Your Marketing Magnet

Whether you’ve already done business together or not, everyone you come in contact with will form an opinion about you and your company.  Learning to manage your reputation so that the opinion others have of you is positive, is therefore crucial to your business success and is also what creates your brand.

Contrary to popular belief, branding is not about slick advertising. It’s about getting your target market to see you as their preferred choice – the problem solver to their specific needs. Building your brand is not just about what you do; it is about what you do differently from your competition and how you tap into your client’s emotional needs.

Brands have a number of strategic functions allowing you to:

- Differentiate yourself from your competition
- Position your marketing message in the hearts & minds of your target clients
- Persist & be consistent in your marketing efforts
- Customize your services to reflect your personal brand and image
- Deliver your message clearly & quickly
- Project credibility
- Strike an emotional chord
- Create strong user loyalty

Your unique promise of value that your clients will receive from using your services and products, your branding integrates customer service, sales promotion, public relations, direct mail, newsletters, discounts, event sponsorship, word of mouth and other communications tactics to present a unified message about your company and its products or services.

In an amazingly complex and competing world–where it’s increasingly hard to know what’s real and what’s not–having your customers acknowledge and support the promise of your brand is key to developing a thriving business.

So how do you build your brand?  By becoming entirely clear and focused on what you do that adds value to your services.  Do you deliver your work on time, every time? Do you anticipate and solve problems before they become crises? Do your clients save money and headaches just by having you on the team? Do you complete projects within the allotted budget?

To be effective, your brand must encompass all of your marketing efforts around your core idea or vision.  When it does, selling yourself becomes a whole lot easier because your message becomes uniform and powerful.

Good brands stand the test of time and last a lifetime.  To build yours go beyond what you do right now. Think long term. Look at Coke, Ford and General Electric. No matter what they sell or how they change over time, they can rely on their brand equity built on a foundation of customer trust to take them deep into their customers trust quotient and keep them there.

Establish a place of trust and relevance in prospects’ minds and you’re in the door. Because the more people believe in your brand, the more it will spread throughout your niche market without your pushing. If your brand is clear, distinctive, easily understood, and expresses a unique, compelling benefit that people believe in, it will bring you all the business and media exposure you can possibly handle.

To your success,