Advertising agencies and newspapers love to talk about the power of building your brand. In my opinion, this is an excuse for actually writing direct response ads and sales letters that actually get results.
Now don’t get me wrong, there is a space for brand building type advertising. If you’re a Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonald’s with a multi-million dollar advertising budget then there’s certainly a place for building your brand and keeping your name out there in the marketplace.
But my bet is that 99.9% of the people reading this article are not in a position to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars advertising in the newspaper or on television to ‘get their name out there’ without getting a return on their investment. Why?
Because you’ll end up going broke very quickly.
So what’s the solution?
The secret to using branding as a small business is to:
a) Make sales using direct response advertising so you can continue to advertise again and again and again.
b) Get a strong customer base and deliver an exceptional service so your customers rave about you to others
c) Entice your customers to join your database through offering a free report or other enticement that’s of interest to them. And then communicate with them over and over and over again.
So what does all this achieve?
Firstly, by advertising free information to entice customers to your database, you are actually attracting potential customers to your business who are interested in what you have to offer.
Then you can either build your ‘brand’ for free via email through educating your customer over and over again. Or alternatively, you can spend your advertising dollars mailing to people who are actually interested in what you’re offering.
Doesn’t that beat spending thousands of dollars advertising in a newspaper to every man and his dog? After all, we get hit with thousands of advertising messages every day (whenever you get on the Internet, on the sides of buses, the backs of T-Shirts, train stations, TV, radio… everywhere you go you’re likely to see an ad for something).
So if you want to get noticed through brand advertising to the public, and not focusing directly on results, then make sure you have deep pockets.
In my opinion, the only way to make a small business work is to make more money than you spend. And the only way to do that is to spend less on promotion and other expenses than you are making.
And if every time you invest $100 on an ad, you can consistently get $200 back then you’ve got a good chance of being around to build a strong brand over time.
The alternative is focusing on ‘getting your name out there.’ But if you’re not turning over a profit with promotions that deliver results, you won’t have your name out there for very
long.
So here’s my 6 step system to building a strong brand in a practical and consistent way:
1. Use direct response ads, sales letters, flyers, etc. that focus on the benefit and needs of your customer. And not ‘brag and boast’ company that you notice but nobody else does. (i.e. putting your company name and logo at the top of the ad).
2. Measure your results.
3. Make sure you’re making more money from your promotions than you’re investing into them.
4. Reinvest your profits into more and more advertising. As your budget grows, you’ll advertise more, therefore your brand will grow.
5. Use a portion of your advertising budget to advertise a free report, CD or useful information of some kind to develop a database of interested prospects.
6. Keep in touch with your customers and prospects by using a regular newsletter
And that’s basically it.
After all, where did branding originally come from:
Farmers used it to identify their livestock. By burning a mark on the hide of an animal with a hot iron, people knew who owned it.
And your job is to burn a mark into the minds of your customers and prospects. But not on everyone - just the people who are interested, and qualify for your service.