How To Turn Your Company Into A Killer Brand Name

By: Mahnoor Awan

What’s a brand?

A brand is not only related to the product or service you’re selling, neither is it your website, nor the name or the logo of your company. A brand is so much more than that. It’s (almost) intangible – it’s the feeling or experience generated when people hear your company’s name.

Why is it important to create a brand?

Creating a brand instills a confidence in users that your company is recognized and reliable. Especially if your company is online based, it is important because you can no longer do that on a one-to-one level, as you’re not personally there to convince your customers.

In 2016 so far, the online markets’ user penetration in e-commerce has been 38.5% alone, and is expected to rise to 49.72% by 2020. Considering how the world services are moving online, consumers prefer going for brands they know of, as they feel comfortable giving them their personal information like, email address and credit card information. Based on a study by Nielsen, 60% of global consumers with Internet access prefer to buy new products from a familiar company.

Now that we know why having a brand is so important, the real question is:

HOW TO BRAND YOUR COMPANY?

Whether you’re an already established company or a startup, here are a few, easy, and cost-efficient ways to brand your company.

CHARACTERIZE YOUR BRAND

The first, and probably the most important thing is to define your brand. Here a few questions to get you started:

• Why are you in business?
• What does your brand offer?
• How does your company relate to the needs/wants of customers?
• What are your company’s goals and objectives?
• What kind of ideas or visions it supports?

Answering these questions will help you narrow down the messaging you want to relay to your customers. It will help you differentiate your company from your competitors, to define the characteristics of your brand and, give it a personality that is relatable to customers. It will help you create the image/story of your brand that you want to portray – an image or narrative that goes beyond the functionality of a product/service and evokes emotions instead.

5 Tips on How to Create a Great e-Newsletter

By: Mahnoor Awan

You’re sitting in a boardroom meeting and your boss tells you to come up with another marketing channel to promote your brand. An email newsletter! That’s what you all agree upon, in order to stay in close contact with your customers, to offer contests and promotions, and of course, to serve as a reminder of your brand. Without a doubt, an e-Newsletter does have many benefits:

• Cost-efficient to share and distribute
• A less costly way to promote events and special offers
• Easy to distribute educational content
• Helps to maintain relationships with your customers
• Provides results that can be tracked straightaway

It all sounds easy and simple. But, creating an email newsletter is a great marketing tool ONLY if done right.

For optimal results, here are 5 basic things you should be doing before you send out your e-Newsletter.

1. Create content your customers want

So, we all know you’re creating a newsletter to promote your brand and all that you have to offer. But if all you do is talk about your brand, not many people will want to open your newsletter on a regular basis. And chances are, your unsubscribers will start growing quickly.

Your newsletters should be more about what your customers would like to read, rather than what you’re trying to sell.

In this case, the 80-20 rule comes in handy. Your content should be 80% educational and 20% promotional. Put your reader first. Create customer-focused content that will interest your readers. You could include topics like:

• Problems in your industry and their solutions
• Tips and quick facts
• Technology developments within your industry
• Industry trends
• Upcoming events
• Advice from industry experts

2. Insert multimedia

Remember that old, over-used saying, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’? Well, there’s a reason it’s still used today. Images, videos, or any kind of visuals are a great way to grab your reader’s attention, if, they’re interesting and eye-catching. However, even multimedia has to be done right. Make sure the images and videos you use are web friendly and have alt text in case they can’t be displayed. Videos can’t be embedded directly in eBlasts, but you can put in a link to your video from a still frame, embedded as an image. Just don’t make your entire newsletter an image as many spam filters will flag it, and your email will most likely not pass through to your customers’ inbox.

How To Increase Survey Response Rates Through Incentives

So you are planning to conduct a survey, the one you need to gain valuable market data and insight into your customers. You’ve structured it so it’s easy to complete, crafted the subject line to increase the email’s open rate, tested your copy out to anyone who would read it…but you are still unsure if anyone will respond.

Consumers are solicited every day to participate in surveys so how do you ensure that you set yourself apart from your competitors? Try adding an incentive.

What kind of incentive should you give?

Research has shown that cash is your best option, however cash is difficult to distribute. Coupons and gift cards are an easier alternative.

Evidently, your incentive is going to be determined and limited by your budget but you should also keep your survey demographic in mind when thinking about what kind of incentive to use in order to appeal to the largest amount of respondents possible. Universities often offer gift cards for their textbook stores because that appeals to students on a budget. However, try not to be too specific, which might not appeal to a wide enough audience (e.g. a coupon for garden hoses isn't going to appeal to everyone. Unless you happen to be surveying gardeners!)

How Long Should A Survey Be?

By: Mahnoor Awan

Thinking about launching a survey and wondering how long it should be? If it’s too long there is the fear that people might not be interested in finishing it. If it’s too short then it might compromise the data you’re trying to collect. The question about the perfect survey length has been debatable for a long time. While gathering data that serves the purpose of research and improvement is great, it’s only valuable if:

• Your sample represents the entire population
• The responses are legitimate
• The responders are able to fully understand the questions

When creating a survey there are a number of factors that will determine it’s length such as:

• Your audience base
• Goals of your survey
• The resources you have to act on the data collected

First off, the length of your survey differs with the audience base. Is it a general audience, a panel (a group of people hired by a company to fill surveys in return for some monetary value), or an internal group like employees? For example, the general public, without any incentive wouldn’t want to spend more than 10 minutes of their time on answering questions. The panel on the other hand is getting paid to fill the surveys. And for internal groups like employees, it is often made mandatory.

Most Valuable Keywords

Keywords help customers find your product whether they are part of your website's natural SEO or if they are being used within a paid ad. But all keywords are not created equal. And if your strategy is to use keywords to contribute to your bottom line, you want your keywords to be able to target the right audience and, more importantly, to separate the Browsers from the Buyers.

How to separate Browsers from Buyers

When we look at a typical buying cycle, a customer usually goes through a series of steps, or a journey if you will, of becoming aware of a product before making a purchase.

Typical Customer Journey:

1. Customer becomes aware of product
2. Seeks information
3. Compares to other products
4. Makes purchasing decision
5. Completes transaction
6. Evaluates product after buying and determines its value by keeping or discarding/returning product.

Let’s say that you own a clothing store and someone enters your shop, slowly sifts through all the products displayed on the racks but walks out without making a purchase. Right after you have another customer who walks in with a specific request for something pink and pleated or asks about a particular item in the store. Which customer would you say is further along in the buying cycle?