Building Your Brand

Let’s start with the concept of carving out a new niche for your product or service. Building a brand strategy will help to give a solid message to offer to potential clients. This branded set of marketing materials includes: a tagline, creating a nimble search engine friendly (SEO) website, downloadable PDF flyers, printed materials, and a capability statement to tell your story.

Your Tagline: Spend the time to write down your talking points so that you begin to start telling the same message when you meet with people in person or when you talk with them on the phone. From these talking points think of a good catch phrase (of no more than 8 words) that you can add as a tag line under your logo and as a part of your electronic signature. You can also turn the printed talking points in audio or video talking points as well.

This tag line becomes a catch phrase that speaks to your product and capability. For example: my company creates online training. Because elearning is considered a just-in-time solution to get training out there quickly instead of the traditional classroom training approach.

For example: when choosing a catch phrase I decided upon: “training at the speed of business”. This tag line served my company well. Recently this year, there has been a push to become more environmental so since online training reduces the need for travel, my new company tag line was updated to: “go green with online training”.

Your SEO friendly website: I am a proponent of creating websites using WordPress. Why? A WordPress blog website is easy to create, update and maintain. But more important, WordPress blogs are super search engine friendly simply in their structure. I do not use WordPress sites as the traditional blogger site, but configure it as a more traditional website with static pages enhanced with blog postings.

What does this mean to you? Your website is able to move up the search engine standings quickly. Adding informational posts regularly to your website enhances your website and encourages search engines to visit it more frequently, meaning better rankings in Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Downloadable PDF flyers and printed materials: Take time to create materials that can be delivered to clients in soft copy (PDF) and hard copy printed versions. I recommend and use an online printing service to brand all of my materials in one look, color and font selection.

Capability Statement: Every company needs a capability statement or a company resume. This document is a quick review of your company qualifications, previous work, certifications, partners, philosophy and contact information in a concise format.