Branding

Branding is defined as the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design. Crafting your brand as soon as possible will be very crucial in successfully branding your company and remaining consistent but also preventing a ton of frustration with trying to rebrand an outdated and unprofessional brand.

Name

Deciding your company name is a tricky step. Common challenges to consider include:

• Trademarks
• Copyrights
• Patents
• Entity availability with your secretary of state
• Domain availability
• Scalability
• Easy to spell
• Easy to pronounce; avoid using your difficult last name, please.
• Make sure it’s not too long or exhausting.
• Try to avoid identical letters side by side in the domain, such as exampleeasy.com
• Only choose a geo-specific name if you absolutely never want to go beyond that market, and even then, it still offers restrictions in suburbs.
• Make sure it is niche relevant.

Logo, Mascot & Colors

When having your logo designed, it is very important to communicate your expectations prior to designing. What is the message or symbol you want your customers to remember? This is an area where inspiration must be used, while logic can be used to go in the right direction and avoid common mistakes, it is an inspiration that fuels a winning logo design.

Mascots are excellent for certain businesses with well-crafted marketing campaigns, they help deliver a message with oftentimes humor or excitement. Mascots are not meant for every business; many businesses avoid using them. We advise to only consider a mascot if you are being guided by an expert marketing agency; otherwise, just stick to the logo. Mascots are not meant to completely replace a logo only to compliment it.

The color scheme helps tie all of your brands together, use logic fueled by inspiration to guide your color scheme.

Consider choosing 5 colors to incorporate in your branding:

• 1st color as the base
• 2nd color as an accent of the base
• 3rd color as an accent of the accent
• 4th color to fill the void
• 5th color is typically the call to action (CTA)

Which colors mean what?

• Red: The universal sign of excitement, passion, and anger. Is your brand loud, playful, youthful, or modern? Think red. More mature, classic, or serious? Red may not be for you.
• Orange: An invigorating, playful color. Go orange to stand out from the crowd. It’s used less often than red but still packs an energetic punch.
• Yellow: Accessible, sunshiny friendliness. Yellow exudes cheer, and your brand will radiate an affordable, youthful energy. Nobody puts yellow in a corner!
• Green: The ultimate in versatility, green isn’t linked with many brand personality traits, but it has strong cultural associations. Are you in finance? Gardening? Consider going green.
• Blue: The classic king of colors, blue appears in over half of all logos. As it symbolizes trustworthiness and maturity, true blue will ensure you’re taken seriously.
• Purple: Where the rainbow gets luxurious. Paint with purple to appear simultaneously cutting-edge and wise. There’s just a hint of femininity in there too.
• Pink: Nothing says “girly” quite like pink. But it’s more versatile than that. From pastel rose to neon magenta, pick pink for a modern, youthful, luxurious look.
• Brown: What can brown do for you? Make your brand appear rugged, masculine, and serious. Brown is very underutilized, so you’ll stand out from the competition.
• Black: Black is the new black. Want to look slick, modern, and luxurious? Time to go black. Rather be economical and affordable? Stay away from the dark side.
• White: The absence of color. White is youthful and economical but can work for almost any brand. As a neutral color, consider white as a secondary accent.
• Gray: Not quite dark, not quite light. Gray is the middle ground of mature, classic, and serious. Go darker to add mystery. Go lighter to be more accessible.

Graphics & Print

Now that you have your company name, logo, and color scheme, it is now time to have your graphics designed. Common graphics to utilize are business cards, flyers, brochures, letterheads, social media banners & photos, presentations, headers, etc.

It is important to incorporate the same design and look across all of your graphics & print.

Website Design

Websites have evolved so much over its existence. Websites were primarily used by small businesses as an online business cards, but now they are used to nurture your prospects through:

• Awareness
• Interest
• Desire
• Action

Websites must have the critical data easily and quickly found, such as phone numbers, addresses, operating hours, email, etc. Your website should have the call to action heavily promoted. The call to action (CTA) is what you want the prospect to do when they are on your website, such as call or submit a form.

The design of your website should incorporate the same consistent branding. Content is king, make sure your website has a lot of high-quality content. Those are just a few of the fundamental elements to utilize on your website.

Reputation

Establishing a positive reputation is an absolute must in order to stay in business. The last thing you want to do is have to survive on a new role of customers to stay in business. Not to mention if you could even attract new customers with bad reviews and testimonials. Client satisfaction should be every business’s primary goal so they can have the best chance of survival & growth. In the end, we all reap what we sow.

Reputation management is comprised of all the elements of your identity and even your promotion.

Review Management

Review management is just one layer of your reputation management. Managing your reviews is an absolute must, but we need to draw a line between obtaining positive reviews & managing negative reviews. There is a very simple but powerful 2 step formula to obtaining positive reviews, and that formula is:

• Earn it
• Ask for it

Yes, it’s that simple however if this was actually done by most businesses, the results would be powerful. Earning it is a necessity, and while it seems so obvious, too many companies fall short of delivering a 5-star service. The reason people pay $60 for a Build-A-Bear rather than paying $7 at Walmart is because of the experience and service. You must offer a positive experience for your customer and exceed their expectations in order to receive a positive review.

A good rule of thumb is the companies with the most reviews are the ones who ask for it. Ye have not because ye ask not. Even out of the few companies that earn a positive review, very few actually ask for it. Want to go even further??? Companies don’t make it CONVENIENT to submit a review. We have a software we developed that gets installed on our client’s websites that we direct their customers to via business cards and invoices, and verbal requests. When the customers land on the review page on the site, it first asks to rate them from 1-5 stars, and if they submit 3 stars or less, it brings them to an internal customer satisfaction survey to allow them to vent their concerns privately. If they select 3.5 stars or higher, it guides them to a page with links to popular websites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, Super Pages, BBB, etc.

Now that we covered the basics of obtaining positive reviews, let’s discuss how to manage negative reviews.

First, understand people are always quicker to leave a review when they are unsatisfied compared to when they are completely satisfied. This is why it is so important to solicit feedback during and immediately after a service or product has been delivered. This allows the customer to vent their concerns privately, and it gives you the opportunity to resolve it before they go public.

What should you do when you receive a negative review? First, investigate, and after investigating you will gain insight into whether the client is right or wrong. If the client is right, then determine a viable solution to help counter your faults. If the client is wrong, determining a small kind gesture to neutralize the client’s anger, and if that fails, you may consider supplying a refund or a major discount or incentive. I always recommend attempting to resolve the issue privately with the client by phone or in person and if you all come to a resolution, then ask for them to either remove or update their review.

If a negative review remains, then you should reply to the review with empathy first and address the review as an isolated incident, and list what your proposed solution is to satisfy the customer. Never argue with your customers online, it shows unprofessionalism and a lack of customer care. Always do your best to dilute negative reviews with positive ones.

Public Relations

Public relations often referenced as PR, is defined as the professional maintenance of a favorable public image by a company or other organization or a famous person.

The importance of quality PR is unmeasurable, but if it could be measured, you would find those numbers to be magnificent. PR can give you natural link building to your website, organic shares and likes on social platforms, and press releases from news outlets.

What are ways to nurture quality PR?

Identify all of the media outlets and news stations in your market.
Craft valuable content with hard data such as statistics.
Implement content marketing on your platforms.
Reach out to the media outlets and introduce yourself and your skills and offer to participate if they need a live interview or report on a subject that you specialize in.
Consider donating to a charity or participating in a fundraiser that will show your community involvement.