Chapter 5 SBDC

What Defines Your Brand?

• Branding is the process of crafting a business’ identity, messaging, and overall ethos with careful and thoughtful design.
• Branding involves visually and verbally deciding on the story you want to tell about your company.
• Marketing involves sharing that story with consumers in a compelling way.
• Visual elements like logos, color schemes, and specific ads often come to mind when thinking about a brand.
• Effective marketing and branding cannot completely define a brand, as negative experiences can also shape it.
• To better define a brand, consider why the business exists, its story, the problems it solves, why customers should choose it, the brands you admire, and what message you want to convey.
• Strong visual elements, such as logos, color schemes, and headlines, greatly influence consumer perception, therefore businesses should aim for consistent look and voice.

Setting a Marketing Budget

• A business cannot succeed without a marketing strategy, devote 7-8% of annual revenue to marketing.
• Retail stores may need up to 20% of annual revenues to marketing during their early years.
• A marketing partner will create a plan, execute every aspect, communicate clearly, and provide understandable billing reports.

Judging marketing sucess

• No matter the marketing tactics ROI should be analyzed to track success.
• Key performance indicators (KPIs) need to be established when creating a marketing plan.
• Marketing success takes time, and doesn't guarantee immediate success.
• Continue to adjust/discard tactics as the market and customers are always changing.

Creating a Marketing Plan

• An effective marketing and communications strategy should be developed from the moment you start planning your business and onward.
• A marketing plan involves assessing your situation, identifying the target audience, setting marketing goals, and researching and selecting tactics.

Assess Your Company’s Current Situation

• Businesses should define your business and products or services, then show how it sets itself apart from the competition.
• SWOT analysis defines a company's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a time-tested method used by marketers to analyse its situation.
• Strengths: How are your company's products and services different and better than your competitors?
• Weaknesses: What do your competitors do better?
• Opportunities: What opportunities can you capitalize on?
• Threats: What factors could realistically cause the business to fail?
• Be honest and identify company weaknesses and threats to overcome them.

Identifying Competitors

• Remember that your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are only important as they relate to your competitors.
• Businesses always have competitors no matter how innovative.
• Identify direct and indirect competitors to perform a SWOT analysis.
• Objectively evaluate your company against its competitors using a 1-5 scale and remain impartial.

Identifying Your Company’s Unique Value Proposition

• Your unique value proposition describes what your company offers, how you solve needs, and how your company differs from the competition.
• Assessing the company strengths and communicating them is the most crucial purpose.

Target Audience

• For B2C businesses, the characteristics of your target audience may include age, gender, marital status, family size, and level of education.
• Characteristics also include annual income, job, hobbies, buying frequency and attitudes toward your goods and competitors' products, and geographic location.
• For B2B businesses, characteristics also include geographic location, industry (NAICS or SIC code), the size and annual sales.
• B2B characteristics include their tenure in business, whether they import/export and degree of loyalty to vendors, buying process, and decision-makers.
• Identify your ideal customers and their characteristics in B2C or B2B sales.
• The target audience for your product may differ from the end user.
• Fictional one-paragraph profiles known as “personas” can help keep track of your audience segments.
• Remember customers have established patterns and you need to give them a reason to form a relationship with your business.
• Target audiences may include existing customers and loyalty programs to retain loyal customers.

Identifying your target audience

• Gather information about your target audience from data you collected during market research, along with extra additional research and current customers.
• Ask current customers about how they learned about your business, what they prefer about your brand, where they normally shop, what they read and watch, and which social media and websites they use.
• Break down the target audience to prospective customers into categories based on similar characteristics.

Defining Your Marketing Goals

• A good marketing plan needs to define specific, measurable goals tied to sales and profitability.
• SMART goals helps makes sure the right goals are being set, it is an acronym that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Specific Example, raise $10,000 by September 1.
• Measurable Example, Improve the number of highly satisfied responses on customer surveys by 25%.
• Attainable Example, Increase monthly revenue by 10%.
• Relevant Example, Increase sales in a small audience segment by 30%.
• Time-Bound Example, Increase average quarterly revenue to $37,500 over the four quarters of next year.
• KPIs, are signs indicating if you're headed in the right direction.
• KPIs include revenue, sales growth rate, number of leads, cost per lead, acquiring new customers, and number of customers.

Marketing Tactics Examples

• Examples of popular and proven marketing tactics include billboard and poster advertisements, television and radio advertisements, print media ads (newspapers, magazines), newsletters and direct mail.
• Additional Marketing Tactics examples include brochures, letterheads and business cards, promotional events, direct sales and online ads, video ads on different websites.
• Each marketing tactic has its benefits and downsides

Important Aspects of Messages

• Effective marketing messages should contain a clear, concise, and memorable headline; a value proposition; a reason to act now such as a coupon code; and a clear call-to-action
• It should also contains an eye-catching image.

Choosing a mix

• Choose a successful marketing mix for engaging them and energize them to become customers as what happens will rely on the behavior of your target audience.
• Evaluative questions to evaluate the target audience may include, what types of media do they interact with? Where do they purchase? How long to take to make a purchasing decision?
• Analyze competitors marketing and strategies to identify the appropriate mix.
• Best decision will rely on observing them and adjusting where necessary.

The Four Ps of Marketing

• The Four P's: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion aids in making marketing decisions.
• Product: What does it do? What need does it fill?
• Place: Where should you sell it?
• Price: How much is it worth?
• Promotion: How will people know/find out?

Creating a Marketing Calendar

• After deciding marketing tactics, make a marketing schedule to determine timelines, implementation, schedules, budgets, and responsibilities for your campaigns for the year.
• A marketing calendar can be constructed using clean online tools or a basic spreadsheet program.

Publicity and Public Relations

• Publicizing success stories, community involvement, new products, and expertise is good to show publicity.
• Seminars and workshops are a form of marketing, and also serve as great PR opportunities.
• Local reporters and marketing firms will help send information about the company out to the public.
• Personalized news and keeping a relevant message spreads the word.

Power of Online Marketing

• Small business should engage in online marketing to gather new customers and establish themselves as a brand.
• A website is the base for marketing.
• Consumers do online research prior to a purchase and use the internet.
• Consumers use online sources as much as combined forms of other revenues.
• Online marketing provides benefits that can match prices to traditional methods such as TV.

Website Tips

• A good website should be visually appealing with the brand's voice/image, intuitive, for customers and provide good offers for customer to return.
• Website can be enhanced with help from "Grow With Google."
• Michigan SBDC has partnership with “Grow With Google" in teaching business techniques.

Using Your Website to Grow Your Business

• Websites with contact forms can help users engage further as leads and are more attractive.
• SEO, improves Google ranking so people can cross your brand and then browse the websites.
• Make sure there is high quality/original content on the page of the website.
• High quality content includes video, images and articles on pages for the product and company.
• A keyword will come into play when the potential customer is trying to search for something similar to your name.
• Keywords are classified into term and broad term.

Key Terminology

• Head terms are the few short words and topics, they might be very mixed and can get visitors who do not look for any services.
• If you are using a very specific keyword to try and describe a certain service in a range, then you will want to use short tail.
• Website structure should be mobile friendly, have blog articles, fixed links and easy navigation.

Other Search Engine Tactics

• Using similar titles and rewording it to try and get people to see that your name is there does not add value.

Social Media Tips

• Social media is low risk, where younger audiences turn to it as a daily habit.
• Promoting different brand awareness to new different users can help get people's attention.
• Customers will continue be engaging as the business builds credit and performance.

Internet Platforms

• Customers might be more inclined to visit platforms such as Google, Instagram

FaceBook

• Use Facebook to get your company/branch out with the 71% of user base on American internet who actively use facebook

Website Visitors

• Users stay on website, should make potential customer feel more familiar to the brand.
• Information can be built to develop trust with customers with testimonials and key people giving it out. _ You have to offer them something of value to get the information back.
• Website contact forms must req name and email because more forms may drop dramatically.

Always Follow Up With Online Leads

• After obtaining leads:
  • Reach out within the first 5 minutes vs 30 minutes and 21x greater chance qualifying instead of 20 hr.
• Digital tool:
  • Call center, Live Chat, and Email marketing can help with the process of being extra vigilant.

Never Stop Improving Your Online Marketing

• Data can increase your revenue, the page views increase over time.
• Use Google Analytics to show tracking code on data relating to website and traffic.
• The amount of visits to pages can show how interested that might be.
• High-quality content drives up viewers and reduces the Bounce Rate over time.

Managing Online Reviews

• Get good reviews when looking for a specific service/product with talk or automated messages.
• Review from an upset client, respond with understanding and be sympathetic.
• Can contact the platform if someone does not have any past interactions with the business