It’s vital to share positive press about your company. After all, if you don’t spread your good news, who will?

Don’t be afraid to toot your own horn! It generates buzz and gets (or keeps) word-of-mouth going. If your business is featured in a local newspaper article, highlighted in a review, mentioned on a blog or other website, or referred to in any other positive way -- talk about it! Sharing good news is a great way to show your clients and connections what you do and what your business has done for your community or industry.

Examples of Great PR Opportunities

Here are some examples of news you can spread:

-Charitable efforts your company takes part in
-Community events your company sponsored
-Recommendations on a review site or blog
-Guest posts your company wrote on others’ blogs or sites
-Your success stories
-Client success stories
-Great testimonials your clients provide
-Any award, prize, commendation, or mention
-Press in papers or online

Tooting Our Horn

We recently participated in VIA’s annual B2B Industry Show at the Hyatt Valencia. As a result of our networking efforts and spreading the word about who we are, we inadvertently got some great PR we’d like to share with you! Jeff Solomon of FreePromoTips.com and All-American Marketing Group mentioned Small Dog Creative & our marketing strategies in this case study article and video commentary he did not too long after the event.

 

So in the name of spreading good news, check out these great PR pieces. Thanks to Jeff  Solomon for mentioning Small Dog Creative!

Sometimes good marketing ideas can be found in the most interesting places. These ideas can be surprising and innovative, or “why doesn’t everyone do that?” For example, putting an ad on a back door. Who would look there? Glad you asked!

I was at a local Starbucks drive-thru, and I noticed something that stood out: a few signs on the back door of Supercuts. Of all the shops in this strip, only one had thought to utilize the back door, which sees quite a bit of traffic from the drive-thru. Supercuts did something innovative, but also so simple that everyone should be doing it. They left no stone unturned in their search for marketing opportunities.

Covering Your Bases

From Supercuts’ back door, we learn that businesses should search out new ways of reaching customers even in unlikely places. After all, you never know where or from what angle you might garner interest and pick up new clients.

Back-sides are often underused and advertising in these spaces is usually inexpensive. Some places that are often under used are the backsides and undersides of materials - marketing flyers, business cards, bottle caps, takeout bags. Essentially, anywhere people see but don’t always seek. People love these surprises, whether practical and useful, or simply fun and spontaneous.

Exhibit A: Business Cards

The back of business cards are a great example. So often, people hand out business cards that have nothing on the back. That means that half of their business card is useless! Yes, it likely means paying a bit more to get them printed, but in the long run, that extra space can go a long way. It serves as space where you can offer more information and capture interest.

So, follow in Supercuts’ footsteps and cover all your business’ bases by utilizing space efficiently and wisely.

 
The End of an Era?

Is the era of personal branding coming to a close? As defined by Wikipedia, “personal branding is, for some people, a description of the process whereby people and their careers are marked as brands. [...] The personal branding concept suggests [...] that success comes from self-packaging.”

While this may sound like a reasonable idea, consumers often prefer to see the person behind the business, not the face they put on for the benefit of their company or the part they play to impress their targeted audience. People prefer transparency and authenticity -- less layers, less guessing, more truth.

People Are People

“People are people. They aren’t brands. When people become “brands,” they stop being people and become one of three things: vessels for cultural archetypes, characters in a narrative, or products. (Most of the time, becoming a brand means they become all three.) Unlike people, brands have attributes and trade dress, slogans and tag lines which can all be trademarked, because unlike people, brands exist to ultimately sell something.”
-Olivier Blanchard, “R.I.P. Personal Branding,” The BrandBuilder Blog

Stay personal and stay "real" -- the exception to personal branding is if you’re Donald Trump, Michael Jordan, Chuck Norris, Lady Gaga, or some other icon. In this case, personal branding comes with the icon status. If you are not an icon, you’d better to turn your focus and resources to what truly matters... promoting your business.

Tips for Staying Authentic

Here are four tips to consider in doing this:

1. Focus on your reputation. Many people go wrong by focusing on their image, not reputation. Image is just marketing. Your reputation is what counts, and what ultimately attracts your customers -- or drives them away.

2. Stay relevant. Relevancy is much more important that popularity. Popularity is fickle and can turn in no time, but relevancy is always, well, relevant.

3. Back up your purpose. Whatever your work may be, it should speak for itself. You should still keep up the supporting acts like blogging and whatever else may apply in your industry, but these should be secondary and supporting roles rather than the lead roles. The lead roles are what you do, not what you say.

4. Be yourself. Let go of the idea of personal branding, and refocus on you. People want to see who you are, and how they can relate to you. It’s okay to take of that mask, it allows people to relate and connect. To quote Blanchard, “Fakes need not apply. Trust is far too important a thing to gamble away on personal branding schemes. The more honest you are around people, the more they will respond to you. It’s that simple.”

Keep It Real

The notions behind personal branding could do just the opposite of what people  presume -- they could hurt your business, impede your success, and diminish your worth and value.

“Create. Invent. Help. Rescue. Solve. Improve. […] Jules Verne is known for his stories. Steven Spielberg is known for his films. Richard Branson is known for his success in business. Author. Filmmaker. Entrepreneur. Compare that to 'online personality' or 'social media expert.'” -Olivier Blanchard

If you focus on your business and on staying genuine and authentic, you will earn your success and respect over time. Just be yourself, do what you do best, and forget about "personal branding."

To read more about branding, marketing and other topics, check out our blog and Articles section.

Nowadays, most brands have a social presence online, and across several platforms -- Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, among many others. The key to maintaining & managing your social presence is to have a social strategy. This means managing and consolidating your brand’s reputation so that you have a clear presence that is cohesive and dynamic rather than disorganized or repetitive.

Here are five quick tips for doing just that:

1. Develop Your Look & Feel. A big part of your strategy is to develop what your brand will look like online. Doing this early on will help make the rest of the process flow smoothly and efficiently. This may take different forms depending on the platform, but your audience should be able to perceive your sense of branding.

 

2. Be Consistent. Your branding should carry through in every representation of your business. This includes your brand’s design, logo, fonts, company description, and style of writing. This also applies to your URL--vanity URLs (e.g. Twitter.com/SmallDogCreative) that match your main domain name (www.SmallDogCreative.com).

 

3. Keep Track of Yourself. Do periodic Google searches to keep track of where you rank and how your general reputation comes across. Be sure to update your website & profiles frequently and to link between your various pages and profiles. This will help visibility as well as improve the way Google perceives your website.

 

4. Take Advantage of Tools. Using tools like Hootsuite.com, Seesmic.com, and Tweetdeck.com to seamlessly update your profiles across different platforms is a great way to update consistently and automatically.

 

5. Stay Human. You don’t want to come across monotone and inaccessible. Social media is a great way to connect with your audience and give your brand a personal feel. Don’t be afraid. Let people see and hear that you are human, just like them.

What makes a good search engine is its ability to give you the best or most relevant results for your search. We wouldn't search with Google if, when we typed in "Banana Bread," car wash companies came up in the search results. Google needs to get a clear "picture" of what your site (and company) is about in order to more accurately position your company in the search results for that term.

Choosing search terms is not as obvious or as easy as you may imagine. Terms you use are not necessarily what your customers use. It is also important to select search terms that have traffic. There is a lot of information that can be gathered on your target market and how they are searching for your products. We strongly recommend you take a step back and hire a professional company to conduct your search term research, and give you a list of terms you should optimize your website for. Sinking time and money with out doing proper search term research will cost you far more in the long run.

Professional search term research is the first place you should start your website and your search engine optimization. Research reveals how many people are searching for terms, how hard it may be to get a good ranking on google for the term, and what the top companies are doing to get their rankings. It is also important to establish these numbers as a baseline for your website, so you can determine if your SEO campaigns are working.

For more information read our next article... Optimizing for Your Search Terms

There are a number of ways to improve your search engine results. Before we go any further, it is important to get a better understanding of search result ranking. Let's talk for a moment about Google's algorithm (that's the code used for determining which order sites appear in search results), and which search results they appear in. 

If you worked for Google how would you determine what sites come up under which search terms? What factors would you use to determine which site should come up at the top of the list? 
Here are some questions you would want your algorithm to "ask":

1. How long has the site been around? How long will it be around for?
2. Are the search terms in the text of the site?
3. How large is the site?
4. How much content is on the site?
5. How many inbound links are there? What sites are the links coming from?
6. How often is the site updated?
7. Is the text original?
8. How many people are visiting the site?
9. How relevant is this site to the search term?
10. How close is this business to the person searching? City? State?

Google is asking all of these question (and more) when they look at your website to determine your ranking. So, if you are wondering why your website isn't on top, ask yourself these questions and take a look at the sites that are coming up at the top.

Stay tuned for our next article... Choosing the Right Search Terms

Your website cannot be successful if you don't have traffic. You can have a professional looking website, post all the testimonials you want, and have a site full of products but if no one is coming to read them, then you are wasting your time. That is why it is important to think like search engines when building your website. This will help give you a better understanding of what you can do to boost your Google ranking, which is a key factor to your website's success.

The first thing you should know is what SEO is and why it is so important to your website and to your business. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of improving ranking in search engine results. If, for example, you owned a website about apples, you would want your site to be in the top 10 search results for apples, so it would appear on the first page of results. If your site was on page 10, you could employ SEO techniques or hire an SEO specialist to optimize your site and help you achieve better results. 

There are two general kinds of optimization: On-site and off-site optimization. On-site optimization is done by making changes to your website to increase its size, content, and visibility. Off-site optimization is done by creating inbound links to your website; getting your site listed in directories, blogs, etc..

Incoming links are like referrals or recommendations and play a large role in determining how your website ranks on search engines.

Stay tuned for our next article... Thinking Like Google

Do you feel like you are wasting money on your marketing efforts?  Well it's actually all too common with small business.

How do you avoid this? First, start by having a questionnaire next to the phone, or on your website that captures valuable information, collect your customer's contact information and ask them how they heard about you. This is the most basic information you can collect, if appropriate you may want to get birthdays and anniversaries so you can send out cards and specials. You may also need their address so you can add them to your mailing list. But that's just the start.

Next, you need a system in place so you can follow up with the new leads and convert them to new business. This may include phone calls, emails, email marketing, invitations to events, or greeting cards. How ever you choose to follow up make sure you have more than one way to contact your leads, and keep your communication ongoing. One follow up call or email is not enough.

Whatever you do, don't launch a new expensive marketing campaign without having a follow up program in place.

More and more businesses are jumping on the blogging bandwagon. You may think a blog is a passing fad or not right for your business, but let me tell you why you should reconsider.

#1 Blogs Show Your Clients You are Human

A blog is a great way to add some personality to your site and company. Most business websites could have a little more personality. Adding a blog and more personal experiences or fun notes can help your customers get to know you better, and you can start developing relationships with your customers 24-7.

#2: Blogs Build Out Your Site

Blogs are a great way to increase the size of your website and add content. Both important factors for search engines, the size of your website and the content can give you an edge over your competitors. Additional content gives Google (and other search engines) reasons to direct visitors to your site.

Including keywords about your products and services can help people find your website and your company. Blogs can also quickly increase the size of your site (another important search engine factor). The more pages you have the more reputable Google thinks your site is, which can in turn increase your page ranking and views.

#3: You Don't Have to Call it a Blog

From a programming stand point, a Blog is a grouping of pages within a site that are categorized by subject or date, allow visitors to make comments, and have an RSS feed. The only thing dictating the content of the blog is you. Call it an articles section, news, company updates or industry information and use it to build out your website. Just because it is called a blog doesn't mean you have to talk about your day or what you ate for lunch. Think of it as a tool you can rename to display content on your site.

#4: RSS Feeds and Why They are Vital For Blogs

RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and it allows people to get updates when you add new posts without needing to return to your website. While it has been around for a while it is just starting to catch on. What makes an RSS feed valuable is that it allows you to syndicate your blog to other blog sites and social networks. Which means you can potentially have your Twitter, Facebook and other pages updated whenever you create a new blog post.

#5: You Have Something Worth Talking About

No matter what business you are in, there are people that are interested, questions that need answers and articles that need to be written. Providing information to your clients and industry increases your profile, and puts you on the road to becoming a leader in your industry.

The Death of The Brochure

From the early days of advertising brochures have offered the greatest opportunity to demonstrate the details a product or service. As the technology and accessibility of websites, video, text messages, and emails increase the trusted printed paper brochure is dying. No longer an effective marketing tool the brochure has become just another piece of paper to throw away.

While that printed piece of paper with the company logo on it may be a comfort to the employees, owners and investors, has lost it’s effectiveness as a marketing tool?

As a consultant working with start up companies there are a few items that are on the top of the to do list, and a brochure is always one of them. The brochure tops this list not because it is an effective sales tool, but because that has been a business staple for the last fifty years, and has been the key components to making a company look professional. So without questioning the effectiveness of the brochure it has remained a default marketing tool.

When was the last time you actually read a brochure or purchased a product because they had a great brochure? Most of us just keep them around to get the website or phone number off the back. Consider your audience if a brochure is just a way to get people interested in your website, then scale it down and get potential customers to your website quicker.

The Innovation Clog

In today’s rapidly changing market brochures are slowing the innovation process. To stay on top companies are continuously refining themselves, changing products, services, prices, and working to stay competitive. This fluid need for change is not conducive to large, expensive printed brochure.

Creating a full brochure for the sake of having a brochure is not only a waste of money, but if it is not in your budget to redesign and reprint your brochure every year then you are locking you company into pricing and services for years to come.

No Brochure, Now What?

If you have given up on brochures altogether than consider all the other tools that are available to you.

There are plenty of marketing tools that can replace your brochure, and work in a more effective or cost effective manner. Consider the following items as a replacement: postcards, rack cards, 2-sided business cards, business card sized brochures, door hangers, HTML emails, or PDF brochures.

Brochures Have a Purpose

Before you throw out your brochure, or cancel your print order ask yourself:

• How often will you need to reprint your brochure? While on the surface it may seem like a great tool, if your pricing in changing, if you’re starting a company, or if your strategy may change do you have the budget to design and reprint as often as necessary? If you don’t then scale your tool back to a smaller marketing piece or move your campaign to the web.
  
  
• What is a successful brochure going to accomplish? Make sure your goals are realistic for the piece. Campaigns work, brochures alone do not. Brochures alone rarely sell anything, so make sure your piece is part of a campaign for greater success. If your goals for your brochure can be accomplished better with another marketing tool then reconsider your need for a brochure, and redirect your valuable marketing dollars towards a more successful campaign.
  
  
• If you currently have a brochure, what is it accomplishing? Find out what your brochure is really doing for your business. Is your brochure directing people to your website, bringing customers into your storefront, doubling as a menu, or lining the cat box? If your customers are just using your brochure as a business card then create a better business card. If your brochure is bringing customers into your store then redesign it as a postcard and add a map. If your brochure is being used as a menu, create a menu, and if it is lining the cat box then cancel your next reprint and rethink your strategy.

Before you make this year's marketing checklist examine your marketing tools. What purpose are they serving, are you checking off the last year’s marketing checklist or are you strategically planning this year’s marketing campaign. If a brochure is the best approach to this year’s campaign then by all means start designing, but be creative, be strategic and don’t invest in a marketing piece with little to no return.