Small Business Branding, SEO and Social Media

With the vast array of opportunities for small businesses to succeed today, it is a necessity for them to ensure that they are taking the proper steps towards attaining their greatest potentials of success. As businesses may find it a difficult time to compete with other businesses in their particular field, there is always an opportunity with today’s online branding strategies. In order for a business to beat out their competitors, they must implement efficient and effective methods of marketing into their functional models/operations. Only by taking these necessary steps will a company have success in creating their own brand. Let’s look at small business Branding and how it relates to online factors like SEO and social media.

As today’s businesses are provided with a myriad of tools online for chances at success, it is important to note that delving into such opportunities will only be effective if the website owner acts proactively in maintaining their updating necessities on a consistent basis. For instance, a website that provides its customer base with a number of products and services will usually be required to update their database’s content every once in awhile to show their persistence and credibility as a brand.

When a business keeps their content up-to-date and in with the current trends, they are sending a message to their customer/client base that they care about them and their needs and will do everything they can to keep producing and providing similar products/services to maintain an entity as an ever-changing brand.

Social Media

Firstly, take advantage of social media when trying to promote your brand. Set up Google+, Twitter and Facebook accounts. We live in a day and age where everything and anything can be shared. Join relevant Google+ communities, tweet out to industry influencers, share your blog posts on Facebook. But most importantly, provide content that makes your business stand out from competitors. For example, create hashtags and share content outside of your brand, but still relevant to your industry. The less commercial you sound, the more willing people are to connect and follow you. Strive to be the account people want to follow and keep tabs on what others in your communities are sharing. This way you’ll not only gain a following, but connect with people and influencers in your industry. Also, don’t overlook the potential these channels have to boost employee recognition. If someone in your company receives an award, right a blog post about it and share it online. You’ll most likely find that the employee recognition ideas that can be incorporated on social channels will be a great way to increase employee buy in and overall engagement.

SEO

One of the most effective strategies of branding is search engine optimization. By incorporating SEO work into one’s web content, the website owner will be able to generate more leads towards their website(s) than ever before. As the web developer intertwines popular keywords and phrases into the site’s overall content, they will have the ability of having their link show towards the beginning of some of today’s most popular search engines. There are many reasons why this is important and vital to one’s success. As there are billions of webpages on the Internet, a business who utilizes website development for the purposes of marketing will need to ensure that their content consists of high quality material to truly grasp the attention of visitors.

However, in order for those visitors to land on the webpage(s) in the first place, they will need to be driven to the site(s) somehow. If the brand hasn’t already built itself up a name and reputation, it is very unlikely for their page(s) to even be seen as there are billions of websites on the Internet. By implementing SEO work into one’s content, the website owner will be able to take advantage of having content with special keywords and phrases that work to drive their webpage(s) towards the front of some of today’s most commonly utilized search engines. When people search for certain products and/or services, they will usually input certain words and phrases into search engine boxes to find what they are looking for. A business that combines popular keywords along with high qualities of content within their webpage(s) will moved towards the front pages of their search result “hit queries”.

Face-to-Face

Video conferencing is another essential function of a solid branding foundation. Video conferencing allows companies to communicate with their clients in a face-to-face setting without having to actually travel from one place to another. Therefore, both parties can comfortably communicate with one another on a personal level without having to leave their homes or place of business. This is a great benefit for small businesses as it brings networking and communications to a platform that cannot be found elsewhere. Any company that is striving to break through in their market should use video conferencing as a form of communication as it can boost their ratings and reputation as a proficient, reliable, and trustworthy company. Furthermore, it shows how a company strives to please their clients/customers by maintaining personal connections.

Have an experience using any of these tactics to grow your small business? Better yet, have an experience where you used a tactic that I left out? Share below in the comments.

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Using Social Content to Build Brand

When it comes to building brand, nothing is more effective than customer satisfaction. There was a time before the world of digital communications when it was referred to as ‘word of mouth’ advertising. This was the very best way for businesses to establish trust, an integral aspect of brand. In today’s culture, word of mouth advertising is still alive and well but has just taken on another form – social media. Now we rely on social media to spread the word about our likes and dislikes and this is why the intelligent marketing campaign will tap into the power of such networks as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as well as Google+.

Why Trust Is Important

With an ever-growing number of businesses popping up each day and the ease at which consumers can switch back and forth between one brand and another, it is imperative to build a solid relationship with our customers. Relationships are built on trust, pure and simple. If you want to build and grow a solid customer base, the first thing you should be looking to do is instill trust in your products, services and even in your own reputation as a business.

Using Social Content to Instill Trust

People are social creatures so we tend to form bonds with others of like minds. Many of us have online friends and followers to our social sites numbering in the hundreds. We share and post about literally every aspect of our lives from foods that we eat to experiences we’ve had with companies we have dealt with. When looking to instil trust in a company’s brand, it would be nice to capture all those things that are being tweeted about, and posted on, in relation to our products and services. There is actually a way to do just this.

Tools for Capturing Social Content

Just as the web crawlers make their way around the internet to find and rank content for search engines, there is now a new breed of crawlers that seek out social content. If you are trying to capture what people are saying about your products, services and even your company in general, utilising a crawler that has the ultimate goal of searching social sites is the best way to go. Not only can written content be captured but pictures and videos are sought out as well. Many products have literally gone viral due to videos posted on sites like YouTube.

Redistributing Social Content

As information is captured, social content curation pulls the best content together into one place to be redistributed. This social content is then re-published to various platforms in order to be made more visible to potential customers. It can be fed live to your website, reposted on social media hubs or even powered to big screens live, in real time, as it is hitting the Web. Never before was it so easy to capture and spread positive customer feedback which is such a vital element in building brand.

Whilst it has long been known that there is huge potential in utilising social media to build brand, it wasn’t until recently that it became possible to capture and repost all those wonderful things people are saying about our businesses. What customers say about a company is so much more effective than all the advertising we can do and why it is essential to capture and repost as much as possible. If you are not taking advantage of social content to build brand, you are missing out on one of the most effective marketing tools you could possibly use.

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5 Key Rules on How to Create an Effective Product Label

Designing a product label can be an intimidating thing. Follow these 5 rules on how to create an effective product label and create a label that beats all the competition.

Making a first impression is integral to creating a powerful message that turbo-charges your brand, but it’s easy to overdo it and mess up your image. The last thing you want to do is send people the wrong impression.

Designing a good label is much more than just a graphic. Realistically there’s a lot of practice and experience that goes into the design, and there’s a huge list of things you should do when you’re establishing your product label.

Here are our top 5 rules that you should follow when you’re designing your products custom label:

Spend plenty of time on your preliminary sketch

No matter what you’re doing, it’s important to start off small. Take the time to establish at least 20-30 different paper and pen drawings that establish a large variety of variations of your beginning ideas. If they don’t seem to work it’s important to start over with new sketches until you find the one that helps you establish your identity. A truly skilled designer or advertising professional will often spend as much or more time in the design step than actually making the label.

Balance and size are integral to good design

One of our brain’s interesting mechanisms is that we create scales in our head that help us perceive ideas. This means that some aspects are appealing and pleasing to the way that we receive information. When you’re developing your product label, you have to keep it balanced by enforcing that the “weight” of your finished product is equally balanced as your graphics, colour, and size. While you can tweak the rules as you see fit, your label will hopefully be seen by millions, so keeping it balanced is the way to go.

The same rules apply for logos. Logos MUST look good and be legible, no matter what size they are. Your logo instantly loses credibility when it’s not as defined when scaled down. It also needs to be designed in such a way that it looks great in larger formats like on billboards, posters, and on the web.

Use complementary colours

It’s tough to pick a colour scheme but it’s always best when you use complementary colours, and colours that aren’t too bright or graded. You also must ensure that your product label looks great in black and white, grayscale, and when made in just two colours.

The design has to fit the company

Make sure you effectively research your client and your audience before you begin your preliminary work. When you’re designing product labels, it should instantly provide background information to your client about the brand. Don’t fall into the trap of going after “recent trends”. Do what works for you by determining the best design style and work up a font that isn’t distracting and gets your message across so you can get a design that works the first time.

Be different and be recognisable

By all means break away from the norm and make yourself distinct with a product label, and definitely have fun establishing your design. However, there is a balance here. Research shows that anything that is more than 10% new is too much. It becomes too different and too “out there”. Take a few steps to stand out, but bear in mind it’s also about keeping it simple and working with the most important elements of advertising: size, style, colour, typography and originality.

Designing your product label can feel like a very daunting process. There are so many aspects to consider and directions that you can take your design. When you stick with these five key rules; spend plenty of time on the preliminary sketch, pay attention to the balance and size, use complementary colours, ensure the label fits the company image and be a little different; you will be off to a great start.

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