Signs That It May Be Time to Change Your Brand

As you enter the world of business, you're told time and again that your brand is essentially everything. It's the first encounter that most customers have with your organization and it's your connection to those people, particularly when it comes to establishing the type of meaningful and long-lasting relationship you need to survive. While all of this and more is definitely true, there is one important thing that your brand is NOT: immortal.

Changing your brand may be a difficult decision, but sometimes it is the best chance you have to re-organize your priorities and start anew. There are a few key warning signs that it may be time to change your brand that you should always be on the lookout for.

Time Has Passed and Passed... and Passed...

A lot can happen in a decade. Since 2005 alone, the world saw the rise of the smartphone, the fall (and arguable recovery) of desktop computing, the "death" of physical media and more. If the one thing that you CAN'T say about the last ten years is, "I've updated by brand at least once, preferably twice during this period of time," then you're looking at a clear-cut sign that it's time for a change.

So much happens in a decade that without a brand refresh, you run the risk of developing a reputation for being old and stale. Even if you know that isn't true, relying on the same logo and marketing approach from President Bush's second term will land you right back there anyway. A brand change or upgrade is a perfect way to start fresh with a bold, new (and most importantly modern) voice.

Your Target Audience is Changing

At some point, any successful business that has operated for an appreciable amount of time needs to deal with a target audience that "ages out" of what attracted them to their business in the first place. If you think of the most successful brands in history, be it Pepsi or Microsoft or something in between, they've all had to deal with the same issue at some point in their history.

If despite your best marketing efforts your once steady sales have started to stagnate, or if you just can't seem to rile up your audience the way you once did no matter what you try, it may be time to rethink your brand and who it is geared towards. Remember that a 30-year-old in 2015, and a 30-year-old in 1965, represent two completely different things and barely resemble one another. If your core audience has gone away, a dramatic change to your brand (but adherence to the values you established in the first place) is a great way to attract the attention of a whole new crop of people in one bold and striking move.

Changing Your Brand Doesn't Mean Changing Your Vision

These are just a few of the many signs that it may be time to change your brand. Above all else, it's important to remember that a brand realignment is not an admission of guilt that something went wrong, or defeat in terms of your business in general. Instead, it's an opportunity. It's a chance to throw out the old and rise from the ashes like the phoenix, ready to take a new generation of your target audience by storm and impact their lives with your products or services in a much more organic and impacting way.

Mistakes as Vehicles to Success

Accidents and mistakes have given us many advantages that otherwise might have never come about. In fact, experimental accidents have been responsible for many of our scientific and medical advances over the past few centuries. The business world has also learned to take mistakes and failures to heart as learning experiences rather than obstacles. Our mistakes can be viewed as stepping stones to future successes.

Famous singer/song writer Janis Ian recently documented in a blog post several of the mistakes she has made over the years. Describing herself as prone to accidents "in the minefield of life," she revealed some whopping errors. Three noteworthy examples are refusing the role eventually played by Rhea Pearlman in the hit TV series Cheers, passing on performing at Woodstock, and declining to write the musical score for the blockbuster film, The Graduate.

These were definite mistakes, to be sure. But as serious as these now obvious blunders were, Janis Ian is still doing what she loves and making others happy in the process. She is earning a living writing music and performing, and the world is better for this. None of her mistakes in that minefield have kept her down nor kept the world from enjoying her music.

Isaac Newton's mother made a mistake that had the potential of altering the history of science. Young Isaac was pulled out of school to help run the family farm, but he was really no good at this, and his mother recognized it. She also knew that he really wanted to finish his schooling. When she realized that this was a far better fit for her son, she found another way to get the farm running as it should and allowed her son to finish school. The world of science is better because of this woman's mistake being corrected and learned from.

Many stories tell of business successes born after their founders' prior failures. Macy's, the department store chain, is one of the largest such chains in the world, but Rowland H. Macy suffered through multiple business failures before learning enough from them to bring him and his family fame and wealth.

Dave Anderson of Famous Dave's BBQ restaurants was, at one time, a not-so-famous Dave, after experiencing not one, but two business bankruptcies. One of them was as a wholesale florist supplying very large clients like Sears Roebuck. His business grew so rapidly that he failed to keep up with it, and lost the business. But, he learned from his mistakes and personal limitations. Indeed, he describes failure simply as "a learning tool."

Since Dave knew that he loved making food, a restaurant was an obvious choice, and Famous Dave's is the famously successful result, but he did not stop there. Anderson also created the LifeSkills Center for Leadership in Minneapolis, investing over a million dollars to start the program for helping at-risk Native American youth. The program focuses on leadership skills--the same skills Dave learned from his previous mistakes.

As author John C. Maxwell put it in his successful book, Failing Forward: Turning Mistakes into Stepping Stones for Success, your objectives should include this mantra: "Fail early, fail often, and fail forward." Mistakes should become vehicles, not obstacles. Like Janis Ian, despite mistakes you keep on keeping on. Isaac Newton's mother learned that correcting mistakes can create value where none appeared to be. Like Rowland H. Macy and Dave Anderson, you build success on the foundation created by prior failures.

As social activist, composer, and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon put it, “Life’s challenges are not supposed to paralyze you; they’re supposed to help you discover who you are.”

Tips for Mastering Multi-Channel Communications in Your Campaigns

You can essentially boil down the goal of any marketing campaign to one impossibly simple core concept: you're trying to connect to your target audience and communicate a message in the most natural and organic way possible. In today's modern environment, marketers tend to fall into two distinct camps: those who are sticking to the tried-and-true print technique and those who see digital as the way of the future. The fact of the matter is that these concepts do not have to be mutually exclusive. Learning how to take all of your available options and use them in tandem with one another is a large part of what multi-channel communications are all about.

Let the Customer Discover Your Message on Their Own Terms

For an example of effective multi-channel communication in action, consider what happens after you send out a print item to a customer using direct mail. Logic dictates that you should wait a week or two and send a follow-up message, right? As you've already established contact, that follow-up doesn't have to come in the form of another mailer sent to the customer's mailbox. It can easily be an e-mail sent to the address for that customer you have on file. Suddenly, you've used not one, but two, different channels effectively, allowing the customer a full range of options regarding how and why they respond and continue their journey.

That may be simplifying the situation a bit, but the benefit to the consumer of getting full control over how they're receiving and responding to your message is what multi-channel communications are all about.

Better Campaigns Mean Better Results

In order to master multi-channel marketing and really put it to good use for your organization, you'll need to keep a few key things in mind. For starters, you'll need to establish a single, unified view of your customers across all channels. Any available piece of information will need to be collated together, not only so that each channel seems like a natural extension of the next, but so each channel can allow for the deeper level of customization that attracts customers in the first place.

Another factor to consider has to do with your organization's ability to create the most consistent experience possible across all of those channels at the same time. When a customer gets an e-mail, sees a mobile ad, and receives a letter in the mail from your campaign, they all need to feel like they're coming from the same company. One can't be casual, while the other, stuffy and overly professional. Failure to grasp this basic concept can result in your organization coming across as a bit schizophrenic.

You'll also need to develop your own in-house multi-channel platform to help keep track of all of these materials. You'll need things like campaign management software, for example, giving you the ability to execute all aspects of a campaign (including both print and digital materials) all from the same unified workflow. This will also give you a better idea of tweaks that you can be making to your campaign by way of things like predictive and actionable analytics.

Multi-channel communication, in general, just goes to show you that print and digital don't have to be an "either/or" scenario for marketers. By leveraging all of the tools you have available to you instead of playing favorites, you'll put you and your team in a much better position to succeed moving forward.

Backlinks: An Online Handshake

When you speak with SEO professionals, you may hear them talk about the importance of backlinks. Backlinks are when another site links to your site. These links are important because not only do they help drive traffic to your website, but they are a sign to Google that your site provides information that people appreciate and view as worth linking to.

In the beginning of 2015, there was controversy following one of the Google ‘hangouts.’ John Mueller, of Google, seemed to indicate that webmasters should not focus on building backlinks. This took the marketing world by storm, as many people dedicate time and energy to developing a high quality backlink profile.

Careful analysis of the problem, however, demonstrates that this might not have been what Mueller meant. At other Google hangouts in the past, he gave advice about how to appropriately go about building successful and useful backlink profiles. It is now largely agreed by many marketing professionals that Mueller was speaking about avoiding using illicit tactics to build backlinks, such as engaging in, 'I link to you, you link to me’ backlink schemes.

To understand how backlinks should ideally be developed, it can be useful to look at how business is conducted in person.

The Role of a Handshake

Place yourself in a corporate meeting between two important executives. They are sitting at a long table in a professionally furnished conference room. They sit at opposite sides, each with a team of assistants taking notes of the meeting and making sure that the bosses are always equipped with a glass of ice water.

The two hash out their ideas. They want to see if their information aligns and if they believe they can work with each other. No executive wants to run the risk of doing business with someone who would ruin their reputation. Before any deals are struck, they want to make sure that this is a professional with whom they want to have their name publicly associated with.

After a long conversation, they both stand up.

“Well, I suppose we are in agreement,” says one.

“Yes. I will have my team get started on the contract right away,” says the other.

They reach out and they shake hands-- and now everyone in the room knows that they will be willing to vouch for the other.

The Role of the Backlink

The handshake is a backlink. When one site links to another, they are publicly vouching for the content on that page. They have reviewed the information and found it to be in line with what they believe about the topic at hand. They trust that when they send their page visitors to that website, the users will be able to obtain useful information that will help them answer their questions.

Backlinks should not be something that you ever have to trick the other website into doing. It is not supposed to be the end goal of SEO. Instead, backlinks should be viewed as a part of a larger SEO strategy that involves creating high quality content that people are interested in reading and find helpful.

That does not mean you cannot ask for backlinks. If you find a website that aligns with your intended audience and you think your content would be helpful, there is nothing wrong with asking for a link, but it should always be done upfront and honestly.

You can build backlinks by writing guest posts or thought-leadership pieces for other websites. You should also be sharing your content on social media to increase exposure and build more backlinks.

Google, and its algorithm, want to keep an eye out for backlinks that come from low quality sites or always seem to come from the same types of sites. They want to make sure that the backlinks are diversified and gained honestly. If a poor site links to you and you do not want the backlink counting against you, then you can always disavow it to let Google know that you want no part of that link.

When it comes to building backlinks, remember to always build them honestly and with the end user in mind. Just like a handshake in business, it should be viewed as a public vouching for the other site. When you view it in that context, it will be easier to understand the role of backlinks in the online web community.

Finding Your Way in School and in Business

Imagine for a moment you're the new kid at school. You arrive on the first day and take a few deep breaths before entering. Around you, kids are happily chatting and comparing notes from their summer breaks. From the rockers to the geeks, each and every group seeks to have a strong representation at the school. Each social group seems to have established its own social hierarchy, and everyone knows exactly where they fit and what role they play within the school community.

As the new student, you nervously look at your schedule and make your way to your first class. It's clear to you that you will have to find your own place of belonging within the already saturated student society. That's never an easy task for new students.

Fortunately, you've been the new kid before, and you know the first step to finding your place is forming a few connections. You need to look for ways to demonstrate how you're a worthwhile friend for people to have. You head into that first class with your head held high, confident you'll be able to find new friends.

What It Means To Be A New Business

If you've ever experienced the above scenario, then you know just how stressful it can be. Once you've left school, you might even think you'll never have to worry about finding your place again, but that would be untrue. New business owners must go through a similar process whenever they look to establish a new business.

A new business, like the new kid, is one that people are unfamiliar with, and therefore are reluctant to trust. You have not yet shown your value to anyone, so people are unsure about whether or not they should hang out with you.

Finding Your Way

The new student in the above story knew there were two key parts to becoming comfortable at the new school. First, connections with some other students had to be made. This typically involves getting to know a peer well enough that they're willing to invite you back to hang out with the rest of the group. The second key part was proving you're a fun person to hang out with and that you belong in that particular social group.

As a new business owner, you'll also need to establish connections with other professionals. Networking is a critical component to becoming secure. These connections will be fantastic for providing referrals to your company, coordinating different projects, or generating new business directly by buying from you. New connections are your link to the established industry marketplace.

Just as the new student needed to prove their worth, you'll also need to demonstrate how your products and services add value for your customers. You must have something to show that can intrigue people and encourage them to learn more about you. You might offer service to a new niche, better prices, a revolutionary product, or something else, but you must be able to show worth and value to get your foot in the door.

Being an entrepreneur is never easy. Finding your way when you first open your doors might be the hardest step. Similar to the new kid in a new school, you have to learn where you belong within your industry and establish yourself as a company worth your customers' time. If you want to improve your brand reach with a marketing campaign, contact us today to get started.

The Quest for Quality Content in the Marketing World: Why the Need Isn't Going Away and is Only Getting Bigger

If you have any type of Internet presence for your business at all, the chances are high you're always searching for relevant, high-quality content to put out into the world on a regular basis. Quality content accomplishes a number of different goals. It allows you to maintain an active presence on the Web, to engage with your target audience, and to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry. It also happens to be incredibly important for reasons that go above and beyond those -- and will only get more and more integral to your strategy as time goes on.

The Google of it All

One of the major reasons why high-quality content is so important to your website, your blog, or your social media presence has to do with Google. Google is essentially the "be all, end all" way of getting recognized by your target audience in the digital age. If your blog appears near the top of the search results for relevant keywords, you can expect a huge boost in visitors (and ultimately revenue) as a result. Because of all this, quality content is important for one simple reason: Google thinks it is.

How High Quality Content Ultimately Benefits You

Even going above and beyond website traffic, the quest for quality content is one that ultimately benefits your business in a wide range of different ways. For starters, it forces you to stop thinking of your website visitors as users and to start thinking of them as real people. This is a great approach to have, as it puts you in a better position to connect with them in a meaningful way and to form a meaningful, loyal bond in return.

Secondly, striving to generate high-quality content online can be a great mentality to take with you into the offline world, too. If you use the same practices when generating offline content that you do for your online content -- an emphasis on readable, relevant, and interesting materials -- you can form the same meaningful connection with those you're targeting via direct mail and other materials as you do with Internet users.

Ultimately, however, the quest for high-quality content means one thing: everybody wins. You aren't "faking your way" into the position of a thought leader in your industry. You aren't "tricking" your customers into thinking you know more than you really do.

You ARE a thought leader in the industry and you ARE a voice to be listened to. Google and similar companies that emphasize high-quality content are essentially performing the biggest magic trick of all -- they're slowly forcing businesses in all industries to become better at what they do on a daily basis. When you look at it from that perspective, it's a position that's certainly hard to argue with.

Measure Performance and See Success

George loves fantasy football. He began playing a few years ago while still in college and has continued throughout the beginning of his professional career. Fantasy football serves as a fantastic escape for him -- a great way to relax and dive into the sport he's loved since childhood. It's also a great way to bond with many of his colleagues, since there's a football league right in his office. The group spends many lunch breaks together, studying the latest football stats from the weekend's games and determining how those stats will impact their own teams.

If you were to ask George what the secret is to a successful fantasy football season, he would answer, "statistics." You need to have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each player. You can use this understanding to see how performance metrics can dictate how the fantasy team performs. After players perform in real games, their every move is broken down and analyzed to determine how they would have performed according to the setups of the fantasy team. Performance metrics are an incredibly important aspect of any fantasy team.

If you've ever participated in a fantasy team, you've also been exposed to the importance of statistics and performance metrics. This fun game can provide you with incredible insight you can use to improve your marketing efforts. Here are just a few lessons you can learn from fantasy sports teams that can be transferred to marketing.

Performance Metrics are Everything

As any sports fan knows, performance metrics are continuously analyzed for every athlete. Whether batting averages, average distances thrown, or the typical number of points scored, the actions of every player are regularly scrutinized.

In marketing, performance metrics are equally important. While it can be tempting to run marketing campaigns based solely on best practices -- and best guesses -- these types of campaigns will have limited value for your brand. To be successful, a campaign must be perpetually monitored to see how well the different aspects are performing.

Performance Metrics Should Be Used to Guide Decisions

On the sports field, coaches will use statistics about players to form their starting lineup and opening plays for the next game. In football, for example, it's common for coaches (and players) to study film of their upcoming opposition to determine the weaknesses they can exploit in the other team. Coaches will also use the statistics of their own team to see who's at the top of their game and who needs to sit the game out in an effort to create the optimal lineup.

In marketing, you should regularly make adjustments and tweak your marketing efforts to reflect what your performance metrics tell you. If the metrics tell you your direct mail campaign or your email campaign is not having the desired impact, you need to examine why that may be and what you can do to better reach the intended demographic. By perpetually measuring the success of your campaigns, you'll be able to see how well your changes perform and continue to refine your campaign. This will help you avoid spending unnecessary money on unsuccessful campaigns, while also better reaching your intended audience to bring in more customers.

As anyone who loves fantasy football (or any other fantasy sport) knows, statistics and performance metrics are critical for developing a successful team. This lesson also translates well to marketing, where perpetually measuring customer behavior will help you refine your efforts and boost your bottom line.