Every Business Needs Brand Management

We all have a brand, and manage our market’s perception of it wherever we can. Our problem has always been reach – finding prospects and delivering our messages to them. Brand Management has been the preserve of the biggest businesses. The costs of PR and advertising agencies, and print and TV media, put the concept out of reach for most smaller businesses.

Publicising products became a lot simpler when web sites came along, but it was still expensive. Designers, html programmers, search engine optimisers all did very well out of the rush for businesses to have their own sites. Building a site was a one off project, and cost tens of thousands.

And the typical 5 page site didn’t do much of a job for brand management. It’s like a brochure, with little room for the buyer to select information. It tends to be fixed in time, and dates quickly. Perhaps more importantly it’s one way communication. There’s no conversation.

Every business should have a blog – for publishing.

That’s why we’ve seen an explosion in the number of blogs andmicroblogging – Twitter. These two technologies offer every small business the chance to work at their own brand management. Now, regardless of location, or budget, or special skills. small business owners can find and engage with new customers. And with their own stories, explain the value of their brand, announce their news and get feedback from the market.

Typical sites are sterile, fixed and limited. Blogs are constantly changing, infinitely variable and engaging. They’re full of opinion, not marketing speak. They enable conversation, in comments. They explain the context in which products and solutions work. They’re perfect for descriptions and discussion of particular issues. and ways they’re addressed

Search engines just love blogs, and buyers looking for products and services start with Search engines. If we want Search engines to help customers find us, we have to provide what they want. They need answers as closely matching the search query as possible. It’s all about long tail search queries – phrases comprising a primary keyword and context. For example nobody asks Google to search for “selling”. More likely they’ll ask for “selling enterprise software”

Blogs are the perfect vehicle for brand management with current insight easily building on what went before. We can explain our brand in a context our prospects relate to – content led selling, and we can do it ourselves. We don’t need to have a site built – just use on of the free ones. We can write our own content, keeping our messages current and relevant. We can link to other blogs. We can Infotain – combining information with entertainment in today’s fundamental sales strategy, Infotainment.

Every business needs a Twitter account – for engaging.

Twitter offers us the chance to find people interested in what we do, send them messages and listen to what they’re saying. We can use Twitter for real time announcements, attracting visitors to our blog. We can use it for PR and advertising.

Every business needs Thesis, Scribe and Indux.

Just how we do our brand management is a matter of personal choice – that’s all part of the brand. Professional, Relaxed, Risque – that’s up to us.

But there are a few services which can help us reduce costs and avoid the pitfalls. Every business, even those with in-house teams should consider:

• Thesis – the #1 Wordpress theme, fully optimised for search engine accessibility, and with lots of tools for the user to customise the look and feel. There is some technical knowledge required but nothing that can’t be learned in a couple of hours.
• Scribe – We’ll write our articles optimised to be read by people, quite correctly, but we also need to make sure the Search engines can read and understand the content. Scribe checks what we’ve written, evaluates it for SEO and makes recommendations on how to optimise it for Search.
• Indux- optimises our Twitter community, finding new contacts based on keyword search and following/unfollowing for us, making sure we stay within Mr. Twitter’s rules.

These services don’t do anything we can’t do in a dozen different ways, but they do make the whole effort simpler, exploiting what’s possible without missing a trick.

We’re affiliates for all three – see the banners in the sidebar – and can offer support and training to help you get there faster.