Listen and share instead?

Strategy is integral, but you need strong branding for any strategy to be effective.

From where we sit, we see companies growing and evolving to accommodate their new ideas and bigger visions. It’s exciting to watch businesses grow in defiance of what the news media hands out on silver platters. It makes dramatic story lines, and we should listen with compassion, but those stories don’t have to shape your reality.

I want to caution you, however, that growth and vision may require basic, often costly changes, that shouldn’t be ignored while you’re building. Even if your new idea is simply a better conception of a previous business, how you brand it will absolutely impact your ability to attract the customers you desire – and the ability to make the money you’re envisioning. 

If you already have a strong brand that represents your offer, your new product or focus may do well with further development of your current branding. Look closely, if your branding no longer represents your vision, it needs to be re-thought. Don’t let the costs associated with new branding impair your judgment.

Don’t Let Cost Become a Noose

If fear of cost prevent or stall you from realizing your new concept as a business venture, I’ve got bad news for you. Nothing about growing a successful business will ever be ‘cheap’ or free. There is quite a bit you can do for yourself to offset your financial investment, but don’t take on the things you haven’t mastered by yourself.

When everything goes exactly as planned, growing your business and growing the operations of your business take bulldog tenacity. If you let yourself get weighted down with things better done by specialists, you’re going to get real tired – real quick. You don’t have time for that. How often do things really ‘go as planned?’ Run your business, get help for the rest.

Attractive Businesses Don’t Shine By Themselves

95% of people don’t know how to make money in business. The people who do, know they need guidance from those who can polish them up so they can shine, as well as support from others. Don’t try to do it all yourself, it’s time-consuming, sloppy, and unwise.

Get mentorship, get wisdom, and make sure your brand reflects what you do for the market you intend to impact with your offer. A well-designed logo, at minimum, is used for brand recognition on a well-designed business website. If you know you have something that requires your buyer to have many shiny nickels, you’d better look like you can perform to their expectations.

You Need to Look at This Seriously

Take a financial inventory and decide on a marketing budget – really dig deep, and recognize where smart money needs to go for brand recognition that brings money back home. The investment you’re making will be evident in your logo and website design, two mandatory requirements for success in business. The third is the ability to think ‘expansively.’ Will you be ready to grow? Not without these basics in place.

Then share your constraints with a marketing agency you can trust for a sensitive conversation. The right agency will know how to allocate your funds in the smartest manner for the largest impact. Without this conversation, you don’t know what you can realistically afford to do, or have a clear idea of what you can expect for your money.

When you work with Zero To Sixty Marketing, we help you make the most of what you can afford, and always showcase your brand at the highest level possible. Our clients are consistently amazed at our performance, and trust us to put their best foot forward.

Zero To Sixty Marketing empowers you to have the business you only dreamed about. You need to perform at your highest level, and we can get you up to speed. Contact us to learn how polished, professional representation will bring higher paying clients to you, and bring them more often.

Have you signed up for the Inside Line yet? Learn what matters, and what to avoid, when you get your copy of 5 Keys to Making Higher Sales in 2012 when you do, available exclusively for our subscribers!

When is the last time you looked at your email signature?

I wonder how often this detail is overlooked. It’s one thing to add your various contact information under your signature line, but that information should enhance your appearance while sharing additional information about yourself to your reader. It should encourage a reader to connect with you in other arenas as well. In my opinion, if it doesn’t help – don’t add it! More information is not necessarily better information.

Here’s what I suggest: 

• Include your full name, phone, fax, and email hyperlink.
• Include your website link.
• Change the font size of your signature lines, possibly even the color.
• Make sure your links are well-contained within anchor text, not 150 characters long and meaningless. That includes your website and social connections.
• A picture is nice, but often it won’t show up. Zero To Sixty Marketing advises against using pictures in signatures for that reason.
• Rotating text can be a nice way to share various ideas without being overwhelming. Once again, however, weigh that against the odds of your email not getting through to your reader. It might not be worth it.
• Include your most important social connections, preferably in link form – again, using anchor text.
• Consider your line spacing, remove extra spacing that doesn’t enhance.
• Keep your signature around 8 lines. Several tag lines aren’t necessary, and overkill is just silly.

A professional, friendly, and well-connected signature will leave a good impression with anyone who might read your email.

What do you include in your email signature?

No doubt, you’re being bombarded right now by every sales call imaginable, most of them trying to sell you either search engine optimization (SEO) services or advertising space. Since the second week of January, our phone has rung daily with someone selling one or the other.

Since, like most of us, you’re probably considering your next purchase of ad space, let’s focus on advertising today. Yes, it’s a HUGE topic, so we’re going to take it back to its most basic premise: Advertising is Salesmanship.

Let us emphasize the point. The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales. It is not for general effect. It is not to keep your name before the people. It is not primarily to aid your other salesmen.

“Treat it as a salesman. Force it to justify itself. Compare it with other salesman. Figure its cost and result. Accept no excuses which good salesman do not make. Then you will not go far wrong.”
~ Claude Hopkins, Scientific Advertising

This is an especially important point for the small business owner to remember. We can’t afford to waste dollars with advertising campaigns meant to spread awareness of our businesses. Before we consider any advertising campaign, we’d better be reasonably sure that we’re making a good investment, one that will make the cash register ring repeatedly.

Mr. Hopkins goes on to say, “There is one simple way to answer many advertising questions. Ask yourself, ‘Would it help a salesman sell the goods?’ ‘Would it help me sell them if I met a buyer in person?’”

Remember that when a salesperson calls on a prospect, he or she is speaking to one individual. Do the same in your advertising … focus on one typical buyer, not the mass of people you hope will buy your product or service. When composing your ad, speak to the one man or woman who is likely to want what you sell.

Dan Kennedy lists 10 rules for advertising in his book, “No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-direct Marketing Businesses.” (Don’t you love that title?) I have them taped to the wall directly above my monitor and I refer to them often. I won’t repeat them all here, but I’ll give you a preview:

• Rule 1. There will always be an offer or offers.
• Rule 4. There will be tracking and measurement.
• Rule 5. Whatever brand building occurs will be a happy by-product, not bought.
• Rule 9. Results rule, period.

For Further Reading:

• Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (free e-book download, provided courtesy of The Copywriter’s Roundtable)
• No B.S. Direct Marketing: The Ultimate, No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-direct Marketing Businesses

The customer may not be infallible (like you or I?), but it’s a safe bet they know a lot more about their own business than I do. It’s my job to help them realize their vision, not mine. We’re building their brand, not my portfolio. As competition gets more fierce (or if you will, as marketing dollars get more scarce), even established ad agencies are acknowledging that customers must have the final “say” in their own brand. 

Too many of my business customers have told me how they do not like their logo or their web site, and by extension the letterhead, cards, and all the matching materials … but they’ve already spent THAT part of their budget. (If only I had a dollar — okay, the long-gone thousand dollars — for every time I heard that!)

It has been a running joke between Home Things! owner Andrea Hogan and I, that I just didn’t “get” the logo that we created. But she loves it, her customers love it, and for some reason women in general — her target market — loves it. Why should I argue? A satisfied, loyal customer is a wonderful thing!

A very interesting discussion, “Ode to the amateur logo” is still underway at Before & After. Check it out for a revealing insight into both the designer’s and the customer’s perspective.

View additional logos designed by Scott Alberts.