but are outside the scope of their purpose. These companies know who they are and that's what they communicate to their customers and stakeholders. They are known for walking the walk and their customers come to understand exactly what they can expect from that company.

Here's a video of Joseph Pine, co-author of The Experience Economy and Authenticity, discussing this subject in greater detail:



Are you perceived as Real and Remarkable? At ICON, our Brand Transformation Process can help you incorporate these elements into your branding strategy. Contact us to begin today!

Be Remarkable!

One of the keys to establishing a strong brand is to be remarkable; to completely set yourself apart from the competition. Google did this when they launched their search engine. Other search engines were becoming more complex and adding more features and Google launched with the intention to be simply the best search engine out there. That and a quirky name was remarkable or in other terms, worthy of being remarked about.

No one explains the importance of being remarkable better than Seth Godin, author of The Purple Cow (completely based on this topic), among other great books.

Here's an excellent video of Seth discussing the need to be remarkable:



In ICON's Brand Transformation workshop, we guide clients through the discovery of what is remarkable or potentially remarkable about their customer experience. In some cases it already exists and just needs to be better communicated, but in other cases there may need to be a change to way the business operates to develop a remarkable aspect. Either way, we can help...just contact us to arrange your workshop.

One note of caution - we don't believe it's enough to be remarkable, as many fads are remarkable, but don't last. More about that in the next post!

Check Your Website’s Competitive Ranking

Once your website is communicating what you’ve outlined in your branding platform, the next step is to see how your site is performing right now. This can provide a benchmark for you to view how you are stacking up against your key competitors and your industry. You can have the most attractive site in the world, but if no one is seeing it, what is its true value?

One way of doing this is to look at the Alexa Ranking for your website. This provides a measure of a website’s popularity over the past three months. The site ranked #1 has the highest combination of website visits and page views.

To illustrate, here’s how our website stacks up against a sample of other firms in our industry on Canada’s East Coast (note - the smaller the number, the higher the ranking):

ISL                                       936,670
ICON                                2,772,683
Extreme Group                 2,981,404
Three Ton                         5,435,378
Hawk Communications    6,329,513
Colour                               9,385,600
Revolve                           10,489,438
MT&L                               10,712,896
Target Marketing             13,993,862
Vibe Creative Group        21,508,990
Breakhouse                     24,716,779
VMP Group                     24,858,770

It should be noted that our old site, which we replaced in July of this year, scored much lower on this list. We applied our knowledge to building the new site and it’s doing much, much better…but of course, we want to reach the top of the list!

So we’d advise you to rate your site and see how you stack up. I’m sure this will be an enlightening experience, but don’t be discouraged, you can climb the charts just like we did.

Beginning in the Beginning - The Branding Platform

Before you say ANYTHING online, it’s important to have a firm understanding of what you should be saying and to whom. It helps to have a foundation or platform upon which your key messages can be developed, but to do this, you sometimes have to back up to the beginning. Here are some questions to ask yourself in forming your branding platform:

1. What is the underlying purpose or passion that drives your business or organization?

2. Who is your ideal customer? What expectations will they have when choosing your product, service or experience?

3. What differentiates you from your competition? Does this point of differentiation matter to the ideal customer?

If you are happy with the answers to those questions, you’re ready to move on to a positioning statement; if not, perhaps you have some bigger decisions to make. Here’s a very simple outline for a positioning statement:

For [your ideal customer definition], [brand name] offers [your product, service or experience] that delivers [the ideal customer’s expectations] in a way that is [differentiators].

Now take a look at your current website. Does it communicate the current positioning statement through the use of text, images or other elements? If not, give some thought to what you can do differently to communicate this message.

Please note that this is a very simple approach to get a quick glimpse at your branding platform. We would highly recommend a more detailed analysis, which we offer in a half-day branding workshop. If you’d like to delve deeper, please contact us.

Are You Managing Your Brand Online?

At a national online marketing conference this past spring, keynote speaker Arlene Dickinson of CBC TV’s The Dragon’s Den defined your brand succinctly as “your company or organization as experienced by others”. Given this definition, we each have to ask ourselves, “How is our brand is being experienced by others online?”

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing some tips to help you analyze the effectiveness of your branding strategy online and we’ll give you some concrete direction you can take to make steps in a positive direction. We’ll look at your website, some E-marketing strategies you can take, and social media opportunities.

Please feel free to send us any questions you may have and, as always, if you need more help, feel free to get in touch.

Play the word association game with your brand

If I say, 'Las Vegas', what comes to mind?

If you said gambling, casinos, the strip, Wayne Newton or Siegfried & Roy, you're in good company with the majority of folks (although when I asked one client, she responded "a new purse"!). While the Las Vegas brand is much more than these responses, they provide a strong indication of the city's position as a destination for fun, entertainment and excitement for adults. What happens in Vegas...

Now, can you describe the official logo for Las Vegas? No? The vast majority of people aren't aware of it, but you can see it at the top of this page: www.visitlasvegas.com. So after seeing the logo, tell me, how much did the logo influence the descriptions you came up with when you played the word association game? I'd bet the house that it's most likely not at all.

Often, when we talk to people about their brand, they think we mean their logo, their slogan, their colour scheme. Sure, those items all represent the brand, but they are not the brand. The word association game provides a closer description of the brand. At a recent conference, I heard Arlene Dickinson of CBC TV’s The Dragon’s Den define a brand succinctly as “Your organization as experienced by others”. That definition works for me.

So for Las Vegas, the brand could be shaped by past visits there, stories heard from a friend's visit, experiencing the city as a backdrop in movies or TV shows, seeing advertisements, reading articles, visiting their website, and on and on.

When you think about your brand, in what ways are your customers, employees or other stakeholders experiencing your organization? How are they treated when they call on the phone? What type of atmosphere do you have in your workspace? How are you handling complaints? All of these elements, and many more, shape the perception of your organization and form your brand.

So if you asked your customers or your employees to play the word association game with your organization, what would they say? Ask them...you may be enlightened with the results.

An online brand strategy fuels web visitation for Neuragen.com

Over the past few months, we at ICON worked with the marketing team at Origin BioMed to develop an online brand strategy for their flagship product, Neuragen. The strategy has helped to drive over 100,000 visitors to their new website in just three months since its launch, with 1 in 5 of those visitors requesting a coupon for Neuragen.

As stated by Jason R. Tutty, VP Marketing with Origin BioMed, "Growing North American demand for our product necessitated a strong web presence. We were starting from scratch and ICON guided us through an online brand strategy which served as the blueprint for Neuragen's online presence.

Together, we also built and launched the cornerstone of our online presence - an interactive, consumer-focused site. Since its launch, traffic and online consumer interaction continues to soar, translating directly into incremental revenue for the company."

A combination of organic and paid search, referrals from WebMD and direct requests from ads are driving traffic to the site and we're working on a new e-newsletter campaign that will enable the conversation with their customers to go to a deeper level.

So if you have diabetes, singles or fibromyalgia and suffer from nerve pain, you'll want to give Neuragen a try. Check out their site and request a coupon!

Halifax Biomedical launches fresh new look

Halifax Biomedical Inc., with its head office in Mabou, Nova Scotia, is an international biomedical engineering company that provides quality clinical research services and advanced research products for the orthopedics field. ICON helped this innovative company to revitalize their brand identity and communications tools to elevate them to their next level of success.

Chad Munro, CEO of Halifax Biomedical Inc., said these nice things about the experience of working with us:

"ICON is a trusted supplier for all our marketing and communication needs, I highly recommend this firm. From logo development and collateral materials to online branding and redesign of our website, ICON has exceeded our expectations and delivered in the time we needed and under budget.

Halifax Biomedical strives to lead in a niche sector of medical imaging. We achieve this leadership through our commitment to quality and excellence in everything we do. We have partnered with only the best organizations internationally. I happy to say that work ICON has done reflects our values of quality and excellence. We are pleased to have such world class talent available to our organization."

Great Plains College officially launched

Two community college systems in Saskatchewan, Cypress Hills College and Prairie West College, announced that they are merging to form a new college, Great Plains College. ICON worked with the management team of the new organization to develop an exciting brand strategy and identity for the college that focuses on “Education with ENERGY”.

Mark Frison, President and CEO of the new college said, “The branding process was critical in shaping the new identity and direction for Great Plains College. Enrollments are up for the next year and excitement continues to build for our ‘Education with Energy’ theme.”

All that's left to say is Go Sun Dogs! (That's their sports team.)

So why blog?

After thinking about starting a blog for a few years, we're finally jumping into the blogosphere and you may want to as well. Here are just a few reasons you should consider blogging:

1. Positioning your Brand
A blog provides a great opportunity for your organization to stand out from competitors by demonstrating your specific knowledge, providing useful insights and showing a glimpse of your personality. Done well and consistently, a blog can help reinforce our brand in the eyes of your ideal customer.

2. Leadership
A blog can establish you as a thought leader in your area of expertise, provided of course that you have some decent thoughts from time to time. It also gives you a soapbox to stand on and share your opinion.

3. Driving Traffic
Having a blog that is optimized for search engines can provide another means for your ideal customer to find you online. As well, links from the blog back to your site (like this one) will improve the search engine ranking of your site.

4. Evergreen Content
Developing a blog and then having the blog feed posted on your site can provide a steady stream of new content for your site and give visitors a reason to keep coming back for more info. Search engines like that too. And you won't have to wait for your webmaster to make content changes.

5. Conversations with Your Readers
Most blogs allow readers to post comments on a blog post and this can begin a dialogue between you and our ideal customer. Just be sure to check the blog regularly to monitor and respond to comments...you wouldn't want to leave someone hanging!

These are jut a few reasons we're blogging, but we hope this will give you some reasons to start your own.