[Aop] Wendy Stevens Nashville, 23 Powerful Marketing and Branding Tips Geared to Drive In More Traffic

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Wendy Stevens Nashville Tennesee,  23 Powerful Marketing and Branding Tips
Geared to Drive In More Traffic


Wendy Stevens Franklin Tennesee

1. Marketing 101: Develop a powerful and compelling core message. ?Say
something, say it well, say it often.? Why should customers buy from you?
Why should they even take a second glance? You need to build a powerful
message that gets key points across without clutter ? because clutter is
what leads to abandonment. Although this is the essence of a successful
branding and marketing campaign, you?d be surprised how many companies fail
to grasp this concept. 2. Make sure your core message is ?benefit oriented.?
People don?t buy services or products, they buy the benefits of those
services or products. In all your communications, make sure your message
translates into specific benefits. 3. Make sure your initial message directs
prospects toward a specific action. Your customers want to be told where to
go to find the solutions they seek. This should be abundantly clear to all
four major personality groups (Amiables, Drivers, Expressives, and
Analyticals). When you invite customers to go somewhere to learn how to
interact with your site and find out more about your company, you can
greatly increase your potential for conversions. 4. Develop imagery that
enhances your message and intrigues your target audience. The images on your
site should enhance your message by being visually stimulating. Sometimes
this may only be an aesthetic; other times it may involve ?timelining?
imagery and content together to use space more effectively and get across a
message in a more distinctive fashion. 5. Develop a unique value proposition
(UVP). Sit down with a branding or marketing expert and define a UVP for
your company as a reminder of your competitive advantages. Make sure these
advantages are customer-centric, not business-centric. 6. Incorporate your
UVP into all online and off-line media for brand consistency and saturation.
Make sure your message constantly reiterates your competitive benefits and
your UVP. You never know which aspect of your brand a prospect might respond
to, so make sure the message is consistently broadcast in whatever media you
use. 7. Tell customers what they want to hear, not what you want to tell
them. We call this inside-out marketing. Too often, companies unknowingly
focus on what they want to say, rather than what customers want to hear. An
outside-in perspective with a true 360° view of your company from the
customer?s viewpoint is best accomplished with the help of a qualified
branding and marketing firm that can determine customers? attitudes,
expectations, and requirements. 8. Build value ? not boredom. I leave this
one to Napoleon Hill: ?It is as useless to try to sell a man something until
you have first made him want to listen as it would be to command the earth
to stop rotating? (Think and Grow Rich 9.Lead with a header and close with a
call to action. Readers are much more likely to read your message, white
papers, case studies, etc., if you pique their interest or curiosity through
well-written headers, transition headers, body content, and calls to action
that lead to the next step in a sales cycle. Visit marketing and brand
development companies for details on building a sales-generating brand. 10.
?SCAN I AM.? Today?s readers don?t read, they scan. They scan for areas of
interest, offers, links to relevant information, etc. So it is important to
set up your text so that it can be quickly scanned. Online text is not
linear like a book; it?s interactive to follow users? nonlinear demands. 11.
Develop a branding ?blueprint? that ? shows clearly how you expect prospects
to interact with your messages. This blueprint should start with an outline
and show all paths from all forms of communication and how they lead to firm
sales. Again, marketing and branding professionals can help develop a plan.
12. Evaluate your plan. Have others evaluate your plan. Re-evaluate and
adjust. No plan is perfect, and any plan should be constantly adjusted to
maximize its effectiveness. It is critical to continually audit your
branding plan and all your marketing media. 13. Re-evaluate again. 14.
Adjust your blueprint ? to adapt to the market, trends, technologies,
customer demands, etc. Review quarterly. Every successful brand in the world
is optimized regularly. Branding is an ongoing effort, not a one-time
occurrence. 15. Use measurable tools to track prospect response. Use online
forms and phone logs to track responses from prospects. Capturing
information via legitimate means allows you to re-market to this customer
base and to see which forms, programs, tools, and salespeople are getting
the best results. 16. Build a list. Use online forms and phone logs to build
an opt-in prospect list to serve as a powerful conversion tool. (See below.)
17. Re-market, re-market, re-market. A customer may need to see a message
more than five times to even notice it once! Keep your marketing efforts
going ? and going ? 18. Don?t forget referrals! Build a specific program to
track, manage, and solicit referral business. We like e-mail campaigns and
direct mail for this. Give us a call to discuss how to make these work for
you: 703-968-6767. 19. Up-selling! Your existing customer base is your best
source of more business. Develop a formidable plan to make sure your
customers know what services you provide and that you keep your core and
other related messages in front of your customers as often as possible. (It
may take up to 10 forms of contact for a customer to identify with your
brand) Remember, sell the benefits?not the service! 20. Use programs and
tools to generate interest. People like simplicity and packages, offers, and
deals that are easy to understand and evaluate. By creating various packages
or free tools for prospects to interact with, you can stimulate interest
that may have waned otherwise. (We offered a free ?ImageCheck? a few years
ago that reviewed a Web site?s brand impact; it was very popular and led to
lots of new business.) 21. Hit them from all angles! It?s called shotgun
marketing. A shotgun shell contains hundreds of tiny lead balls, increasing
your chance of hitting a target. Marketing is much the same ? the more media
you use effectively, the better the chance that your message will be seen
and remembered. There is no secret solution to marketing; it?s all about
creating a total user experience across all platforms that projects your
brand. 22. Use technologies and trends; they are your friends! Using various
technologies such as online bookings, reservations, response forms, PDF
downloads, Blogging, Wikis, internal search engines, and newsfeeds can have
a dramatic effect on your overall brand identity and on your marketing
strategy in general. There are too many benefits to go into here, but feel
free to visit web design creative firms to learn more. 23. Calls to action.
Calls to action are perhaps the most important aspect of marketing and
advertising. After all, what good is any message or image if it doesn?t
initiate an action that leads to a conversion? When developing a call to
action, remember the four personality types and make use of available
technologies to make compelling, interactive offers. You should have a
unique call to action for each type of person who represents your customer
base. For example ? Visit branding marketing and advertising agencies to
learn more about successful branding and to request a free evaluation of the
effectiveness of your home pages.

Scott C. Margenau is president of ImageWorks Studio, an award-winning
marketing, branding and advertisng firm specializing in online and off-line
media. Visit  for more info.

 Scott C. Margenau is president of ImageWorks Studio, an award-winning
marketing, branding and advertisng firm specializing in online and off-line
media. Visit  for more info.
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