Your Marketing is Not Your Brand
I spend a lot of time talking about strategies and tactics for marketing, especially online marketing. I talk about SEO, Adwords, Facebook, email marketing, etc. And while all these tools are important parts of marketing and growing your business, you don’t want to lose sight of the forest for the trees. These things are just tools, your number one mission is creating an established brand.
Creating a brand can be a nebulous concept and it gets less and less attention as the internet marketing industry booms. We fixate on how to rank well with Google, how to amass 1,000 fans on Facebook, how to grow your email list. The problem with doing these things as an end rather than a means is that these things are always changing and you don’t control them. Google can change its algorithms and upset your carefully executed expensive SEO. Facebook could shut down your account. Email service providers could implement measures that make email marketing nearly useless. (There’s every chance that Google’s Priority Inbox tool could be a sign of more things to come that make email marketing less attractive.) My point here isn’t about forecasting what the internet giants will do, my point is about going back to basics. My point is about going back to branding.
When you invest in marketing strategies (whether it’s your time or your money) always think about how you can use them to grow your brand, not just attract website traffic today. Imagine what you’d do tomorrow if Google or Facebook or email disappeared. Would you still be in business? If the answer is no, it’s time to think about things you can do to become a fixture in your target market’s consciousness.
This means taking a multi-channel approach to your marketing plan with an eye on both conversions AND brand recognition. It’s about incorporating advertising, PR, word-of-mouth and other creative strategies that both introduce your company to your target market and keep your brand name in front of them.
Does your current marketing plan help grow your brand or does it just focus on getting conversions?
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Really interesting article Meredith.
It’s true, often we spend lots of time thinking about numbers instead of focus on creating an image for our brand, a recognition, and loyal customers that Seo, social networks and Google apart, know who we are, what we do and the quality of what we offer.
Thanks for sharing this
Comment by Irene — December 1, 2010 @ 11:13 am
[...] Stop Obsessing Over Your Search Engine Rank – nicely echoes what I said recently about branding. [...]
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