According to Craig Ress, Entrepreneur Magazine, creating a brand perception requires intrusion. That is a fancy way of asking, how do you get customers to buy from you rather than a competitor?
The idea here is that a truly successful brand will not only get a customer in need of your product/service to buy from you, but will encourage the customer to pick you over the competition!
His solution, which you can read all about in the March, 2011 Issue of Entrepreneur Magazine involves 3 steps:
- Craft your Image
- Get Known
- Know what the customer wants
Easy enough, right? But, how do you really execute these steps?
Here is how.
Step 1. Craft your Image
Too many businesses operate without a clearly defined Brand. The result,
- inconsistent brand presentation
- costly media production costs
- poor performance of marketing initiatives
- poor market reception
A brand kit is critical to successfully marketing and managing a brand in the marketplace. Take the time to learn about its uses and benefits, and build one early on. Most important, once you build it, enforce its use religiously.
Step 2. Get known
Getting known is a job for marketing. And yes, traditional marketing like print, radio/ TV, direct mail can be out of reach and unsustainable for many.
However, everyone can afford social media marketing. In fact, put in the right perspective, social media marketing provides some significant advantages over its traditional peers.
Social media marketing allows everyone to create brand awareness cheaply. The key is to have tools that automate the communication process, so you can have the time to manage and engage the relationships you build across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
For example, if your
website management technology supports directly publishing to social platforms, then you can easily execute and manage social media campaigns, build business networks and raise your brand awareness in the marketplace without much additional effort.
Step 3. Deliver
Really, this is more appropriate than his suggestion! Delivering on your brand promises to customers is critical to a successful brand.
Nothing will kill a brand quicker than a broken trust between it and the marketplace. When that happens, its time to re-brand!
For a brand to be truly successful, nothing works better than simply keeping your promises. Deliver products when you say you will. Own your mistakes. Have some integrity. Show real care for your customers. Simple old fashion ideas will buy you loyal customers happy to retweet your brand with praises to all that will listen. Which, at the end of the day, is really all that you want in the first place.
