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.