Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Several times a year I get asked the same basic question about how to choose a brand name for your business or a product. The question (or some variation of it) is:

“Is it better to choose a descriptive name, or is it better to make up some unique word that never existed before?”

There are different schools of thought on this question. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each side.

DESCRIPTIVE NAME

A descriptive name is something like “Mary’s Bakery” or “Toledo Plumbing.” Names like these have several advantages:

• Inexpensive to convey what business you are in — You don’t have to spend a lot of money on advertising to establish a brand identity that the public will come to know and recognize for the line of business you are in. With a name like “Smith’s Towing,” for instance, people will know exactly what your company does based on the name alone.

• Easy to think up — You don’t typically need to go through the expense of hiring a brand naming consultant. For a small business on a tight budget, a naming consultant may be out of reach, and the task of thinking up a unique name on your own too daunting. No wonder so many small businesses opt for simplicity, choosing something like “Sally’s Candies” or a similar descriptive name.

• Easier to get found in the search engines – If your business name is Toledo Plumbing, you already have a natural advantage for getting found when someone searches for Toledo plumbing companies.

But of course you have to weigh these advantages against the negatives of using a descriptive name — and there are indeed some downsides.

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I’ll never forget how surprised I was to receive the little booklet from Google.

You see, I’ve always thought of Google as the quintessential electronic business.  Who would have thought that they’d print up little spiral bound booklets and mail them to small business owners like me?  But they did.  Here is the booklet I got in the mail one day:

The booklet is called “Tweak Your Way to Profitability.”   The subtitle is “Tips for Boosting Your Income with AdSense.”

It contains tips for running Google AdSense units on your website to earn extra income.

Several things intrigued me about this marketing piece – so much so, that over 4 years later I still have it.  

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Google inspired me.

Yes, Google inspired me to create a marketing collateral piece for my business, from its little AdSense booklet that I received in the mail several years back.  (See the booklet and read more about it here.)

Today I’d like to share my own booklet – the booklet that Google inspired.  When I saw Google’s booklet, a light bulb went on over my brain.  “A ha!  I can create something like that to drive people back to my website,” I thought.

You see, I run a Web-based publishing business – akin to an informal online magazine.  I have struggled to come up with meaningful printed collateral to hand out at in-person events and speaking engagements that will get people to go online and visit my website.

In my case, going to my website is the single biggest call to action.  My goal is to get people to go to my website, whereupon they read information, subscribe and participate in the community.  So I created my own booklet, which looked like this:

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I wonder if you made the same assumption as I did when you read the title of this post?  Did you read “Direct Marketing” but think “Direct Mail?”

Direct marketing is defined as sending a marketing message directly to someone, instead of using mass media such as TV, magazines, billboards, etc.  Direct marketing channels include but aren’t limited to paper mail, telephone, mobile phone text (SMS), and e-mail.

This is an important distinction because the cost of a first class postage stamp in the U.S. is going up to 44 cents on May 11, 2009.  Each postage increase makes getting return on your investment in traditional direct mail a lot harder to come by.

Despite the price increase, direct marketing is still worthwhile.  It just means you have to be smarter at it. 

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