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EXTEND YOUR BRAND: Turn Your Employees Into Brand Ambassadors

 

Guest Post By: Cyndi Zidell

No matter what type of business you are in, your employees are your greatest assets. They humanize your company. While logos, taglines and marketing campaigns are important to your brand’s success, employees are the brand custodians that are responsible for delivering the brand promise.

To leverage your brand, creatively tap into your employees’ networks – both offline and online. It is a way to reach new markets, generate “buzz”, and put a real face on your business. In today’s world your business needs the human touch integrated with marketing your goods and services in order to succeed.

You will want to develop a healthy, supportive work environment developing enthusiastic, engaged communicators with a good work ethic. To determine Brand Ambassadors from your employee pool, you will want to directly engage them and obtain their input on such matters as: Performance of your business’ core values; customer service delivery – is your company delivering the highest level, and if not obtain their ideas for improvement; engagement of the workforce across all levels of the company or business.

Once you have identified your Brand Ambassadors consider the following areas to make the best use of their talents:

  1. Share the Knowledge. Find an opportunity to connect your employees with your brand. Starbucks CEO Charles Schultz states that, “The (Starbucks) merchant’s success depends on his/her ability to tell a story.”
  2. Build Community. Actively participating in the community in which your business is located enriches your company. Encourage your employees to volunteer and/or participate in team building community events. Collecting food or clothing for needy or displaced persons; promoting spay, neutering and pet adoptions, and fundraising for education or charitable events are some examples.
  3. Seize Every Opportunity to Communicate With Your Employees. Speak honestly with your employees about your business achievements as well as the opportunities and challenges your company faces. When you build a sense that your employees are important to your business, they will be more willing to work to meet your goals.
  4. Encourage Participation. Create a company newsletter or blog and allow employees to contribute, or offer topic suggestions. Identify employees with excellent communications skills to post on your social media sites strictly adhering to the your company’s standards for those types of communications.

A company should strive to create Brand Ambassadors from their employees no matter the size of the organization. When this is achieved, each employee will be positively marketing the company to their individual circles of influence creating larger opportunities for increased sales and profitability. When you find Brand Ambassadors within your company that have made a positive difference to your business’ performance, recognize those employees. Public recognition is an excellent way to encourage your advocates to keep up the good work and a way to inspire others to get involved.

 

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Take Flight With Your Elevator Pitch

Even if you’re good and take the staircase, you’ll want a brief, intriguing “elevator pitch” or branded statement when someone asks, “What do you do?”

Your goal with this elevator pitch as a lead-generation tool, is to leave the person with a clear synopsis of what you do, engaged and asking for more, in “Really, that’s interesting, tell me more…”

Recently, we participated in a networking seminar that touched on refreshing your elevator pitch, and motivated us to take another look to make sure it was adaptable to the setting we were in, relevant and consistently delivered in a genuine fashion.

A few key components your “under 15 seconds long pitch” should address:

  • Describe who you are, and what benefits you offer for your clients or customers: “I enlighten” or “We empower”
  • Describe the market you want to serve, your ideal client specifically: “small businesses” or “small businesses in the Inland Empire” or “lifestyle brands in LA County”
  • Describe what you offer, your unique selling proposition, what makes you different using flavorful but easy to understand words: “graphic design, marketing and brand awareness” or “creative direction, design and core messaging” or “personalized attention, savvy design and brand awareness”
  • Describe a solution or an answer that you can provide or offer – why they might care and what they’ll benefit by working with you: “so you can market your brand with confidence” or “so they can project the best cohesive brand image for building business” or “so they have a visually compelling brand that connects with their audience”

Once you have the key components of your pitch, arrange them into an effective, free-flowing statement along these lines…

“I provide savvy businesses in LA County with creative direction, graphic design and core messaging so they can market their brand with confidence.”

See you in the elevator!

 

 

 

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Sum It Up With A Unique Tagline

An important part of creating your brand identity is through the creation and consistent use of a unique tagline.

Clever brand taglines are created in many shapes and sizes, serving as a brief, supportive statement, phrase or question that align with your business, and captures your company’s brand essence, tone and personality.

A tagline strengthens your brand positioning.

An effective tagline should evoke an emotional response, spur interest and be memorable.

So when brainstorming on the different types of taglines, consider how it distinguishes the business from its competition, and determine the ultimate response you desire.

Taglines can be a number of things:

Short/Motivational

“Eat Fresh.”

“Just Do It.“

Thought-provoking

“Got Milk?”

Evocative

“Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.”

Positioning

“The ultimate driving machine.”

Descriptive/Defining

“The happiest Place on Earth.”
“The quicker picker-upper.”

“Expect More. Pay Less.”

Identifying the business category

“Love the skin you’re in.”

“Drivers wanted.”

“The Lifestyle Brand Boutique.”

Above all, a tagline should be used frequently and consistently to reinforce its message. What response does your tagline convey?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Three’s a Crowd!

Which CMS Platform to Choose for your Website?

If you’re an agency that offers website design, you may be hit with a wave of website woes sooner than later. Maybe not exactly woes, but having three good platform choices in front of you!

For starters, you’ll need to know about three content managed systems, or CMS, that you have at your fingertips.

Those three CMS platforms are:

  • WordPress
  • Joomla
  • Drupal

You will want to do research — or see that your web designer does it for you — to note the similarities and differences of the platforms, the benefits, cost, and of course, which will best suit your needs.

As part of the re-brand of pd+a, the platform that worked best for perryadvertising.com was WordPress.

Why? It’s free to download a customizable theme — the others offer free too, but being already versed with the workings of blogging using WP and its growing popularity, it made sense.

Through the development and launch of perryadvertising.com, and with several client websites in development using the WordPress Platform, the learning curve diminishes, confidence builds, creativity flourishes, and productivity increases which helps to keep the budget on track.

As with Joomla and Drupal, WordPress offers continuous updates of plug-ins that usually entail security patches and sometimes increased functionality. Plugins can be straightforward to use, and are often customizable to fit your site objectives.

If you want to surround yourself with local CMS enthusiasts, there are numerous meet-ups, like the WordPress group at: http://www.meetup.com/inlandempirewp/ and online tech support to help.

That resource, along with having a trusted, competent developer on your team is priceless.

Another priceless resource to have with today’s security issues, sophistication and persistence of those determined to rein in havoc is to establish an on-going web maintenance plan — a “guardian angel”…to help keep your beautiful new site, healthy, up and running.

Now, here are some highlights on three CMS Platforms to help you make the right decision.

As always, do diligent research, and focus on the purpose, goal and complexity of the website, the budget, timeline, and the skillset of the person or persons assigned to the website updates and upkeep, to help you choose the right platform.

WordPress –

Relatively easy to use for a very simple site, or manageable with a deeper understanding of development, to create a customized, branded site using a seemingly endless choices of free and premium (paid) customizable themes, and free and premium plug-ins, that will help you build a site designed to function just as you mapped out. There are some well-regarded plug-ins, such as WooCommerce, that can help you turn your WordPress site into an eCommerce site.

The WordPress community is exceptionally large and is quite generous with knowledge and help. Facebook has several robust WordPress groups on it. WordPress.org has two-day WordCamps happening all over the world for designers and developers, for a surprisingly low cost. It also has an extensive online support forum.

For the following overviews, I consulted with an expert web developer.

Joomla –

Joomla is a somewhat user-friendly platform that’s used for more-complex sites, including eCommerce sites. Their free and mostly premium plug-ins (which provide added functionality) are known as “extensions,” and there are many attractive customizable free and premium themes available. The learning curve for Joomla is steeper, the developer community is not as extensive as WordPress, and it may be more difficult and perhaps more expensive to find timely support for issues. There is one Joomla group at the time of this writing on Facebook that can help you with issues that crop up, but their main website has a community forum.

Drupal –

Drupal is versatile and customizable, but requires ample time to develop, which means a much bigger budget, with expert developer skills required for more complex websites. This platform includes, but is not limited to, online stores. While there don’t seem to be any Drupal groups on Facebook at this time, they have a community forum on their site to provide support.

“Google” any of these content management systems to reveal a variety of resources to help you before, during, and after the development of your site.

Now can see why three’s a crowd? 

With a clear understanding of your website objectives, resources and budget in hand, you’re sure to make the correct choice.

Let us know your experience with a CMS Platform!

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Re-branding? Key Factors to Consider to Remain Viable

When Re-branding, Will It Help Or Hurt Your Image?

Imagine a brand so successful it is a household name: A brand that has been in existence since 1902. Certainly over time, the brand has had several leadership transformations in which new ideas were tested, successes measured, practices overhauled, and yet the brand survived turbulent economic times and buying habit trends for over 111 years. The brand was J C Penney’s, now known as JCP.

When a brand makes modifications process begins with “cosmetics”: a new logo design, new color standards and tagline to capture the brand’s essence. These positive aspects of re-branding, done correctly, can have resounding success.

When going beyond a change in the look and feel of the company that represents its new direction, the customer must be eased in to this new model, but to give them time to accept the other transformations in the new vision.

In the case of JCP’s new modernized logo and name change, it seems there was disconnect with the elements that were working favorably for the store over its history. Instead, all of their changes – logo/name change, vendor and price strategy, and new advertising campaigns – were all rolled out at once, allowing for resistance from their loyal, established customer base.

If Penney’s goal was to broaden their base, attract new customers and positively impact sales to this well-established brand, the effect of “too much too soon” seems to have produced the opposite effect.

Reviewing the lessons from JCP and other large brands, we have made a more nuanced transition as perry design + advertising recently re-branded after 16 years serving businesses’ advertising and marketing needs.

If you are thinking about making changes to your business brand, consider the following:

(1) What is it about your current operations that your customers like, and how to embrace those elements into your new image?

(2) Considering your target market. If you are going after a new demographic, are you making sure your business is in alignment with your product, pricing and media reach?

(3) Are you planning to stage the rollout of your brand’s changes so that it is subtle and easier for your customers to adapt?