Take a moment to reflect about your company, produce or service…
What makes it unique? What feature really stands out? More importantly, is that feature share-worthy? Once you have answers to these questions, then you’re on your way to pinpointing your company’s brand factor.
Identifying Your Brand Factor
Think of your brand factor as your company’s “WOW factor.” The best way to determine where your company shines is to ask your customers, “How am I different from my competitors?” You may be surprised by the answers. For example, you might think that it’s your product that “wows” the marketplace, but feedback may reveal it actually is your customer service that makes the positive impact.
Reality Check
If you cannot identify your company’s brand factor (and your customers can’t, either), the reason may be simple: you don’t have one. Without a brand factor you can’t even begin to think about building your brand. Consumers neither care for, nor reward, mediocrity.
Good companies have one brand factor, great companies have several.
Spreading the Word
Once you identify your company’s standout feature(s), you will need to focus your attention on making it “top of mind” in your market. The way to do this is to get the word out.
Whatever your strategy to get the word out, your brand factor message should permeate every aspect of your corporate identity, marketing plans, employee training, social media, website and print. It needs to become the first impression your company makes to the consumer. Therefore, your materials must be positive, personal, and relatable.
Traditional Methods
Make a list of all the ways to communicate your unique offering to the consumer. Many of the traditional ways, like print advertising, radio and television are still very effective methods.
Newer Methods
For certain products or services, other tools like websites, social media platforms, and guerilla marketing may be more effective because they are variants of my favorite suite of marketing tools: Personal Marketing.
Making Personal Connections – Face to Face and Online
In all of your business dealings you must strive to make the impersonal, personal. Potential customers must be able to see through the corporate veil of your organization into the human side of your business. They want to know that you are local individuals with shared values that have a stake in making your area a better place to live.
Begin thinking about your offering as more customer experience than customer transaction. Building your brand cannot be accomplished in a mercenary fashion. You need to connect with your customers in a truly authentic way.
A good way to spread a personal message is with social media. Social media, or personal marking-on-steroids, as I think of it, will happen whether you participate or not. It’s more than word-of-mouth advertising with all its positive implications; it’s also negative word of mouth publicity with all its negative ramifications. And this negative social energy can come from any direction: dissatisfied customers, disillusioned employees, even perturbed vendors. More than ever, you must strive to make every business interaction memorable…in a positive way.
Social media has become so critical to brand building that you should have a full-time employee – or a company that specializes in social media management – devoted to it because to make social media work in your favor, you need to have someone with a finger on the pulse. Constantly monitor cyber feedback to determine how your message is being received. A social media manager must seek out and refresh positive testimonials, on both your website and on the many social media platforms, responding immediately to any negative comments. Track the chatter because protecting your online reputation is key to securing your brand factor.
Proceed With Caution
A word of caution about social media: It may only seem effortless in its ability to build positive impressions about your company, but it can be lethal as a reputation-destroying tool. What’s more – though quickly destructive, it is slowly productive as a brand building and reputation repair tool, and most companies tend to overweigh its positive attributes. When devising your offensive brand strategy you will also want to develop a defensive strategy in case things go wrong online, putting your brand factor in danger.
To make social media work, your focus should be on broadcasting the positive while at the same time, mitigating the negative. Your overarching strategy should be to create a free flowing channel within the full spectrum of social media channels that allow your brand factor to pollinate organically along the open network, creating a positive feedback loop, while simultaneously filtering out negative feedback by contacting the authors of negative comments and asking them to remove their postings (or re-post) if you satisfy their criticism and concerns.
The Last Step
Once you identify your brand factor and develop it as the centerpiece of your brand strategy, stick with it. Be consistent in your message and think long term. It can take years, but the momentum that accompanies a well-developed brand is more than worth the effort.
Freddie Wehbe
Local Franchise Owner Cell:352.284.3733 F:352.337.0525 www.Gatordominos.com
Take advantage of some of the online tools designed to monitor and protect your reputation. Tools like Trackur, which will report back to you when sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube “talk” about you; and TweetBeep which tracks Twitter conversations that mention you, your products, and your company, then reports back with hourly updates.