Ways to Build Your Brand in Short Chunks of Time

Your brand embodies everything that you do and stand for as a business. At a tangible level, your business name, social media marketing services tagline, the colors you use and the content you publish encode your brand and present it visually and conceptually. The visual elements of your brand are a powerful reinforcement of what you’re trying to achieve. Customers recognize your logo. Fans know your brand’s colors.Are you using your logo in all the places you should? Is it part of your social-media profiles, in your email signature and on your presentations? Do your Twitter and Facebook presences reflect your company’s color scheme? If the answer is no, take a moment to change one thing that’ll bring you closer to a unified visual brand presence such as adding your logo to your email or changing the background color of your Twitter account.Building a solid brand requires a big investment of time. Yet it’s important not to overlook the power of small steps and single interactions that can solidify and share your brand with others.
Here’s a closer look at five ways you can spend small chunks of free time to help build your brand. Get over that and work with what you’ve got. I eventually created a website. Nonetheless, I have major website shame! That's not to say I don’t love the look and feel of my site, jaclynmullenmedia.com, but it’s not optimized for high engagement and honestly it’s out of line with my current business model and offerings. social media marketing companies Yet this very brochure-type site helped me generate substantial sums as a solopreneur these past four years. With this site, I landed speaking gigs at Social Media Week in Miami and Los Angeles and was accepted into the Tory Burch Foundation Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program. How? I set up a site and I began networking, serving my clients, working with my strategic alliances and establishing a credible personal brand. It pains me to think about where I would be today had I waited to first create the perfect website.

Respond to your fans, followers and friends

An accessible brand is one that people want to do business with. One way to help cultivate this image is by being responsive to questions, comments and customer reviews. Spend a minute replying to the latest messages left on your social-media pages, social media marketing plan customer reviews on sites such as Yelp and Google, and touching base with new connections on major networking sites. You’ll strengthen your relationship to a specific customer, while also enhancing your image as a conscientious and responsive business owner. I can say the same about my Facebook cover album and my YouTube channel artwork: "Start before you’re ready" really means just that. There will always be 10,000 things that you'll want to perfect, enhance and improve. But the sooner you begin collecting data and information about your customers' needs (and wants), the sooner you'll be able to update your services, marketing copy, promotions and processes not only to your liking but to your clients’ liking as well.
Make your customers a part of your branding and marketing process, ask for their feedback (on your Facebook business page, of course) and identify those initial strategic alliances.Follow up on one of these suggestions or all three. Either way, you’ll start before you’re totally ready and perhaps end up with a set of tips to share based upon your own entrepreneurial experience.Success in most businesses is built around sales, typically including either an inside or outside sales force or a combination of both.Inside sales typically include communicating with customers remotely, whether via telephone, social media marketing strategy email or any of the many other remote sales tools. Outside sales are executed in person, usually outside the company's office.Since I've never built a business that required an inside sales force, I've enlisted the help of Mark Roberge, chief revenue officer at HubSpot, a Cambridge, Mass.-based inbound marketing software company that has rewritten the rules on inside sales.

Use a social monitoring tool to listen to social trends

Tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck let you follow brand mentions and hashtags in one place, and are a great way to focus your social-listening efforts. Measure sentiment about your brand, spot and deal with any problems being discussed publically about your business, social media marketing and track discussion around high-value keywords to keep your pulse on your industry. Monitor the conversation, learn more about what’s happening and strategically jump into the discussion when you have something to add.Over a period of six years, Roberge increased HubSpot revenue more than 6,000 percent and expanded the team from one to 450 employees in multiple countries so yes, he knows what he’s doing, and HubSpot, which recently closed 2013 with over $77 million in revenue, has become wildly successful as a result.Related: The New Approach to Get Customers Banging
Before you give your job two weeks' notice, identify five to 10 potential strategic alliances for your business who may be able to provide business referrals and insights. Take these individuals out to coffee. Ask how you can support them in return. marketing by social media For example, I gave my business coach social-media marketing consulting. And I constantly made introductions for my other referral sources and shared opportunities with them (even before I became an entrepreneur). Yes, some preparation in identifying these individuals is essential. You don’t want to launch the business and only then begin to conduct this outreach. The sooner you identify strategic alliances and share your new business idea and details of your venture, the sooner you may have potential clients.