Is your business too small or too specialized to warrant the time and energy it takes to develop a brand? No! Brand building is essential for any business. A strong, positive brand is just as important for a 200-person technology company as it is for a 3-person retail shop. 

One of my clients, Sean, is a chiropractor. When Sean started his business, he knew he had two branding challenges to overcome:

1. Favorably differentiating his business from other chiropractic services
2. Strengthening the legitimacy of chiropractic healing itself; branding chiropractic products and services in general so that more people would consider going to a chiropractor (namely him) rather than going to a more traditional medical doctor for treatments

Every business has to be able to attract and satisfy customers predictably and consistently if it is going to thrive. One of the best ways to do this is to build a strong, positive brand in the minds of your target markets.

What do People Think of your Business?

When people encounter your business, your products or your services they will either think negatively or positively about it depending on your brand. Ultimately, it is your brand that determines if people actually do business with you.

A good branding strategy takes time and attention to develop and implement in your business. You need to have a very good understanding of the purchase decision needs of your target markets and how your business meets or exceeds those customer expectations. You (and everyone else in your business) need a clear idea of what brand you are trying to establish in the marketplace so that you can look for any and all opportunities to reinforce that brand when dealing with customers. Your brand building efforts should also be tracked and quantified over time so that you can keep doing the things that strengthen your brand and identify the innovations that will improve the things that aren't working.

3 Steps To Begin Developing Your Brand Strategy

There are three basic steps you can take that will allow you to start building the right branding strategy for your business:

1. Create a clear objective for your branding strategy. This should be a written document (we call it your Brand Objective Statement) that outlines the brand you hope to establish in the minds of your target market. It should be based on what your customers want and expect from your business, your products or your services. Some areas of focus to consider:
   Product Branding – This involves keeping your company somewhat anonymous but building the brand of your products or services. A business like the H.J. Heinz Corporation may take this approach to building the brand of, say, Heinz Ketchup without necessarily emphasizing the company itself or the brands of the distributors and retailers who carry the ketchup.
   Company Branding – This is something you might focus on if you were a company like the supermarket chain Safeway and are primarily focused on building the Safeway company brand. Interestingly, a company like Safeway carries a lot of “brand name” products and can use those brands to build upon the Safeway company brand to draw customers to their stores.
   Dual Branding – This is an approach that, for example, an automobile dealer might employ. Dual branding comes into play when there’s a strong product brand, like Toyota, as well as the company brand, like Donovan Motors. The Toyota brand (product brand) is developed and supported primarily by the Toyota Motor Company with is national and international advertising and public relations strategies. The Donovan Motors brand (company brand) is established locally in the company’s trading area. This is the branding strategy that Sean wanted to focus on for his Chiropractic business, since he wanted to brand his business and chiropractic health treatment in general in a positive light.
2. Integrate branding into all customer-focused activity. Make sure that everyone in your business is aware of your desired brand and is taking every opportunity to reinforce that brand at every customer touch point. This is a bigger topic than we’ll go into now, but the better everyone understands the brand direction, the better equipped they are to act on the brand building and communication systems you have in place.
3. Establish brand monitoring. This can be accomplished through interviews, surveys or focus groups that allow you to gather data regarding how your business is being perceived in the marketplace, and whether your reputation is growing in accordance with your brand strategy.

Sean worked through the three-step process outlined above and quickly started seeing the difference as his chiropractic business began to grow and gain a reputation. Through his research, he was able to articulate that people in his target market ultimately wanted quality health care and treatment that immediately helped them experience more functionality, a better quality of life, and less pain or side effects. He used that to create and document a Brand Objective Statement using a Dual Branding Strategy approach that pinpointed how his company specifically (and chiropractic medicine in general) would appeal to his target markets.

He then set about integrating his branding strategy into all of his business systems from advertising through sales and client fulfillment. After six months of operating with this new brand awareness he had quantifiable results that his efforts had paid off. He sent out a customer survey which helped confirm positive customer perceptions of his business. His internal meetings with staff helped confirm they were getting consistently positive feedback from customers. He measured a rise in clientele and client retention.

Additionally, he noticed that, since his brand was strong, his customers gave his business the benefit of the doubt when something did go wrong. His customers viewed mistakes and inconsistencies as merely temporary aberrations that the business would recover from quickly.

Interestingly, Toyota (as mentioned in point one above) is facing some brand setbacks right now. They’re experiencing a high volume of recalls for safety defects in certain vehicles. Do you think that this is going to permanently tarnish the Toyota brand? Do you think the company will be able to recover? Newsweek posted an interesting article on the topic that you might want to read.

flickr photo credit: planetc1

Almost every business owner wants more leads for their business. In fact, for many owners the need for a constant inflow of qualified leads often dominates their thinking. There are, however, many challenges to ensuring and maintaining that supply. And, in addition to the needs of today, growth objectives and profit goals will require increased revenue which must come from increased sales—which means more leads. So are there really “sure-fire” methods of lead generation? And, if so, what are they?

Start With Your Plan

Truly successful lead generation must always be an integrated part of your marketing strategy. And this rests on having a comprehensive plan that takes into account the demographics and psychographics of your target market, as well as your positioning—the perception of your business and your product/services held by that target market. In other words, your lead generation efforts must be guided by who it is you are ideally trying to attract to your business and what it is you’re promising them.

A mistake many business owners make with lead generation activities is to simply try different things with no real thought about who their ideal customers are, where they are, and how to best reach them. Random acts of lead generation produce random results—and a very questionable ROI.

Assuming you have effectively put together a strategic marketing plan and you know your ideal target market customer, what can you do right now to generate some solid, qualified leads?

5 Ways to Get Them to Bite

Here are some tried-and-true methods for getting good leads quickly:

• Team up: Many businesses can find ways to share resources with other non-competing businesses that targets similar customers. One of our clients who specialize in dent removal teamed up with an auto detailing facility to exchange customer lists and trade discount coupons to promote each other’s services. Clients who had a dent removed from their car received a coupon for detailing and the detailer did the same for our client. Not only did each of them enlarge their potential customer database by sharing information, they also opened the doors for co-branding opportunities, to boot!
• Referrals: Time, experience and much research has concluded that nothing brings a qualified lead to your door better than the recommendation of a friend or colleague. Having a structured and intentional system, or program, in place to elicit referrals is not only a sure-fire way to generate qualified leads, but it is highly cost-effective as well. 
• Word-of-Mouth: According to Wikipedia, word-of-mouth marketing “encompasses a variety of subcategories, including buzz, blog, viral, grassroots, cause influencers and social media marketing.” People tend to act on what they hear in this way because of the added layer of integrity perceived in it. In other words, getting people to talk about your company, your products or services, who you are and what you do, is an effective means of moving people to come to your business. We often say that your best salespeople are satisfied customers.
• Give it away: Give your product or service for free on a limited or one-time basis. This is especially effective if you’re a restaurant, a spa, or any service-oriented business. Make it a random weekday for just one hour, for example. The restaurant chain Macaroni Grill did this when they first opened with the idea of building mid-week traffic and it was incredibly effective. The old saying that “samples sell” holds a great deal of truth. And lead potential!
• Surprise them: Never underestimate the power of surprise, of the unexpected. Reach out and “touch base” with your pool of past or current customers, but do something spontaneous or out of the ordinary when contacting them. If you can find ways to surprise and delight current or past customers you can then leverage the power of that moment to generate a new sale. Although you may not always think of them as potential leads, these folks are almost always a great source of qualified leads and can be a far more cost-effective source. The added bonus is that your lead conversion, or sales process is often shorter and easier with repeat business.

Where There’s a Way There’s a Lead

The real key to generating more leads is how well you know your most probable customers—your target market. This is why making lead generation a systemic part of your marketing is so important. However, even though continual research and quantification of data on your target market is essential, it’s also critical to avoid getting stalled by too much analysis and not enough action! It was the American General and military strategist George S. Patton, who said: “A good plan, violently executed today, is better than a perfect plan executed next week.” A good strategy supported by some effective tactics will result in the leads you need.

Share Your Story

What lead generation activities do you rely on? What's worked for you in the past? Post a comment and tell us about it.

Further Reading

Advertising is Not Marketing
Tips to Drum Up Sales Now
Stop, Ask and Listen: Exploring the Links between Marketing and Client Fulfillment

We define business frustrations as a series of specific recurring events in your business over which you feel you have little or no control.

Every business has frustrations. From small "hiccups" that hinder the flow of work, to fatal flaws that can have a devastating impact on the bottom line, and everything in between.

As it is with every challenge you face, the question is really about how you deal with it. You can ignore the frustration all together; you can abdicate and hope that somebody else will take care of it; you can apply a quick band-aid fix… But all of those options would be doing yourself, your team, and your business a great disservice.

I'd like to share this story about Michelle who owns a printing and design business. Michelle was having trouble finding the time to develop systems and processes because of constant interruptions from clients. She was getting so many project status requests that she couldn’t focus on the strategic work she wanted to do. Michelle told me that she was feeling frustrated by the fact that her customers weren’t relying on her support staff. She hadn’t taken any proactive steps toward fixing this situation because she was afraid that her clients had gotten used to working with her and she didn't want to jeopardize the level of service they'd come to expect.

There are three ways people typically perceive business frustrations like the one Michelle was experiencing.

1. Self-Directed: I am the cause. “I make my clients rely on me too much.”
2. Outer-Directed: Someone or something else is the cause. “My customers aren’t utilizing my support staff.”
3. System-Directed: The lack of an effective system is the cause "There's no system in place for proper project communication."

For Michelle, her first inclination was Outer-Directed. And that's typical, we all have a tendency to blame other people. But if you ask the right questions you can move through the blame game and focus instead on the system solution.

Finding the solution to a frustration begins by asking the right questions. The questions that will enable you to discover what the true, underlying business conditions are.

• First explore the big picture. What is the real impact this frustration has on you, your employees, your customers and your business?
• Then quantify anything and everything that might be a result of this situation. Whether it's lost time, productivity, lost revenue... every frustration is ultimately costing you money.
• Finally, keeping the first two steps in mind, observe the frustration objectively. Avoid blaming people, instead focus on the systems. Walk step-by-step through the sequence of events until you're able to dissect what’s really going on. You'll probably identify areas that can be improved with system implementation right away.

For Michelle, it boiled down to the fact that her clients went to her for answers because they were never told to do otherwise and her support staff did not have the systems in place to regularly contact clients. In short, there was no customer communication system in place.

With a System-Directed frustration identified, you have the clues you need to begin understanding the underlying business condition that is the cause of your frustration.This will eventually lead you to the solution—a system solution. What Michelle needed to do was work with her support staff to create the appropriate communication system for clients.

Now her clients receive introduction emails from their assigned Customer Service Representative at the beginning of each project along with regular status updates until the project is completed. They improved their email signatures and website contact information so that clients can be clear about who to contact for what.

The result? Michelle estimated that establishing this client communication process freed two hours of her time each day. Imagine that! Two hours she can now put to very good use working on her business. Her support staff now has clearly defined steps to take to ensure clients have an exceptional experience on each project. The positive results from this system implementation just keep coming. And it was all born from a frustration Michelle couldn’t see a solution to before!

This process, the Key Frustrations Process, is a client favorite and is really about the essential skill of systemic thinking. It helps you look at problems and frustrations strategically to pinpoint gaps in your systems and processes that a new system or set of systems can solve. When you engage in this process with your team (you should include them!) you end up creating a powerful culture of strategic thinkers looking for ways to solve problems and improve business operations instead of an endless cycle of blame and discouragement.

Share Your Story

How have you turned business frustrations into opportunities for systems development or improvement?