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Showing posts with the label Brand Innovation

12 Ways to Elevate Your Personal Brand in 2018

Tips you can use next year to build your brand. If you aren't fully committed to building your  personal brand  yet, it's time to go all-in. I'm a huge advocate when it comes to personal branding -- it's how I built my first  marketing agency. I leveraged my personal  brand  and  bootstrappedits growth , allowing me to avoid taking out a business loan or giving up equity to an investor. To this day, I retain 100 percent ownership of every business I operate. When done right, you are able to establish yourself as an authority, create an authentic voice and attract business through transparency and expertise. I've discussed ways to  build your personal brand  in the past and mentioned some  online personal branding tools  that you can use -- and now I want to talk about effective strategies. I spoke with several  entrepreneurs  to come up with a list of a dozen ways you can elevate your personal brand in the upcoming year. 1. Launch a weekly email newsle

5 Steps for Making Your Brand Identity More Consistent

Use these steps to get your branding identity back on course to projecting a clear and concise message. With so much content flowing through an organization, from ad campaigns and branded marketing materials to digital media content and social media updates, it’s easy to see how a company could get a little lost while trying to maintain a consistent brand identity. Multiple people creating many branded elements can make it difficult to keep things aligned. For both big corporations and small business, it can be easy to veer off course, sometimes without even realizing it. The lack of consistency may not be noticeable at first, but failing to identify and stick to a consistent brand identity can eventually have a negative impact. The brand can become disjointed, unreliable and divided so much that it confuses customers, clients, employees, and even the executive team. So, if you feel like you’re starting lose the identify of your brand throughout your organization, use

5 Steps to Becoming a More Recognizable Brand

Grow your business with these simple tips. Do you have a favorite lunch spot? Maybe a cafe that once made a great impression on you? If so, that's the power of branding at work. Your brand image is often the difference between having a lifelong relationship with loyal customers and never being discovered at all. But, building an amazing brand doesn’t happen overnight. It takes time to figure out how to reach your audience in the most effective way possible. By following these simple (but often ignored) steps, you’ll develop a better understanding of what your customers want and how to exceed their expectations. 1. Focus on storytelling, not product features Without a good brand story, your product holds no inherent or emotional value for your customers. As author and story coach  Lisa Cron  tells us, humans are hardwired to respond to stories. When a brand makes a deep impression on us, it impacts our buying behaviour. A  2013  Psychology Today  piece  showed that, w

These are the most powerful brands in the world

For the last five years, Apple held on to the title of the world’s most valuable brand. Then this year, the iPhone maker lost the top spot to Google, according to consultancy  Brand Finance’s Global 500 rankings . As Apple’s brand value tumbled 27% to $107.1 billion in 2016, Google’s increased to $109.5 billion. Amazon, with 53% brand value growth, was close behind at $106.4 billion. Image: Brand Finance Global 500 2017 Eight of the top 10 brands on Brand Finance’s 2017 list are American, reflecting the global dominance of US brands. So where does this leave the rest of the world? Visualizing brands as countries Using Brand Finance’s ranking, cost information website  HowMuch.net  has taken the most valuable brands in selected countries and turned them into a map. Each country is sized to reflect the global value of its biggest brand. After Google, the next most valuable national brand is South Korea’s Samsung, which is in sixth place on the Global 500 list at

6 Simple Ways to Revamp Your Small Business's Online Presence

Most websites focus solely on SEO, but increasing your online visibility involves more than that. When a consumer searches for your company, it’s a fairly safe assumption that you want your website to show up first organically. But how do you make sure it’s super easy for customers to find you, no matter what (or where) they’re searching online? To do that, you’ll need to double-check your online presence to make sure that you’re optimizing all the places you could show up online. From business listings to social profiles, here’s what you should focus on to boost online visibility for your small business. 1. Check all of your business listings Make sure that, not only are you listing your business in the first place, but you’re also providing each listing with consistent, up-to-date information. It’ll make your business much easier to find online. Plus, if it’s easy for consumers to find your number or address, then they’ll be more likely to call or visit. Keep in