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

A good brand is not simply a great logo, or a beautiful brochure, or a cool website. The essence of a good brand is a great customer experience.

My favorite example of a company with a great customer experience—aside from Apple—is Threadless, an online T-shirt store. The T-shirts are fashionable and well-made. But more importantly, the customer experience is memorable, enjoyable, and delightful.

Fostering great customer experiences is much harder to do than creating beautifully-designed marketing materials. Here’s what you can learn from Threadless:

1. Show customers you actually listen
Instead of an after-thought, customer feedback is the backbone of Threadless.

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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’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: Whether your business is just launching or has been in the black for years, your brand is — or should be — as unique as you are. Your “story” is often the reason customers decide to spend money with you.

The expertise, strategy and tips shared right here in the DIY Small Business Marketing Guide will help you develop and evolve the compelling and unique story of your business — whether that brand story is a logo, a brochure, your company letterhead, a website, or all of these and more. I want to help you start sharing that story — without breaking the bank. And it starts with three easy steps.

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A funny thing happened on the way to social media tools like Twitter becoming so popular. More and more consumers started to find that one of the best ways to get help about how to use the products and services they had purchased was to ask other users who happened to be online.  (People have done this for some time in forums, but social networks have a more open and public feel.)

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Pinkberry frozen yogurt has been spotted in the hands of famous people from Paris Hilton to Mike Tyson; it’s appeared in television shows like “Saturday Night Live” and within celebrity gossip magazines like Us Weekly and People. How did a frozen yogurt company achieve such pop culture street cred in such a short span of time? Rockstar branding.

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