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

Half of all new product revenues come from the introduction and early stages of a product’s life cycle.   But what about brands?  Can you create a whole new life cycle by re-launching your brand online?

Sure you can.  In fact, brand managers have been working overtime on finding the best ways to keep their brands at your fingertips .  Here are some of the best online brand building tools and how you can use them to build a powerful brand presence online. As a small business, you have a lot of the same online marketing tools available to you as the big companies.

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What does every business have in common? A brand. It might not be the same for everyone, but it is a strategy they all have to employ at some point. Essentially, it will represent every positive, or potentially negative, thought a customer will have about your company.

Of course no business would want their brand to give people a negative impression. But, what do they want it to say? That’s a question that you need to ask yourself. The actual answer will depend on you.

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No matter what you want to call it — direct mail, junk mail, circulars, ads, or spam — they all share the same purpose: to motivate you to buy from them. While a lot of what is out there may actually be junk, a savvy direct marketer inspires the recipient to read their ad.

Unlike your brand, which will tell the customer what to think, your marketing strategy must tell them what to do. Before you can effectively do that, you need to know how.

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Last week, I shared a few ideas for original and creative marketing materials. Here are some more ideas for high-impact ways to connect with your customers.

Interactive Business Cards
Time: 10 min
Cost: $9.99 for design, $13.98/100 + shipping
Customer Interaction and Playing with Your Business Card: Priceless

After brainstorming, one of my clients came up with the visual analogy of a Rubik’s Cube.

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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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