Branding is a balancing act

All to often companies find themselves with a brilliant strategy – on paper at least. When they try to implement the strategy, they run into obstacles such as channels, partners, technology, infrastructure, competition, or lack of resources. The reverse is also true. Companies can spend so much time executing that they lose sight of the business objective. They might end up with an awesome website, but no real results.

Effective brands, that is, brands that deliver on their promise and help companies sell more stuff, are those that find the right balance between strategy and tactics, between images and words, between effect and affect. Every brand is made up of several different components: visuals, messages, voice, and personality, for example. Each of these is integrated into specific deliverables like a company logo or tagline or photographic style. The trick is to find the right combination and then apply them consistently throughout everything you do.

It starts with strategy – how will you achieve your objectives? Depending on your brand promise some strategies are going to be more effective than others. For example, you probably won’t see Nascar investing in “environmentally-friendly” campaigns; you would expect it from Starbucks. There are lots of different ways to achieve your objectives. Make sure that your strategies align with your brand promise and that you can actually implement them. This is what I call the “duh” test. Run the strategies by a colleague, friend or spouse and see what they think. If they ask you a question and your reaction is “duh”…you might want to rethink the strategy.

Next come the tactics – what exactly will you do to implement the strategy? If your strategy was to grow your market share by expanding into new markets, a tactic might be to partner with a complementary brand in the new market to jump start your brand recognition. This might require a joint email campaign, billboards and local ads on radio and TV. The key is to align the tactics with the strategy so that everything is in support of the brand. Otherwise, you end with a lot of random activities – all of them are probably pretty cool on their own – but together they don’t deliver.

To be valuable, strategy must be practical, and tactics must be integrated. With the right balance of strategy and tactics, your brand will grow and so will your business.

What to do?

Usually, when it comes to marketing, the biggest challenge most of us have isn’t a lack of ideas. In fact, ideas sometimes seem to come flying at us from all directions.  The biggest challenge is selecting the most effective things to do based on what your customers want, what you like to do and what will help you achieve your objectives.

The list of marketing activities you can invest in is huge, and seems to get bigger everyday as new things like Twitter, video blogs, and I-don’t-even-know-what appear out of nowhere. The big thing right now seems to be Twitter and social media in general.  What I want to help you do is to prioritize them.   Not everyone needs to be on Twitter.  Not everyone needs to write a book.  Not everyone needs to deliver keynote speeches.  You need to figure out what YOU need to be doing to 1)  reach your target audience, 2) achieve your objectives, and 3) enjoy yourself while doing it.

Try this little exercise:  List off the top of your head 5 things you would like to do to market your business that you are not doing today. It could be doing an Adwords campaign with Google, or setting up a Twitter or FaceBook account.  It could be creating a video to describe your business and post it to YouTube and your website.  Submitting articles to blogs, commenting on blogs in your field, the list can go on and on.

Now, ask yourself these questions:red question mark

1.  Do your customers use these things – are they on FaceBook or LinkedIn?  Do they even read blogs?  If so, which ones?

2.  Do you like doing these things?  If you don’t like to write, then saying you’re going to write articles and submit them isn’t going to be very much fun for you, and consequently you probably won’t do it.

3.  Do these things help you achieve your objectives?  If most of your business comes from referrals and word of mouth, then investing in search engine optimization for your website, might not be the most important thing for you to do.

What you’re going to find is that not all of them work.  Some might work for your customers, but you hate doing it. Others might help you achieve your objectives but your customers don’t like them.  This is how you prioritize your marketing activities and get down to the critical few things you need to do to attract the right kind of customers.  The things you need to do, you like to do and will move you towards your goal.  Evaluate the different activities you COULD do and decide what you SHOULD do.

Do what you enjoy

I want you to think about the things that you’re good at and that you enjoy doing.  Life is too short to spend your time doing things you don’t like and you’re not good at.  Plus, if you don’t like it, you’re probably not going to do it anyway.  If you’re trying to build a business by doing stuff you don’t like, then you can’t really be enjoying it.  If you’re not enjoying it, you gotta ask yourself what can you do differently?  Here’s how you figure it out…confidence

I want you to write down the first thing that comes to mind when you read this question:

“Remember a time when you felt a sense of accomplishment and pride in a job well done.  What was it?”

Write it down.  Now,  think about times in your life when you had this same feeling – a sense of confidence, accomplishment and pride.  Go way back…to school, university, when you first started out in business, personal and professional things, it doesn’t matter.  Write these things down. Now go thru them and figure out what they all have in common.  This is a fun way of figuring out what you really like doing.  Because chances are if you like doing something, you will be successful at it.

Know what you want to do

If you want to be successful and build your business, you need to know what you’re trying to exclamation pointaccomplish.  The simple fact is, you need to have a defined goal in order to be successful.  We have all read the research and heard the studies that prove, people with written goals are significantly more likely to achieve them than those who don’t.  So, that’s where we start.  This is the single most important thing you can do to help yourself build your business.

It’s like building a house – if you don’t have a vision of what the house will look like, if you don’t have the construction plans for how to build the house – all you have is a big pile wood and nails.  But if you know what the house looks like….then you can build it.  Same with your business.

Here are some examples of business objectives you might be considering:
→    Get more repeat business?
→    Increase your referral business?
→    Charge higher fees?
→    Launch new product or service offering?
→    Generate passive revenue?

Be honest with yourself on this one – your business goals need to be specific and have some time element built in.  For example, Increase my referral business by 25% in Q1.  OR Increase my average fees by 25% by Q2.

More often than not, when I ask business owners what their business goals are they say 1 of 2 things:  1)  be profitable or 2) drive traffic to my website.  These aren’t business objective.  Being profitable is the reason for existence of a business – the question is how profitable, by when.   Be specific so you know if you have been successful.  Driving traffic to your website is the goal for a marketing campaign, not your business objective. So what if you increase traffic to your website using social media?  What do you do with it?  Do you track sales leads?  Do you get affiliate fees?  Do you convert it to sales?

Once you know your objective, write it down.  It doesn’t have to be fancy.  Hand written notes on a piece of paper is fine.  I have my business objectives taped to the wall above my desk.  I look at it everyday.  It keeps me focused and helps me make decisions when I’m prioritizing my time, my investments, my energy.

Planners, Doers and Social Media

After much observation and questioning, I have come to classify people into two groups: Planners and Doers. This may seem a stereotype, and it probably is, but bear with me.  Most people I talk to can definitely place themselves into either one camp or the other.

Let’s start with The Planners: You know these folks. They think, analyze, request more data and then reassess their assessment. Then something changes – Oh no! After a moment of panic and deep breathing, they get to work evaluating their contingencies and updating the plan.  These folks plan and plan and plan but actually don’t accomplish very much. Planners are important and we need them. Without them the Doers would be running around like chickens with their heads cut off! Remember the hit series Friends? The character Monica, played by Courtney Cox, was the epitome of a Planner. She had her life planned out from the time she was 12 years old. Not only did she plan her life, but her friends’ lives as well. Everyone loved Monica because she was practical and you could always count on her to “have a plan.”

Now let’s look at The Doers: These folks, on the other hand, must be doing something. Anything. It doesn’t matter what they do as long as they are “moving the needle” and “making progress.” Because of their energy, others jump on the bandwagon and everyone starts doing things. The issue is whether the Doers are doing the right things. Back to the Friends example – Phoebe, as opposed to Monica was the quintessential Doer. She did whatever came to mind, whenever it came to mind. Everyone loved Phoebe because she was spontaneous and full of energy.

The point is, when it’s your business, you need to be both a Planner and a Doer.  You get to walk the tightrope between both.  And that’s the biggest challenge – balancing between strategy and tactics, planning and doing.  When we talk about social media most of the discussion is centered on whether you have a FaceBook page, a fan page or a Twitter account.  I’m here to tell you that it almost doesn’t matter.

How do you know if you need a FaceBook page or a LinkedIn profile or FriendFeed if you haven’t decided what your ultimate goal is?  If we don’t start there, you will waste a lot of time and energy focusing on the wrong things – things that don’t support your goals, or things you simply can’t, or shouldn’t execute.