What is Branding?

When one starts a business or a shop we give it a name. The smallest trader to largest world business has names. Only a few companies have what is called a brand name or brand. Branding is commonly used by marketing and advertising professionals but what does it actually mean?

The definitions of brand are many. The easiest one is it is a symbol, name, or mark that when seen by the audience it reminds them of a product or firm that owns the brand. It separates or differentiates them from their competition.

A well-known brand is easily noticed by people even if they do not know the parent company they know the product. It is usually the business name or name of a product or feature mark or style. It delivers the message of the product/company clearly. It confirms the credibility of the company. It helps to connect with the target audience emotionally. It motivates the buyers to act. It cements loyalty of the audience/consumer.

Some well known brands are Nike with its famous tick mark, Google with its name etc. The process by which a product becomes a brand from an initial small unknown product to one that commands the market is known as branding. The brand is carried to the market by a firm with a brand plan in place that is executed to help sales and recognition in the market. One needs to specialize in a niche by understanding the target market and what people want. Branding is a concerted process which takes time and effort. It requires a brand strategy to prop it up. It helps the company that brands products in the long run in terms of advertising, recognition and ultimately revenue intake.

Differentiation of Brands: The Benefits

In order to differentiate from competitors great effort in time, creativity and money must be spent by companies to sell their brands in the market. The brands that stand out of the crowd win in great respects. To get differentiation one has to use brilliance in innovation or design, advertising creativity or customer service, or a combination of these efforts, and even other methods.

All of these efforts have good rewards for the companies that adopt a plan of differentiation of its products. Differentiation allows the company to earn more revenue. The products and services of the company are worth a lot more to the customers. Customers will be willing to pay more and also remain more loyal to the brands that are differentiated. Take the example of apple i-pod, people queued all night, even days for the product. They did this because the value of the product was high as it is highly differentiated. The product was a great hit in the markets, and earned large amounts of money and fame for Apple Inc.

Differentiation means revenue spending in the anticipation that the consumer will spend more money. But will the consumer pay more out of their pockets? Can the revenue generated from sales of differentiated products cover the cost of the resources that were spent to create the products and the entire gambit of the differentiation campaigns?

According to Potter, Differentiation leads to superior performance if the price premium achieved exceeds any added cost of being unique. The net benefit is what makes the product/s or service/s sale viable.

When considering the brand architecture this type of planning and thought comes into play when trying to work out a differentiation campaign for a product. In a real position one will be working with a business that has grown by itself or has been acquired and has a host of products and services in its portfolio. Now to chalk out a plan to differentiate the products will also serve as a review of the product portfolio to give a healthy audit of them and also benefiting the firm. The framework put into place allows evaluating which brands are baggage and which brands are revenue generators for the company (fliers). The portfolio can be streamlined and tweaked for the performance of the company to improve its performance. This is done by differentiating brands that are viable and removing the brands that are pulling the company down. It is often true that less generates more than having many products in the market. This is the beauty and net benefit of brand differentiation. It creates a simplification and puts focus on value from a few good differentiated products. There are many ways to differentiate and the net benefit method helps to evaluate which ones are the source of higher income and benefits to the firm.

Linking Strategies for Small Businesses

Free links do not exist. Links are made by taking time to craft a blog, using cash to shoot a video, taking time to look for opportunities on the net. All of these require spending time or money. So, there are no fee links, you can see. Say you have a budget of 90,000 Rupees. I will take you through various hypothetical link building processes and spend the budget of 90,000 Rupees on them.

It is a wise practice to spend money and time wisely to get maximal returns for your investment. First you should take stock of your SEO situation. What stage of the SEO are you in. Different companies are in different stages of SEO and will require different strategies. You should ask the questions: What stage are you in? Have you done any SEO efforts before? Have you bought links or made linking before? What is a reasonable goal to achieve in this situation? How will we increase domain authority and also increase long tail traffic? How can we boost the ranking of certain pages in the SERPs? Who is my competition and how does he/she rank? How much work will be required to rank higher than the completion? These are just a few examples of questions that one would have to address.

Remember you have 90,000 Rupees. One can easily spend ¾ of the amount on directory submissions. It should take about 5 hours to do so. Before using the money I would do a little leg research into which directories are out there and what do they offer. I would not submit my site to spammy ones. Some paid directories are Yahoo!, Business.com etc. These are strong link juice directories. You might want to consider annual renewal costs as well. Anyone who is not listed should do this activity. You do not want to submit to directories if they are low quality. You might be declined and lose your money. It is wise to spend your money over a few months do not submit all at once. You can submit to directories and also do some creative link building side by side. You may notice a spike in backlinks then a lull may follow.

You might want to also consider outreach methods to promote linking, which is inexpensive in terms of cash you might allocate. It however requires investment in time. You can hire underpaid call center staff or interns to do your PR. You might want to give them a few guidelines in SEO (the practices and processes), what an anchor text is, how linking is done. This will help them select good link worthy partners. And they will not spam. You might want to spend a little money in the outreach process by offering discounts, free samples, and financial incentives to acquire good links. Offering free products and discounts will generate interest. Make sure the money is well spent and give results in sales. You do not want to spend more than what you gain. You might want to consider incentives as a way to generate interest as well. A free trial, a demo or white paper will do the trick. The trick is to be wise and patient.

Just how will you measure the results of your campaign? You can use coupon codes for every outreach target; send visitors to a smaller site or landing page, or tracking URL; make use of Google Analytics to track the long term value. Spreading the good word can be done by anybody but the public relations department (PR Dept.) is the most appropriate.

You may want to consider buying links. But this is not a white-hat activity it is black –hat, and I discourage it no matter how tempted you may get. Google will detect buying links and is set to reward those who employ white-hat techniques in linking.

You might want to consider viral marketing by including good content that people would like to link to like: blog posts, inforgraphics, a widget, a video, a funny 404 pages, a comic strip, etc. By putting interesting varying content you might get links organically compared to buying links. You can consider content marketing as well. It will generate a lot of links. You can use teams on paid service sites. You can also use social networking sites to spread the buzz. This will give you good linking provided your content is good enough.

Once you do all or some of these activities you will be able to generate a lot of links as possible. Hopefully your page ranking will improve in the SERPs and you can track both organic traffic and mark any upward trends as well. You can also hopefully stay ahead of your competitors. Good luck to you!

Thoughts about optimizing for variation in product

It is very difficult to help ranking of site with product variations which require the use of long tail key phrases. What exactly do product variations mean? For example you have a clothing site. You are selling tops for women and children. And you have a page which is for children tops and women tops. The tops come in different sizes and colours; black crêpe women’s top is a product variation that I was alluding to. Also you can see it uses long tail phrase. There may be various variations and combination of phrases. How do you optimize for these product variations?

For the customer (user point of view) it would be practical to make one page with buttons going to different shades and cloth types as well as sizes of each. But how can you optimize the website for products with these variations? As the key phrases will convert more, it is just handy and very important to optimize the clothing website for long tail key phrases related to the varying products.

There are two strategies I can think of:

To optimize the main page of the website for all long tail key phrases, by using and pointing some links with proper long tail key phrases in anchor text. Maybe one can use colour names in the copy pages.

To create separate pages for the various variations of colour, fabrics, and sizes; while keeping the main product page the same.

Option two is rather easy to visualize. One can create as many pages as you have colour variations and maybe link to them from a sort of selection page. The user is given various options and on selection he/she will be lead to that page. This step has been responsive to SEO and is a quick method to get ranked for long tail key phrases. Option one may compromise the usability of the website. Option one has been found to be harder to break into due to competition. I was wondering what your thoughts were about these SEO strategies?

Social Role in SEO: Beyond Google

SEO has grown over the years. People spend time and energy to SEO. They do this to increase their pages ranking and traffic. More traffic leads to sales, sales lead to profits and more the profits the happier the stakeholders. SEO is big to help ranking on Google, Bing or on any search engine. It is all about driving traffic. One might have thought social media has a small non-existent role in SEO. You thought wrong! Lately you might have seen a spurt of articles in favour of social media. They are right! Social helps increase interest in content and drive up pages in ranking and thus leads to good traffic too.

Search has got weaker in recent years due to web spam penetrating the SERPs. Also the integration of non-quality articles has also made search weak. Search can be described analogous to a phone. It revolutionized communication. Social is adding to the traffic driving today.

Linking is like giving a vote. Recently linking can be paid for or the use of means such as spamming blogs and forums with links has resulting in driving traffic but these are black-hat tactics. Consider social media you can get genuine linking. The public will be the judge whether to link or leave your content on SM. SM can be sourced on Facebook or Digg. The quality articles/content will win and be recommended on the SM sites. In today’s days the search has become local. Links are made by local communities and are more relevant to a specific area. More and more people are using other ways to find websites, content, videos and more through other means than Google. SM is becoming more and more relevant to drive traffic.

Creating a Facebook account and twitter account will help you transmit content that your community will link to it will help you drive traffic. You can add to other SM sites as well to generate additional traffic. You will want your content to be interesting and not mechanically generated like a robot. It should be readable and cater to an audience; because they will decided to link to it or not. Hence this is an important quality of building traffic to a site. The content should be fresh as well.

If you follow a plan of this sort to SEO your website I am sure it will be a traffic generator and you will enjoy high ranking and a good response as well.

Authentic Strong Brands

Authentic brands are different from brands that are marketed. They are not products that are just produced by individual companies. They are much more than these –they are the life that resides in a company. They are held above all for the people by the people and made of the people. Just like the constitution of any country. So you can see the importance of a strong authentic brand.

Brands act as a foundation for a company just like the constitution of a company. Its principles are the base foundation for thought and actions by everyone in a firm. If this were not true there would be no consistency, no alignment between what is said and what is performed. The entire framework of the company inside out would be different.

One may ask that this is the same as culture. The answer is yes a little bit and no also a bit. Authentic strong brands are in many are like the culture or identity of a company. They help the culture of the company become visible. They also speak for the values and purpose of the firm. It gives the employees a face and mouth of what is said and done by their hands in the company (sense of direction).

A strong brand has some attributes. It generates more results than sales. A healthy and strong brand last for a long time through consistency, excellent communication, and providing value to its niche customers. Here is a list of 23 brand qualities as stated by Peter Cherverton’s in his book understanding brands (creating success).

They are listed below:

1. A strong brand is based on a proposition of genuine substance and value to the target customer
2. It communicates a clear and powerful brand definition
3. It communicates a clear and is full of emotional charge
4. It communicates an attractive and relevant personality
5. It wins, builds and retains customer loyalty
6. It is well known by the target customer
7. It is held in high esteem by the target customer
8. It communicates and evidences a unique match between the company’s capabilities and the customer’s needs
9. It is a source of competitive advantage
10. It is an investment of increasing value that others will want to own
11. It maintains its relevance over time by evolving in response to changing customer expectations and perceptions
12. It increases the profitability of the business is consistent with the business strategy
13. It makes sense within the business’s brand architecture
14. It provides a protective halo for growth strategies
15. It provides a barrier to entry for new entrants or substitutes
16. It is uniquely positioned in the market and creates a relevant space in the customer’s mind
17. It communicates and demonstrates a clear sense of value
18. It interacts consistently with the customer on as many fronts and on as many occasions as possible
19. It cements the brand definition into the customer’s mind through interactions and positive associations
20. It is managed and supported consistently over time
21. It has values that can be applied consistently and successfully to all parts of the marketing
22. It forms a mix and through all promotional media
23. It makes people want to get their hands on it

These are an exhaustive list of a strong authentic brand. You can see that it fits brands such as Tata and Apple or Coca Cola etc., for example quite well.

Role of Paid Links

Sometimes due to pure pressure of wanting your site rise in ranks in various search engines, one breaks the guidelines prescribed by Google. This is pure temptation. One buys links from vendor. The use of paid links is a reality and has become necessary. One simply has no choice but to backtrack a little and buy links to compete with other sites that are higher in ranking. They too may have bought links and have not got their position organically.

Paid links have a positive impact! Even though this is against the guidelines there are countless site which are using this technique to have their website rank higher. They have resorted to buying links as a regular practice. Purchase and use of quality links in particular the ones with targeted anchor text boost the ranking on Google greatly.

If you decide to go this way by buying links, then here are a few tips:

You should avoid obviously paid links. If you are going against the guidelines then you should be discreet in what you do. It would be good to avoid buying links from websites that promote the facts that they would like to sell their links. They have phrases: sponsored, advertisers, paid reviews, and paid pots. This will give you the inclination that they are the ones if you link to you have a high chance of raising the alarm at Google. You would like to look somewhere else.

You would want to purchase links from identified sites that are relevant to your needs. For example a website on frogs you will look for nature or pet sites. If you find the site of no relevance, just avoid using them.

If you are buying links, you will want to keep its look natural. Varying the anchor text (this is needed to be specific to your needs) and the destination of the link either your website or internal pages. The placement of the links should also vary. One should aim to get the links in the main body of the page content as much as possible. It would also be good to get a few relevant links in the sidebar of a website. This will give the linking a natural look.

Bargaining with the site owner for the site you found (which you would like to link too) is needed. Once you get a site you would like to link to you can always negotiate. Be creative and see what type of people have made the site you like. The webmaster would most likely refuse your request but the hobbyist or other person would most likely accept your offer. Sometimes you can donate to a charity and get links as well. The opportunity for good links is always there. It would be wise to keep all your options open and also have patience.

Facets of Small Business Branding

A business can increase its value that it offers its clientele by promoting a certain quality and differentiating itself. One must understand what drives the clients to buy or use the service. One may think that is a low price that does the trick. But, this is not always the case.

These are certain factors which may help:

Building trust by delivery of products and services on time with the same quality.

Building the security of the clients information and data

Building a strong relationship by cementing the bonds through repeat orders

Capability of offering something outside the envelop; offering more and delivering the goods

Capabilities of offering them something that will benefit make them look better

Capability of giving them something that will increases their power.

Capability of making and motivating the client to freely associate with you and make them feel right.

These are traits that one can look at to improve their business associations with clients. And hopefully it will increase your business in a positive way.