Brand Admiration and the Power of Love: Build a Brand That People Adore

As a business owner, there are a lot of things I love about my job—the flexibility, the freedom to choose projects, the opportunity to work with some amazing companies. But there are also plenty of things I hate about it—specifically, specifically, anything that involves invoicing, expense-tracking, and accounting. So, when I first

The Psychology of Color in Marketing and Branding

The psychology of color as it relates to persuasion is one of the most interesting — and most controversial — aspects of marketing.

The problem has always been depth of analysis. Color theory is a topic of complexity and nuance, but splashy infographics rarely go beyond See ‘n Say levels of coverage.

The #1 Secret to Building Your Perfect Personal Brand

Some people absolutely hate the idea of personal branding because they think it feels fake or forced. Sure, I’d hate that too. Who wouldn’t? But an effective personal brand should never feel forced by definition.

I’m going to let you in on an insider secret. Brand building is actually a misnomer. You don’t sit down and decide what you want your brand to be. In fact, that’s completely the wrong way to go about it. The secret to building the perfect personal brand is this. You don’t actually “build” a great personal brand, you “extract” it. It may not be an easy or comfortable process, but figuring out what makes you “you” is a necessary first step to making your brand realistic and relatable.

The people who skip this step and jump immediately to packaging themselves are the ones who end up with forced brands that they can’t relate to and ditch after a week.    

Use Google+ to Build Your Brand's Reputation

Google+ is structured in a way that offers two key benefits to marketers and businesses: It allows them to easily build relationships with one another, and it impacts their web presence by passing social signals.

Building relationships, from a mechanical standpoint, is quite easy on Google+. The open nature of the platform allows users to comment on public posts, whether or not they have that user in their circles. The open, asynchronous format is similar to Twitter: I can talk to you without having to follow you, compared to other networks which require users to establish a connection first before being able to interact with each other.

4 Tools That Can Help You Provide Better Tech Support to Your Customers

Customers are the lifeblood of any growing company. Their return business brings reliable income and their referrals help you widen your reach. According to the Adobe Digital Index Report, 40 percent of an American business's revenue comes from repeat or return buyers, who are only eight percent of a business's overall visitors. This means a small percentage of your customers are helping you pay the bills every month.

By nurturing that eight percent and hopefully watching your repeat customer base grow, you can keep your monthly cash flow strong. Fortunately, there are multiple tools you can use to better interact with your customers, while also keeping your response times short. Here are a few tools that are designed to support your customer service efforts.

10 Ways to Quickly Generate Leads

You’ve printed flyers, you’ve sent out mailers, you have blasted your social-media followers, but you’re still not getting the lead flow you need to grow your company into the next billion-dollar brand. Well, there are hundreds of ways to generate leads, so don’t hang your head.

Here are ten of my favorite.

1.eBooks

These work great for B2B companies or a business that works in a very technical space, as people love to read and gain expertise about their industry. Make sure you don’t promote your services or products. People don’t want to be sold, they want to be informed. So write it from a neutral perspective and give actionable insights. Share the eBook socially and ask your network to share it for you.

7 Tips For Working With Social Media Influencers

Influencer marketing is quickly becoming the new big thing on the marketing scene. Defined as the act of convincing people, bloggers or celebrities to promote brands through their personal online accounts, it's a tactic that can help brands succeed beyond their wildest dreams.

From three to ten times higher conversion rates.   

If you're just getting your feet wet in the sea of influencer marketing, here are seven tips that'll help you reap all the benefits this effective form of marketing has to offer.

How to Effectively Introduce Your Company's Updated Brand

Marketing a new brand is a big undertaking that involves a wide array of challenges and obstacles. But when done right, a brand transformation can bring exciting new opportunities for growth. Careful planning is essential. A conscientious focus on budgets and strategic milestones for implementation will help ensure an effective rebranding process that customers will understand and appreciate. If you've recently rebranded your business, here are some important guidelines to remember while introducing your new brand to your prospects and customers.

How Do You Sustain Your Brand's Value? Follow These 6 Steps.

When I broke the screen on my iPhone a couple of months back, I asked the Apple care team for help. And the experience that followed exceeded my expectations. The team member involved went out of his way, contacting the nearest store to arrange an appointment to replace my screen -- in less than an hour.

It was that memorable experience which increased the value of Apple in my eyes, through my positive brand experience with the computer giant.

The design, look and feel of the Apple store itself has always provided me -- and obviously many others -- a unique, carefully crafted consumer experience. Apple fought and won the right to protect that experience with a trademark registration that covers the unique design and layout of its stores worldwide. And here again is the core of a good brand experience: Steve Jobs chose a brand name that could grow in the minds of the public, be legally protected and add to the value of the company.

7 of the Biggest Content Marketing Mistakes Wrecking Your Brand

Have you put a huge number of hours into your online presence, just to reap little benefit? There could be many reasons that your brand is failing online but perhaps none more important than your content strategy. Long pushed to the side as the secondary element to a brand's growth, content has pushed its way to the front lines and can make or break almost any company. Here are the things you might be doing wrong and tips to learn how to fix them.

Branding Lessons From Steve Jobs

"It’s a complicated and noisy world," mused a younger Steve Jobs, "and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. "

That chance to make a memory, he says, is the essence of brand marketing.

For Jobs, who looks so Jobsian—and so 1997—in his sandals, shorts, and turtleneck, that chance to make a memory presents the fundamental question of branding. The oft-mythologized executive laments that Apple's brand had fallen off, and the way to get back was not by talking about speeds or megahertz or why Apple is better than Windows.

5 online strategies to get millennials offline

Advertising budgeting for 2013 is underway, but let’s look at 2017. That’s is the year when Millennials – the generation now in their mid-teens to mid-30s – will have more spending power than any previous generation. While they’re known to be the generation of “ScreenAgers,” they’re elusive consumers thanks to a constant barrage of marketing and advertising messages. Because of their “always on, always connected” lifestyle, it’s easy for marketers to assume that they’re hearing your messaging.

How Facebook is trying to bring on more small business as advertisers

On Facebook you'll find business Pages for cabinet makers, cupcake bakers, people crafting flower arrangements shaped like teddy bears, and so much more. And 3 million of those businesses now actively advertise with Facebook, up 50% from last year, with small businesses representing the "vast majority" of that number, according to a new company blog post.

More than 70% of those advertisers come from outside the United States, and Southeast Asia has seen the most growth. 

5 reasons to outsource your branding

Now that your company is established and has some sales activity, you'll need to think about your brand.  However, you should resist the temptation to making branding a DIY activity.  Here's why:

1. You probably don't understand the concept.

Unless you've actually branded a company or product in the past, you probably think that brand consists of your name, logo, tag line and the look and feel of your products.

In fact, your brand is the emotion that customers and potential customers feels when they experience your product and service. Those brand elements can only reflect that emotion.

If you miss that basic concept, you'll waste time, money and mental energy on those brand elements rather than on the emotions you're attempting to elicit.

6 tips for positive brand building

When we launched the Credit Karma platform in 2008, we were offering free credit scores at a time when consumers were used to deception from other companies, often getting pulled into expensive subscription programs when they thought they were getting their credit scores for free.

Because of this, one of our first goals as a company was to elevate our name above everyone else's. We've done this while consciously attempting to avoid making negative statements about other companies, and we've tried to always put actions before words. It's left us battling competing impulses at times--accentuating our own positives, without directly calling out another company's negatives--but I think we've learned to walk this line well.

Small Business Authentic Branding on a Budget

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Branding is one of the most important and at the same time can be one of the most confounding areas for business owners of all sizes. Last week, Forbes asked small business owners to tweet their questions about branding using the hashtag #SmallBizHowTo.

The most common questions had to do with priorities and resource constraints. Does branding require big budgets? When you have limited budgets, what is most important to focus on?

In this column, we look at how authenticity and creativity – particularly creativity in partnerships – are the real drivers of long term brand quality.

First, let’s dispel the notion that huge budget guarantees success.

4 Common Brand Journalism Pitfalls

As more companies warm to the notion of becoming their own publishers, here are a few pitfalls to avoid before launching an employee brand journalism strategy.

Just because someone else wrote it…

How many times have you endured: “In today’s challenging, global economy…” – or something just as banal? Maybe you’ve used it yourself? I know I have. Guess what? Just as water will always be wet, the global economy will always be challenging. And social media will hyper-connect us like never before. And mobile devices will proliferate. And millennials will disrupt the workforce (ok, you get the picture). Unless you’re looking to boost your bounce rate, avoid the same trite phrases that a bazillion other writers have used before you.

How a brand can predict customer's needs

These days, fulfilling customer needs in real time is necessary to sustain competitive parity. But soon, “real time” won’t be good enough; brands will need to fulfill needs before customers are even aware of them.

Consider a world where an Uber pulls up automatically because it knows you’ve got a flight in two hours; your fitness app ships a new pair of running shoes without you ordering them, as it can detect that you’ve put in too many miles on your existing pair. Or, your vehicle automatically plots a traffic-free route because it knows you are likely headed home after a day at the office, alerting you to the nearest gas station given the pending snowstorm.

The 7 characteristics of successful brands

With the volume of competition that businesses face in most industries, it’s never been more important to stand out and develop a unique identity and value proposition through strategic branding. While it’s obviously important to offer a quality product or service, effective branding is often at the heart of the companies that thrive.

According to Jerry McLaughlin, “brand is the perception someone holds in their head about you, a product, a service, an organization, a cause, or an idea.  Brand building is the deliberate and skillful application of effort to create a desired perception in someone else’s mind.”

3 ways to grow hack your content marketing strategy

By now you’ve likely heard the phrase “growth hacking” almost as often as you’ve read about the power of influencer marketing. Growth hacking, a term originally coined by Sean Ellis in 2010 and used by countless others since then, is built around the mindset of being a hybrid of marketer and coder. Growth hackers answer the question, “How do I get more customers for my product?” with Google Analytics and conversion rates, all the while looking at marketing growth tactics through the lens of data-driven decisions.

Growth hacking’s roots stem from the integration of product development and marketing. When your product is your content and you’re telling the story of your brand, applying growth hacking tactics is the only way you can drive sustained organic traffic and (try to) make your content go viral.