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

I know, I know, you’re all saying: “Print? Print? Battelle, in your last post, you implored us to get with the social times, start a blog, start Twittering, figure out Yelp. You even wrote that most small business websites were “static brochures, devoid of personality and life.’”

And now you want us to…print a brochure!!!

Yep. This my fantasy brochure of sorts, a slim piece of cardstock I wish every small business I worked with would hand me on the way in or out the door.

But before you can print this brochure, before it can deliver on its promise, you have to first go back and read that post of mine, the one about Cultivating Your Online Garden, and you have to actually go DO what I suggest you do.

Go ahead, DO it!

OK, now you’re ready to create the best brochure you’ve ever printed. Because this brochure isn’t a sales pitch, it’s an invitation to join a conversation that will last for a long, long time.

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(Image credit) Back in the late ’90s, I’d often be asked to give speeches to Very Large Businesses – the kind of companies that bring their top sales execs to a “Chairman’s Circle” retreat at a high-end resort. I’d fly in, eat dinner with the senior management, and in the morning I’d give a talk about the impact of the Internet on that particular business’s industry. And whether I was speaking to an insurance company or a media conglomerate, my message was always the same: The Web is going to change your business, forever, and you better focus on understanding this new technology.

Now, this was ten years ago, mind you. In the intervening decade, large businesses have not only learned the Web, they’ve embraced it. They realize that they live or die by how their brand is expressed online. 

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We humans are all wired for a great story. We love narrative, it’s how we relate to each other and the world. Over the course of the past 20 years I’ve been involved in naming a lot of new things – from the early days at Wired (more on that in a minute) to Web 2.0, to my current work at Federated Media. And as I review all the  names and brands I’ve been involved in starting or advising, one thing becomes crystal clear to me: the best names are ones that have a great story buried inside.

It’s often said that a brand is a “vessel waiting to be filled.” In other words, you can call a new product or service anything, and after a while, if your product is successful, that brand will come to mean whatever experience it ends up delivering. While I generally agree with the thesis, I’ve found that having a great story is a very good way to jumpstart a new brand, and a great way to help sell it and keep defining it in the long term.

A few examples. Let’s start with the first great name I had the pleasure of being involved with: Wired. I had nothing to do with naming Wired, that came from Louis Rosetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe. When Louis called me before launch, “Wired” was associated – to my mind anyway – with a book chronicling the life and rather sordid death of John Belushi. Being “wired” meant you had done a lot of drugs, and I wasn’t sure it was a great idea to associate anything with that concept.

But Louis and Jane were certain the brand would take off, mainly because they were plugged into a small but growing culture of digital counterculturalists who had appropriated the word to mean “connected to the digital revolution.”

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