Posts Tagged ‘Marketing’


Posted on June 24, 2010 - by

How To Get Your Customers to Have Faith in Your Brand

How To Get Your Customers to Have Faith in Your Brand

Customers follow or ‘unfollow’ brands because of their experience with them. They follow brands because of their faith in that brand. Because they know what they will always be getting from that brand. Because that brand has a unique spot that serves the industry in which they find themselves.

Apple is followed because of their revolutionary and innovative products. Mercedes is followed because customers are assured of luxury and quality engineering. CNN is followed because they are first in news. The list of unique, remarkable brands goes on and on.

Now let’s shift focus to you. What makes your brand unique? Before people will follow your brand, you need to show them something they can have faith in. Something that is difficult to find in your competitor’s products. Something that will stand for your brand; be your brand’s definition.

There are a few ways you can achieve this. One way is to be unique in a remarkable way. Creating a remarkably unique brand image helps you dodge most of the competition. Facebook understood this when they started. They didn’t want to be just another social network, they wanted to be more and they succeeded.

There are millions of businesses trying to copy each other. The sad thing is, most of them die fast. Most become bankrupt because they spend lots of money to advertise their ‘common’ products; products just like the others. This is no way to win. Something has to be different about you.

Building a remarkable brand takes lots of creativity and innovation. Counterfeiters know this, that’s why they spend money producing product look-alikes instead of investing that same money into their own product ideas.

If you want to run a ‘monopoly’ in today’s marketplace, build a unique brand. If you can get your customers to have faith in your brand’s attributes, you have a ‘monopoly’. Apple is running a ‘monopoly’ in their marketplace because they are remarkably unique in everything they do. What can you do to make your business a ‘monopoly’?

The second way you can build a faithful customer base is to treat all customers equally. Treat the $1 item buyers the same way as $1,000 item buyers. When you do this, people become more attached to you and your business will grow. A $1 item buyer could bring you a $1,000 item buyer through word of mouth so why don’t you treat them equally eh?

The third way you can bring in faithful customers is to be consistent at what you are best known for.  If you are remarkable, stay remarkable. Start with innovation and continue with innovation. Complacency is not accepted in business because your customers and competitors are watching you. In fact, your customers are watching you and your competitors at the same time. Once they notice you have stopped evolving, they will move on to the other company that has evolved.

Consistency builds faith.

How do you know if you have faithful customers?

Your customers have the best answer to this question. They don’t have to tell you in words. Their actions are there to assess yourself.

5 ways you can tell if you have faithful customers are:

  • They refer other customers to you
  • They give you feedback about your products
  • They buy from you for the second time…third and fourth times …again and again.
  • They defend your brand when people spread negative rumors about it.
  • They give you a second chance when you flop. Please Note: Second chances are mostly given to brands that have been consistent at something for a long time and then all of a sudden, slack a bit.

If your customers do this for you, then you earned their trust.

It doesn’t matter if you agree with me or not but your customers are your most valuable assets. Like all your other assets, you need to get them to work for you. You need to understand them in order to leverage them. Don’t focus all your efforts on advertising. Focus a big chunk of your efforts on your building customer relationships too. If you’re in business for the money, you lose focus on the customer but if you decide to be in business for the customer, you build a better business.


Posted on June 16, 2010 - by

How to Add a Unique Voice to Your Brand: 14 Tips and Ideas to Help You Win

How to Add a Unique Voice to Your Brand: 14 Tips and Ideas to Help You Win

Differentiating your brand from other brands can be a daunting activity these days. This is because of the many other brands that are also out there competing for attention from the same audience you need.

In this article, we will not be looking at the very basics of brand recognition: logo and brand colors. What I’ll be sharing with you are tips that will give your brand a unique image and the unique voice it needs to speak to its audience. I am using the word “unique” because every brand has a voice so if I use just “voice” it will sound too regular. You don’t want a regular brand. That sucks.

When your brand has a unique voice, every message it sends out is heard by its audience; the right audience. Your audience will then send out your message to other people who may already be involved in your brand’s conversations or may be total strangers to your brand.

All-in-all, it is essential to give your brand a voice that can be differentiated from the masses.

Let’s look at the ideas you can use to boost your brand.

1. Use a Powerful USP: I am not going to assume you already know what a USP is, so I’m going to define it. A USP is the abbreviation for Unique Selling Proposition, which is a feature of a product or brand that makes it different from other products or brands it competes with. To form a strong brand, you will need a powerful USP that people will want to put to test. For example, a pizza delivery service may have, “we deliver in 30 minutes” as their USP. If you have a pizza delivery service and you think you can deliver in 20 minutes within a certain radius, use “we deliver in 20 minutes within ‘x’ miles” as your USP. Use USPs that sound better than your competitors’ USPs and you will be one step toward winning.

Caution: Be sure you can guarantee that you can deliver on your USPs promise before you put it out in public. If you don’t do this and you keep on breaking your promises, you will fail fast.

2.Use a Mascot: Mascots are great brand building assets. The Santa Clause we know today was a mascot for a Coca-cola X’mas campaign. The campaign was so successful that the image of the mascot spread across borders and the jolly mascot in the red and white suit is what so many people around the world refer to as Santa Clause or Father Christmas in some countries. It’s a shame so many people don’t know about where the new Santa Clause image (as we know it today) came from. You can also create a mascot that will spread your brand’s voice across borders.

3. Create a Tradition: Start a brand tradition. Some businesses have a freebie day as their tradition. They give out free stuffs only on those days. This gets people to spread the word out to their friends. You can choose to do certain things on certain days; on your brand’s birthday, or on Christmas day or Independence day. It could be a once in a month, once a week or once in a year tradition. It could also be a full day or half day event. Choose a day and do something remarkable on that day. Some ideas: give your biggest discounts on those days, host customer meetups on those days only.

4. Customer Participation: Host online and offline meetups for your customers. Get them involved in competitions. Choose brand evangelists from them. They own your brand on the internet now so give them a chance to be part of it. When you do great things for your customers, they will do greater things for you. Reciprocity, remember?

Below is a video of a Mini Cooper meetup. Mini Cooper owners met to showcase their cars and engage in Mini conversations. Can you imagine the benefits? Watch the video and see what I mean.

5. Staff Participation: You and your staff need to participate in customer meetups, your business’ online communities and industry events. Wear T-shirts with your brand’s identity to events that don’t have a dress code attached to the invitation. If you have a mascot, you can even take it along.

6. Practice Barter: There might be an area in your business that itches constantly. Get another business to scratch that itch so that you scratch theirs. Every business has an itch. If you are great at accounting and awful at marketing, marketing is your itch. There are businesses that also have accounting as their itches but that are great at marketing. If there is a situation like this, you can exchange your “itch scratching” services instead of paying for them. You can then ask the other business to list you as their partner on their website or other places both of you deem suitable.

7. Leverage influence: Do you know of a place where your target market is constantly gathered? Blogs are great examples of where you can find your target audience. Reach out to influential bloggers to publish reviews of your products to their readers for a fee or service exchange (remember barter?). When you reach out to influencers, be succinct and straight to the point; don’t go on and on with your idea in the first message. If they want to know more, they will ask you. You can also choose to write guest posts for them if you don’t want to pay with your time (at least, much of it) or money.

8. Start a cause: If you have the support, start a cause. By support, I don’t necessarily mean money. Having a large customer base is also support. Help people save the environment, help people feed orphans, help people save animals, help people do… et cetera. Put your brand forward. Be genuine; no melodrama accepted please.

9. Watch Your Footsteps: Watch your brand’s activities in order to keep your reputation clean. Your competitors will be watching your footsteps and they may be ready to bring you down. Cover where you step by first making sure it’s the right place to step. Makes sense doesn’t it :) ? Maybe it doesn’t. Okay, if you step in mud, it will show in your footprints and people will see it. Now it makes more sense :) .

10. Follow your Mission and Vision: Many businesses with mission and vision statements get side-tracked at some point in time. Some just write their missions and visions and then leave them on the desk to collect dust. They are among the 90% who fail. Want to win? Don’t let your mission and vision statements collect dust. If you don’t like it, re-strategize and change its content.

11. Create a comic: There’s nothing like a good laugh right? Consider hiring someone to create a comic about what your brand or the industry you find yourself in. Make a comic of your brand (or your mascot. That is, if you have one) kicking the ass of your biggest competitor. Make it funny, put it on your site, make it downloadable and encourage people to share it. Have your own ideas? Play with them and get that comic out.

12. Get Free Media Publicity: Getting media publicity is fairly easy. You just have to be worthy to be talked about. Perhaps, you started a cause about the environment and have made some contributions. Great! Request to share your story on the green channel or in the green magazine. Maybe a big industry player was at your event. That is great too. Interview that person and give it to the appropriate media to publish or broadcast for the price of them making reference to your business as the source. Don’t be shy to ask for the credit. If you do something remarkable, work at getting free media publicity.

13. Consider Your Website: On your website, tell people about your traditions and everything about your brand. Get them interested in you. If you communicate your brand’s story with them, they will be easily convinced to get involved with you. Integrate your social profiles on your website so that your audience can engage with you on the social side of the internet.

14. Be Consistent: There has never been an inconsistent brand that won the battle of branding. If you are not consistent with your branding efforts, you send different (very confusing) signals out to your target audience. If you want to win, be consistent with your efforts in all branding areas.

Did you get any ideas from this list? Write them down. Develop a strategy on how you are going to deploy them and take action. Don’t leave your brand’s tongue hanging out like “blahh”. Put it back into its mouth and let it start talking.


Posted on June 3, 2010 - by

25 Characteristics of Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns

25 Characteristics of Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns

There is so much rock and roll going on involving businesses running social media campaigns. However, there are not many social media rockstars. Their guitars vary. Some rock hard and some… not so hard. Some even have broken guitar strings. We don’t notice the size of their guitars though. What we notice is the kind of music they produce.

There are certain characteristics that differentiate the effective social media campaigns from the boring ones. You need to learn these characteristics if you also want to be effective with your campaigns.

Don’t worry if your ‘strings’ are broken. You can fix it.

Here are 25 characteristics of highly effective social media campaigns (from the rockstars) and some tips to help you rock like them.

1) They spread like wildfire. Effective social media campaigns spread very fast. If your campaign is not spreading, it is not effective. Test the waters with micro campaigns. Learn to swim before attempting to ride the big waves.

2) They are not spammy. Don’t just promote your site links; share something insightful about your company or product. Don’t send out the same message to your community. It is spam…and it is very annoying to them. Even to you. Admit it.

3) They provide value. Value can come in the both physical and mental forms. Effective campaigns provide value in any or both of these regards.

4) They are well branded. Clothe your campaign from head to toe with your company’s identity. Use your logo, your USP or slogans, your colors, and any other thing that defines your business’s identity. Add your brand to every video you produce; don’t add just your website address.

5) They are measured. You need to track your social media marketing efforts. Whether you install Google Analytics on your Facebook fan page or you use Post rank to measure your effectiveness, make sure you work with the data.

6) They have excellent copy. Leave a positive impression in just a few words. Using big vocabulary is not the way to go; making sense is what matters.

7) They don’t ‘sell’. Instead of selling, you should work at generating leads with your social media campaign. Sell to those leads later on.

8 ) They build relationships. Don’t just broadcast. Interact. Building relationships  helps build even more relationships. It also increases the perception of value and builds loyalty.

9) They build trust. Be as honest in your campaign as possible. Trust is very hard to earn back once lost. Your campaign should build and maintain trust in your build.

10) They are innovative. Regular campaigns mostly go unnoticed. Innovation adds ‘flavor’ to your campaign. It is the aroma of your campaign and the one thing that will convince most people to take action.

11) They have ears. Your campaign will not be successful unless you listen for feedback. People may have something to say so listen and show appreciation or let them know you are working on it. Never delete a negative feedback.

12) They are well organized. Your campaign needs to be well planned. It should have a first step and an nth step (where n is the number of the last step). Follow through from step 1 through to step n. Don’t go from step one to step 3 to step 2. Plan your steps well so it is easy to follow through step 1 to the last step.

13) They are maintained by humans. Don’t rely on automation when it comes to marketing on the social web. It just won’t work. Besides, it destroys trust. Put a human being in front of, in-between and behind all your social media campaigns. I want to talk to a human being not a robot.

14) They are consistent. You need to be consistent with your update (or broadcast) schedules and interact with people who leave replies and comments. If you broadcast once a week and change to 5 times a day, people will begin to question your actions. Unless you give them good reason why you have changed your schedule.

15) They have bait. You need to have some sort of bait to convert visitors into leads. Try eBooks, free products, white papers, discount codes, samples, free vouchers, et cetera. Bait them to get them :) .

16) They use leverage. They leverage the subscriber bases of their communities and other people’s communities. They also leverage their company strengths.

17) They include a blog. I suggest you have a business blog before you start your campaign. Your blog should be the hub of your social media campaign efforts. Make you install social media sharing buttons to make it easier for others to share your blog’s content.

18) They engage other blogs. You can do this too. Apply as a guest writer for blogs in your target market. Read blogs in your niche and leave thoughtful comments (not just a “thank you”).

19) They are not everywhere. If you want your campaigns to be successful, don’t register for an account on every social media site. That will only burn you out and your campaigns will be fruitless.

20) They have humor. Adding humor to marketing is a cool way of saying “we are a friendly business”. It makes your marketing memorable. A priceless result.

21) They share company events. If your company is being bad mouthed, tell your customers about it. Tell them the truth in it and the lies. Don’t give them the chance to second guess your company. If your company is nominated for an award, tell your community about it. If your company wins the award, tell them. If you lose the award, tell them.

22) They integrate offline marketing. Print some T-Shirts, with your logo, Twitter handle, Facebook fan page URL and your slogan on it and give them out to your customers. Send out paper printed catalogs to your online leads. Add your Twitter and Facebook URLs to your contact address. Integrate offline with online.

23) They use the right networks. Even though Facebook supports videos, video campaigns will do better on Youtube than on Facebook.

24) They use photos and videos. Photos and videos leave a lasting impression on peoples’ minds. The best photo you can use is your logo. When you make a video, put your logo on it.

25) They have a call to action. What is the essence of a marketing campaign without having a call to action of some sort? I suggest you use your social marketing campaigns to generate leads before trying to sell anything. By the way, “signup below” and “call us now” are not the only call to action examples. “Click to view our portfolio” is an example of call to action. Your call to actions must follow a sequence; from your homepage to the last page.

Tanaa, tanaa, yay,yay, yay! Sorry, couldn’t help it.

Here are 3 other useful resources:

1. Is Your Social Media Clap-on, Clap-off?

2. Understanding Social Media Using Honey Bees As A Standard Model

3. How to Be in the Right 50% of Social Media Marketing Campaigns


There are lots of valuable tips in this article you could use. I suggest you print it out and use it as a reference when you are running your campaigns. I also encourage you to bookmark it online and share it with your friends and colleagues.

Let me know if you are a social media rockstar. Share any tips, questions or comments you have in the comments area.

Thumbnail photo by Silvertje.


Posted on May 31, 2010 - by

How to Write to Get Free Publicity For Your Business

How to Write to Get Free Publicity For Your Business

There are so many ways you can get free publicity. I will be sharing them on Sociatic but it will not be all at once. I want you to get time to savor and apply my tips to your business.

Writing is one way of getting free publicity…targeted ones of course.The trend towards online writing is on the increase. Those who actually take advantage of online writing are mostly bloggers. Businesses seldom use writing to promote their products. The keyword here is seldom.

However, there are some businesses that use this technique very often to promote their business.

If you are not already using writing to promote your business, you better start now.

Two reasons why you should use guest writing in your marketing:

  • You don’t pay anything to write for a publication; whether it is online or offline.
  • You get free promo to the blog’s audience (RSS readers, Twitter followers, Facebook pages; generally, people who love to visit and read that blog).

The web is not the only place you can write. You can also write for magazines and newspapers. You could try and get a column in a newspaper and share your expertise or in other words, help people solve problems related to your niche.

I have seen doctors and lawyers with their own columns in some newspapers and then in return, they get their byline (itsy-bitsy bio about the writer) published along with their article.

If you can’t get a column, you can contribute to an existing column in the newspaper or magazine. Just make sure you write something related to what you do. Also make sure you are writing for a publication your target market reads.

If you prefer web writing too, there are a number of blogs that accept guest writers. Writing online is an excellent way to get all the promotion you need. This is because, these days, things on the web are shared more than things offline.

For example, let’s say you write a very interesting article that gets lots of people’s interest. If you are lucky, your article may go viral when lots of people share it through email, Digg, on their blogs, facebook, et cetera.

Actually, some guest writers have experienced this with their articles and it shot their brand up and boosted their business.

Okay, so now you know why it’s shoe-string marketing. Now let’s look at what to consider before you guest post.

Things to check before Guest Writing:

  • Audience: The publication’s audience (or readership) should be targeted towards your product or service. For example, if you are a web developer, write for a web development publication and if you are a business coach, write for a business blog.
  • Numbers: Check the number of subscribers the publication has. You can find out by asking the publication. Some blogs share their RSS subscription number on their blog via a chicklet/widget (what’s the difference?). If that is not available, you can ask the owner of the blog. You can also check other stats such as Twitter following, traffic ranking(use Alexa.com), et cetera. This is to make sure you get many eyeballs to read your content and thus, drive traffic to your website.
  • No Selling: That will turn people off.  Besides, many publications won’t accept a guest post like that. Your article needs to be original and should provide value for the blog’s readers by solving a problem. If you want to add a sales pitch, write a press release instead.

Oh, one more thing. Some publications give you a secondary benefits for your guest writing efforts; they pay you for writing for them. You can expect to be paid as much as $150 per guest article. That’s secondary benefit to us because what I want you to achieve is free publicity for your business.

Some online publications that accept guest writers are:

After going through all the processes and check lists, I can’t end this article without stating that you need to keep doing it to get the result you want.

A single article could get you some sales or leads but in order for you to achieve more valuable results (with “more” as the word of emphasis), you need to get published a couple of times. One article might bring in some showers of profits but several articles will bring in a flood of profits; that is, if you are selling a good product ;) .

In my opinion, it will be better to write regularly for one particular blog so that the community over there gets to know you and trust you more to do business with you through your own site. After you establish some authority or relationships on that blog, move on to another one (also related to your niche) and build more relationships. It may surprise you that some of your friends from blog number 1 read blog number 2 too.

Give yourself some time to get serious results. You don’t always have to write the articles if you get frustrated along the line. You can always outsource your writing to professional writers on Elance or Odesk for a few bucks.

Before paying anybody to write your articles for you, request that all the applicants (or bidders) submit a small introductory piece so you can assess their writing.

Oh, you will also need to make sure the writer has some knowledge about your niche for obvious reasons. It will make the work easier for both sides.

Which shoe-string marketing techniques do you use? Have you ever used guest posting to market your business? Let me know your experiences in the comments box below.

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