Before you can effectively begin working on your brand strategy, it is important to identify your companies “brand positioning”. This is what truly brings your strategy to life.

Brand positioning is something that happens in the minds of the target market. It is the perception the market has of a particular company, product or service in relation to their perceptions of other competitors in the same category. This is going to happen whether or not management is proactive or reactive about their companies positioning in the market. But a company can certainly influence perception through effective strategic action.

Tell me more about building my brand.

If you’re going to take the time to develop a brand strategy, take the steps to make sure that it is going to be as effective as possible.

• How is your organization different in the marketplace?
• Ask your customers, employees and suppliers. Do their comments coincide with your strategy? Your real brand is not always what you may think it is.
• Develop your brand strategy around emotional benefits not features.

Define your brand

• Think of your brand as a unique person with a distinct personality. Try describing that person, then use these traits in all the materials that go to the marketplace.
• Write your companies positioning statement. This is the story that describes the brand and the ideal target for your product or service.
• Determine the look and feel for all graphic elements that the marketplace will interact with.
• Determine how your employees will interact with prospects and customers to communicate your brand and the positioning that you’ve worked so hard to create in the minds of the consumers.

What’s next

Together with your companies unique brand positioning, your brand strategy becomes the essence of what you represent in the minds of your target market. An effective brand strategy helps you communicate consistently with your market, so be sure to follow it in every interaction you have with prospects and customers. These interactions include: your name, pricing strategy, employees, marketing messages, brochures and website just to name a few.

If you have a strategy and branding question, feel free to drop us a note or give us a shout for a “no obligation” shoot from the hip conversation.

A brand is much more than a logo. It’s your company’s identity, a reflection of your product and how customers feel about your firm. Building brand equity is an ongoing process, one that requires careful planning and execution. Ecentric can help your company build an unforgettable brand that stands the test of time.

Your brand is the entire experience that your prospects and customers have with your company. It’s the personality you convey, the voice you communicate in and ultimately what you stand for as an organization. Although your brand does include your corporate logo, website and stationery etc, your brand really exists in the daily interaction you have with the marketplace.

Key elements of your daily brand promise include:

- Your key messaging/positioning on all marketing materials
- The look and feel of your website and print collateral
- Employee interaction with your prospects and customers
- Opinions held by your customers

A strong and unique brand helps you stand out from your competition. It helps bring your unique selling proposition (USP) to life in the mind of your prospects and customers. At its core, branding is continually telling your prospects and customers why they should buy or continue buying from you.

Successful branding creates a sense of familiarity with your products and services, potentially before any interaction has even taken place. This can help build trust and credibility in the minds of the consumer, shortening sales cycles and increasing revenue.

There may or may not be successful brands in your particular industry. When you inevitably go up against a competitor, the one that represents something in the mind of the consumer will have an easier time closing sales and retaining customers. The creation and execution of an effective brand strategy can give your organization the competitive advantage it needs to dominate the marketplace.

The amount of money the marketplace is prepared to pay for your product or service is in many ways is determined by the strength of your brand. This is called brand equity. When your brand reaches “Power Brand” status, you know you’ve arrived. When’s the last time you said “Go input a search query on an internet service provider”… no, you simply say, “Google it.”

Next week we’ll look at the steps and strategies to go about creating a “Power brand”.

If you can’t wait until then and you’d like to discuss how ecentric could help your company with their branding, please give us a shout today.

Over the years we seem to run into similar situations with clients. Whether big or small, many organizations are making similar mistakes with their websites. Sometimes fixing the simple things can make a big difference in your search engine rankings.

Is it really that important to be listed on the top of page one? A recent research study suggested that 90% of internet searchers clicked on one of the top three organic links 100% of the time. Being on the top of page one, clearly results in more targeted traffic to your site.

So what are the easy mistakes to avoid?

1.  Page titles

The page title is found at the top of your browser window. It tells both the page viewer and Google what that specific page is about.

Page titles should be less then 70 characters in length, or they run the risk of being truncated by the search engines. Be sure to use your targeted keyword phrases in each page title. Every page on your website should be optimized for a unique page title.

Page titles should be concise and use only targeted keyword phrases where possible. Don’t waste characters on filler words. It is important to consider that these page titles are written as much, if not more for search engines, then they are for web viewers.

2.  Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are important in motivating searchers to your site. The meta description is the text beneath the page title in the search engine results page (SERP). This needs to be written to communicate clearly the benefit of this particular page. And like page titles it can also be cut off if you use too many characters.

150 – 160 characters is commonly thought to be optimal.

The example below illustrates a random search term for “hair design studio”. The first line in blue illustrates the title tag and the meta description follows below.

3.  Alt tags and header tags

An ALT tag is the search engines way to understand images on a page. Because search engines cannot “read” images, the use of ALT tags on all images ensure search engines know what the content is about.

The header tag tells search engines what the primary purpose of the page is. It is usually situated near the top of the web page much like an actual headline. In the example above, you will see that the number one result for the search term “hair design studios” uses the header tag as described.

<h1 id=”fw-title”><a id=”fw-titlelink” href=”http://www.studiohairdesign.org/”>
Studio Hair Design</a></h1>

<h2 id=”fw-smalltitle”>Hair Salon and Esthetics</h2>

4.  What are your website’s targeted keywords?

Before your company embarks on any major internet marketing initiative or a website redesign, be sure to know exactly what the keywords your site is targeting. Knowing this will help determine the setup of your page structure and navigation naming conventions.

Even for existing sites, each page is an opportunity to be found for unique and different content. Some of your targeted keyword phrases may be more competitive then others to be listed for. Be sure to diversify and target a variety of keyword phrases throughout your site. Each page can realistically target no more then 1 – 3 unique keyword phrases.

5.  Not measuring your results.

So you’ve optimized your site for title tags, meta descriptions and all the other important factors. Now what? Do you know what the fruits of your labors have been? If your not measuring and tracking the results, you have no accurate way to determine if the work you are doing is on track and providing positive results.

Be sure to install and start tracking results on a monthly basis. The most popular tool at this point is Google analytics. It’s easy to install and provides an enormous amount of data to measure how you’re doing.

If you’re ready to start moving those search engine results in the right direction, but aren’t quite sure where to begin, give us a call today.

Social media marketing is the process of marketing your business through social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube, just to name a few. Social media marketing provides a business the ability to connect and interact on a much more personalized and dynamic level than through traditional marketing channels.

Before diving in to any social media site, it is important to have both clearly defined goals and a good understanding of the various sites to which you will be participating.

Your company’s social media goals may include:

· Connecting with your current customers?
· Create relationships with potential customers?
· Establish credibility within an industry?
· Manage your online reputation?
· Respond to customer complaints?
· Try to create “buzz” about your business?
· Rank higher in the search engines for targeted keyword phrases (SEO)?

The social media landscape is hard to ignore these days, particularly for small businesses. The big question is where do you begin with social media?

Below are the first steps to get your business started with social media.

The first thing to do is to determine what sites you should be participating in. By that, I mean contributing to the community and the conversation. Social media should not be a one-way conversation. The best way to do this is to first determine if your customers and potential customers are hanging out there.

A good way to learn where you should be participating is to see what influential bloggers within that market segment are doing. Do a Google blog search or a technorati search using your targeted keywords to determine this.

Once you’ve identified these influential bloggers, check to see what they’re doing. See what social media sites they are using and the type of language and conversation they are engaged in. The first step for anyone that is new to social media is listening. Listen to hear how people communicate, what topics drive response from users and what will create buzz.

Once you’ve determined the most popular sites, that you are going to participate in, you can follow this simple four-step process to get going within social media:

• Setup profiles of your business at the major social media sites. Always include a link to your website and blog. Add a short introduction of you and your business. Remember social media sites are for connecting and not hard-sell tactics.
• Once your profiles are set up and complete, do searches within those sites to find users and groups that relate to your business. These can include potential customers that you’d like to connect with.
• Add yourself to communities that share common interests with your business by joining groups, and “following” like-minded people or requesting them as “friends.” Spend some time listening to what types of conversations and discussions are going on between your new friends, and in your new communities, then join in the discussion when you’ve had a chance to gauge the tone and activity there.
• When you feel comfortable with the situation and you’re ready to join the conversation, be sure to keep the sales pitch to a minimum. Social networking is less about selling then it is about building relationships and contributing to the community in such a way that you become perceived as a market leader. The content that you contribute should be focused on providing valuable information to the people that are interested in you and your business.

Whatever product or service you are selling, Social media marketing is a very cost effective way to gain exposure and interest about your business within a targeted niche.

Do remember, this takes time and sincerity to establish effective long-term relationships that will hopefully lead to business down the road. The most important thing is to stay with it and have some fun while doing so.

8 Secrets to drive targeted traffic to your website.

Like the movie, many business owners today still believe this statement to be true for their own website. “If we build it, they will come”. There was a time when this may have been true, however, those days are gone. According to a recent Netcraft report that suggests there are approximately 240,000,000 websites and blogs in existence and growing rapidly daily. This means extreme competition for the eyes and minds of the people you want to see your site and buy your product or service.

The most basic goal of any website is to generate targeted and motivated traffic. Doing this requires an ongoing digital marketing plan. So where do I start?

Whether you are just beginning the design and development of a new site, or are wondering why my existing web site is not generating the leads you were hoping for, these 8 tips are sure to provide the ground work that will help increase targeted traffic to your site.

Keyword Research:
Whether you hire an SEO firm or do it in house, be sure to uncover the exact phrases that your potential customers are searching for. This is by no means a guessing game either. There are a variety of keyword research tools that can provide insight into what people are searching for and how competitive it will be to rank for those particular words. Wordtracker and Google Keyword tool are a couple of the more popular options.

Copywriting:
Nobody knows your business better than you. But sometimes it takes a talented writer to take what you know and “buff it up” to really make it shine. Good web copy can be the hardest part of the entire digital marketing equation because compelling web copy is based on a unique set of rules. It must draw readers into your site effortlessly giving them the information they need as they navigate around. It must be clear, concise and benefits-centric; using language readers use. It must also flow well within its layout and design. When writing for the web you need to consider at least two audiences: humans and the search engines’ that visit your web site.

Optimize your site for the Search Engines:
Onpage optimization involves populating your site with the keywords you’ve determined as your most critical. Other then ensuring your keyword phrases appear throughout the body, items such as title tags and meta descriptions are the place to start. It is also very important to make sure your site is visible to the search engines. Things like full flash interfaces and graphics for navigation are impossible to be read and indexed for search.

Inbound Link Creation:
Inbound links are links that point users to your page and content. Search Engines see them as a vote of confidence that another site has given you. When a high page rank site has a link that is pointing to you, particularly one that uses your pre-determined keywords, this is SEO gold. In our case, whenever we comment on a blog or submit our link to a directory, we always use the words “Calgary web design” and link those words directly to our site. Search Engines in turn read that link and see us an authority on “Calgary web design”, or Kelowna, depending on the origin of the link.

Social Media Optimization:
Not only are these easy to get powerful inbound links, but this is an incredible tool to talk directly to an engaged and typically supportive audience. Social Media has created a dialogue back and forth not only with the company but also the people that are brand advocates and fans. Experiment with this. Find your voice and take advantage of a communication tool unlike any before.

Offline Advertising and collateral materials:
Ensure that any offline activities like traditional advertising or Direct Mail are in sync with your online messaging. They should always be working together and not inefficient money wasting silos. All offline communication tools are either driving viewers to the website or to simply pick up the phone.

Public relations & article marketing:
Get the word out through both traditional channels and online news and article sources. Write a press release announcing the new venture and submit to both local media as well as online sources. Online news and article sites are typically free and offer two main benefits: they get your story out to the masses and they also offer those important inbound links back to your site. Are you starting to see a common theme? Everything you do, ties directly into your online marketing strategy, and most of it happens outside of your corporate website alone.

Get out and shake some hands:
I’d be remiss if I suggested that all this will benefit your business without getting out and making some personal connections. Face to face relationships for most small business will never be replaced completely by any amount of internet marketing. Public speaking builds credibility, volunteering builds character and networking builds backbone. Clients that know and trust you, are that much more likely to buy from you.

This may seem like a lot of extra work, especially if you were one of those who thought, “If I build it, they will come”. But the reality is, if you have a plan, work at it consistently with passion and integrity… they will come.

Your site doesn’t need to be the biggest, or even the best. It just needs to be effective in helping you reach your goals. Start small, stay at it, but most importantly, start with a plan.

Social networking site, Facebook was originally launched in 2004 as a site to connect college students. It has grown and evolved in its short history to include over 400 million active users. (50% of Facebook’s active users log in at least once a day and have an average of 130 friends.) Facebook is the number 2 visited site on the internet currently, second to Google. Facebook is quickly becoming the tool of choice to connect with friends and colleagues online.

More important from a business perspective, Facebook has evolved into a powerful marketing tool. Facebook utilizes a variety of tools (or applications) that allow a business owner to keep audiences informed as to what’s happening. Use it to communicate things like special events, seasonal promotions and new product launches etc.

So here are 10 tips to get your business started on Facebook:

Get started – join Facebook and set up your personal Profile (this must be in your name and not the business). Profiles are for people, pages are for businesses. We’ll get into this later.

Invite friends – Invite everyone in your contact list to become friends on Facebook. You’ll be surprised how many are already on Facebook. While you can never have too many Facebook Friends, think carefully before accepting Friend requests from people you’ve never heard of.

It is all about Relationships – not selling! Start communicating with people on Facebook. Join Facebook Groups that are relevant to your business and your prospects, and contribute in the discussion areas. Comment on items your Friends may post. Write on The Wall of new Friends.

Now to Business – create a Facebook Page for your company. Make it personal – present the human face of your business. And don’t forget to link to your company website and blog.

Promote it – tell everyone about your Facebook Page. Put a link on your website, email all contacts, you could even advertise it on Facebook! Encourage people to become Fans of your Page.

Update, update, update – when a personal Profile or business Page is updated, all the Friends (or Fans) know. So if you have any relevant news, events, activities, whether major or minor, post it on Facebook.  And keep doing it!

Learn and Improve – look at other Facebook Profiles and Pages; what could you do to make yours more interesting to your Friends? Seek advice; ask other people how they use Facebook and similar Social Networks.

Add Applications – there are thousands of Facebook Applications that can be added to your Profile or Page to help both you and your visitors, including powerful business tools such as Voice Mail, Video, Slideshare, Introduction and Networking tools.

Think Ahead – By now you should be building and interacting with an active community on Facebook, relevant and interested in you and your business. Start planning how you can continue to improve that community by engaging with it and contributing to it.

Add me as a Friend !

If your business could use a little advice or ongoing support with understanding the power of Facebook, give us a call for a free consultation.

Creating a business blog is a great way to energize your marketing and build awareness for your business on the internet.

Blogging can be helpful in a handful of ways:

Build credibility – Start developing a relationship and trust with potential customers, allow them to get to know the way you think and what you value as a business.

Lead Generation – It is said to take up to seven touch points before a prospect will contact you. Your business blog can help position you as an industry expert.

Search Engine Optimization – When used correctly and written effectively, your business blog will become your number one source for traffic generated by search engines.

Community – Like other interactive social tools, your business blog can allow for open communication and transfer of knowledge with your readers.

What should I write about and does this take a lot of time?

Write about what you know and are passionate about. Be sure to use those words that you’ve identified as your organizations mission critical keyword phrases. Write as often as possible, and be sure to be very conversational in tone and style. Each post need not be “War and Peace”, just enough information to communicate a point effectively.

Here are a few ideas:

- Write posts about common problems to prospects in your industry
- Related industry news or trends
- Best practices common to your industry
- Important events
- Unique products and services
- Related case studies
- New business wins that you recently acquired

Where do I start?

The two most popular platforms are Wordpress and Blogger. You can either setup a free template, which is generally not advisable because they tend to look “Free”, you can purchase a premium template or you can custom design from scratch to match the look and feel of your corporate website. I would recommend getting a dedicated domain (www.ecentric.ca) as opposed to the free Wordpress assigned URL’s. This again looks more professional and allows you more flexibility when configuring your blog.

What do I need to get started?

STRATEGY & OBJECTIVES… Before you rush out and set up a free or premium template, it is critical to the success of your business blog to have defined your blog strategy and the objectives of what you hope to gain by dedicating time on a regular basis to this particular marketing activity.

If this sounds like something that your business should start doing, please give us a call at ecentric media. We’ll help define your blog strategy and get you pointed in the right direction.

Keyword research is one of the most fundamental Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities, but often is not given adequate consideration. Without the right keywords, your company’s SEO efforts will more then likely not generate the desired results.

Keywords and keyword phrases are the building blocks of effective SEO. It’s not about stuffing a hundred keywords into meta tags or your copy to get rankings. It’s about uncovering and utilizing the keywords that make the most sense for your business and using them in a way that drives targeted, qualified traffic to your website.

So the question is… how do you find and define the right keywords for your business?

What is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of discovering and selecting the appropriate and most effective keywords for your website and your businesses target market. It involves undertaking an investigation to understand what terms people are actually searching for, how often and how many other sites are competing for those terms. Keyword research is a strategic exercise that enables you to determine which queries your site is most relevant for and for which you can realistically expect a return, then optimize your site accordingly.

When this part is done correctly, your chances of achieving a high placement on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) are greatly increased.

Keyword Research Done Right

You can probably think of at least 10 to 20 keywords or keyword phrases you might think are relevant to your site. However, the way you think about your organization or business may be very different from how your customers or potential customers think about it.

An insurance agency might call its product “commercial insurance,” but you or I would probably use the term “business insurance” when searching online. We might also search for the singular or plural of that or another search term. Similarly, the terms you automatically think of may be too broad or widely applicable to be appropriate for SEO. For example, “business insurance”, will likely return a result that is not applicable to your target market. Where as “business insurance (city name)”, will return a value that is geographically targeted to a specific market.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research tools are essential for uncovering what users are actually searching for. These tools generally house data on search engine queries that have been conducted over an extended period of time. They enable you to get a quick idea of which specific terms are searched for, and how often. They typically also allow you to enter one term and get back a variety of other related terms, including synonyms, variations, plurals, and misspellings.

Not only do these tools provide data on search volume, many will give you an idea of the number of search engine results for each term. This is usually referred to as the level of competition. All other things being equal, the lower the competition for a given keyword, the better your chances of getting a higher ranking.

The best keywords have the following qualities:
Strong targeted relevance to your site, high search volume and low competition.

The knowledge you’ll gain from conducting keyword research will be invaluable in the long-term for any SEO initiative. For help in discovering and defining the keywords that are going to gain recognition and new business for your company, give us a call.

Twitter is currently the hottest platform on the social networking landscape. Twitter provides its users the ability to send short posts that contain brief, targeted information and to read other users posts.

Each post is limited to 140 characters, these messages, called “tweets” are delivered to those who have chosen to follow your business. While you receive messages from Twitter users, you have chosen to follow.

Some have described Twitter as the perfect blend of blogging and instant messaging, giving rise to the name “micro-blogging”. The 140 character space limitation is welcomed by business, as it forces you to get right to the point in answering the question of “what’s Happening”.

Not all social media tools will be right for your business, but here are three reasons to use Twitter and how they can affect your business marketing efforts.

Enagage in conversation:

Find other users and businesses in your targeted geographic area and follow them. Follow those businesses and a few of each of their followers. The end result of this will usually be a handful of them following you in return. Be sure to interact and don’t let your account sit dormant. Twitter isn’t just a one-way tool (for either speaking or listening), it’s meant as a conversation tool. If you see another user asking a question that you can answer, go for it. Be informative, open to communication, offer suggestions and comment on others posts.

Communicate with customers: (this is Twitter for business after all)

Ask your customers if they are on Twitter. If they are (or not), suggest they follow you. Give them reasons why engaging in the conversation with your business will be beneficial to them.

For example, If you owned a retail outlet, you could send out special discounts that only Twitter followers could receive. Those customers could pass this tweet (discount) on to their friends and followers. This is a great way to track ROI and gain new followers all at once.

Ask your followers a question. Each of the followers that respond to your question will have their own list of followers that see they have responded to a post and in turn check you out on Twitter. Again, more potential followers gained.

The ultimate goal is to go viral:

It all starts with great content and good conversation. With this, your followers will be more inclined to “re-tweet” your posts. Don’t be afraid to ask for re-tweets, especially if the information or tweets will be beneficial to many users. The more times you are re-tweeted, the more people you are likely to get to your page and the more that are likely to follow your business.

Everytime you post something to your website or blog, be sure to send this to you Twitter feed. This will help to increase your followers and help to increase inbound links to your business website.

If you’d like help to better understand if Twitter is right for your business, give us a call for a free consultation.

This may seem like a silly question. “Of course I do, we registered it 5 years ago”. The main thing to consider here, is the word “we”. We meaning me the owner, or a staff member who is now gone, or the web guy?

The website’s working, why is this a problem?

We had a client about 8 years ago, that was working on a very specific anti-gang youth initiative and they really wanted a specific domain. As it turns out, it was taken already, but it was for rent or sale. Sound familiar? Well, they chose to rent it because the costs were prohibitive to purchase.

All went well, up until the day before the official press conference and the site went down. I realized just then, we had no control, no recourse and no way to make this right, because we didn’t have control of the domain name.

I’ve been an evangelist of controlling your online persona ever since.

Years of online brand building…

I’ve run into this too many times in the last few months. You go to make a change with regards to your web host or domain name only to learn you don’t have access to your own domain. This can slow progress to a halt or can be catastrophic if the person who registered it originally cannot be found or will not cooperate.

If you are wondering now, who is listed as the registered owner of your domain, you can do what is called a “who is” search. For .ca domain names, go to cira.ca and for .com, go to networksolutions.com and click on “who is”.

So what do I do if I’m not the listed owner?

Once you’ve identified who is listed as the administrative contact, get in touch with them and request that they do an official domain transfer. More often then not, this is not a problem and the registrant is more then willing to help.

The perfect domain name is such a rare commodity these days, if you’ve had yours for years, protect it like was your child.

For help or advice on this or any other internet topic, please give us a call at ecentric media.