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Have you wondered how companies created so many years ago, such as Coca Cola, Apple Inc. and Disney, remain positioned in the minds of people? The answer is simple: they use the power of branding as a differentiating element.

These great companies have taught us that the important thing is not just selling products, it is much more than that. It is telling a story that allows you to reach the minds of people and stay to live in it.

A brand is more than a logo and a name, it is it and much more. They are all those aspects that reflect the spirit of your company, which allow you to create a close and special relationship with your audience.

Why keep reading?

The answer to why to continue reading is this: because the goal is to differentiate. But the real challenge is to achieve it by maintaining a homogeneity, a single voice capable of adapting to different contexts. A story that lasts over time, but that is not obsolete.

This guide will help you to know:

What is Branding and what is its importance for the growth of your company?
How to design a Branding strategy according to your audience and objectives.
What elements make up the Branding and tips to develop them.
How to achieve loyalty to your brand.
Cases of companies that know very well how to make an effective Branding.
What you should do and what not in Branding.

Branding: What for?

Why think about Branding? The goal of Marketing is to get people to know you, love you and trust you. One of the best ways to get known and get them to love you is to introduce yourself. The design of a brand involves defining how you want to show yourself to others.

Defining a correct branding strategy will allow you to:

Reach the client with a clear message, without the need for advertising.
Motivate the buyer.

Connect the consumer with the product and with the values of the brand.

Develop the credibility and loyalty of customers.

Strengthen the identity of the company.

Differentiate yourself from the competition and… Become unforgettable!

Branding is everything, but… what is it?

Branding is the process of development and dissemination of the brand through a series of elements and actions of Communication and Marketing strategically thought.

And is that Marketing has stopped selling products, now sells experiences. We do not buy a car for its functionalities, we do it for the emotions and sensations that will be produced by the mere fact of having it.

For Tom Peters, the great guru of Branding, the differentiation of a company lies precisely in its intangible factors: the value, credibility, and uniqueness of a brand.

In his book “The core of Branding”, Peters mentions “the 3 physical laws of Marketing”:

Patent benefits
A real reason to believe
A big difference
Peters emphasizes the increasing relevance of stories and experiences when transmitting emotions since the brand resides in the minds and hearts of people.

How do you see your brand in the future? Define your strategy

1. Investigate

How to know what values, emotions and experiences you should associate with your brand? Investigate

1. Who are you? What are the elements that identify you and your competition?
2. What products and/or services do you offer? Define its main characteristics.
3. What are the core values that guide the actions of your company?
4. What are your mission and vision?
5. What is your company specializing in? What are you an expert in?
6. What is your target audience? It defines its main demographic, psychographic characteristics, etc.
7. What message do you want to convey?
8. Why should people choose your brand and not the competition?

 

2. Know your target audience

What is the profile of the people that make up your target audience?

The real reason why you should know your audience is that in this case, you will be able to offer a proposal of relevant value and that this proposal arrives in an appropriate way, through a message with which the public feels identified and that is significant.

3. Define your goals
What do you want to achieve?

Reach your audience with a clear message.
Achieve greater credibility
Emotionally connect your audience with your brand
Motivate consumers
Achieve brand loyalty
Answering the following questions will help you define your goals:

What do you want your brand to do for your company?
What do you want people to know and say about your products or services?

4. Beyond the brand: the promise

From the moment you make your brand known based on certain attributes, you make a promise.

Beyond the visual aspects, the brand is a concept, an idea. Something obstructed that depends purely and exclusively on subjective aspects, that is, on a perception of people.

Here are some tips to create a successful company:

Be amazing: Do not make promises that you will not be able to fulfill.
Be emotional: Connect emotionally with your audience. Make them feel identified with what your brand proposes.
Be relevant: Identify what your audience wants and is interested in.
Be consistent: Between what the company is and what it claims to be. Promise, but comply.
Be different: Create a promise that makes you unique and that causes you to choose yourself and not your competition.
When you have achieved attributes such as confidence – which is essential for the business but that does not make you fall in love with a brand – that is the moment when you start to think of your client as a person and not as a number.

Kari Blanchard, Strategy Director of the New York office of the future Brand.

The heart of your brand
Reminder + versatility + simplicity. These are the main qualities you must gather.

1. Keep simplicity

The simpler the design, the easier it will be understood and therefore, remembered by your audience.

2. Try it in black and white

The use of colors is fundamental. The brand must be able to be perceived with all the senses. However, a good logo has to achieve the same effect even in black and white.

3. Play with the hidden symbolism

It is very fun to play with the combination of words and images. This is the “Double Entendre” design technique.

4. Make it unique and personal

What will distinguish your brand, is the fact of thinking to connect with your audience. Think about getting right to your client’s mind. Connect with your emotions and interests.

5. Vectorize it

Thanks to programming as an illustrator to CorelDraw you can preserve the resolution of the image and prevent it from being pixelated by modifying its original size.

6. Recruit a professional designer

Remember the logo is part of the first impression and the message that your company will transmit. A professional can give you new ideas and points of view, as well as help you convey the concept in a clear and creative way, do not you think?

Still can not think of anything?

Find inspiration on sites like Logopond
Check with friends and colleagues. One of the best ways to gather ideas is through brainstorming.
Some data that will help you think: 33% of brands use blue for their logos. 29% red 28% black or some color of gray scales. 13% yellow or gold.

 

 

 

Inbound Marketing essential step-by-step guide

Essential step-by-step guide: integrated digital marketing

Nowadays, traditional marketing methods are becoming increasingly ineffective and costly.

Effective digital marketing will allow you and your company to get started in the online world by creating and implementing a successful integrated digital marketing strategy, step by step.

Since the establishment of a keyword strategy and the correct use of social media to promote their online content through a complete analysis and definition of their strategies.

This article will guide you through every essential step you must take to grow your business in a way that

on-line.

Below we detail in 9 summary steps how to get your brand positioned optimally where you see it.

1.- Create a keyword strategy

A keyword is a word or phrase that a person uses to collect information from an online topic. People can enter keywords to search engines such as Google or Bing or even social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn

This will allow you to optimize your website and your profiles on social networks, thus increasing the chances of being found online through people who are looking for those keywords, which will generate more and better traffic to your business and website.

To define the or keywords that can also be a phrase; It is a process that requires study, analysis, and monitoring over time so that you will find out about industry trends and product demand.

A complete investigation of your keywords can help you grow organic traffic and save you money in conducting a paid search campaign in Adwords through PPC (Pay per click).

To create a keyword strategy, you must put yourself in the customer’s place, that is, as if you were searching for a product or service through social networks. Think of short words or phrases that you can define the best way what is your product or service.

For a small or medium business, you should consider less competitive words, more specifically related to your business called long tail words.

Google Keyword Tool or Hubspot Keyword Tool are excellent tools to determine the degree of competitiveness of a specific word as well as suggest and help to think in new words.

You can try different words to see which works best.

Once the words are chosen, the next step is to incorporate them into your website, in specific places and keys at the same time; even include it in images through Alt Text (hidden text added to the image)

2.- Optimize your website to be found

To know how well optimized your website is, we recommend using a free HubSpot tool called Marketing-Grader.

This tool will analyze your marketing completely and give you a total score between 0 and 100.

In it, you can see some ideas on how to increase conversions and strengthen your integrated marketing program.

The elements of On-Page SEO are:

Title page, the text which you can see at the top of the browser window when viewing a web page, is also the title of a page that is presented in the search engines

.Meta Description & Meta Data considered as the description of a site for your search on Google. The meta description is to provide the search engine with a brief description of the page (150 characters to be more exact) under each result if a meta description does not is included in the source code, then the search engine will display part of the content of the page instead.

Title of page:

If a part of the text appears larger or more prominent than the rest of the text on a page, it is likely to be part of a title.

You can verify this in the HTML code of your website and search for text with an <h1>, <h2> or <h3> tag that surrounds it.

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS):

HTML is the code of your website that search engines read. Search engines extract relevant information, such as keywords, from your HTML.

CSS, on the other hand, has a template for the design of the page.

In CSS, you define headers, links, and other visual elements.

Images:

The images of a web page can improve the user experience. However, you should keep in mind the following:

Beware of including many images and increasing the weight of the page. Always associate text to images (Atl Text) and include

Keywords in image files

Domain information:

Search engines reward sites that register for a long period of time. They indicate a commitment to the site, a sign that the site is less likely to be spam.

Moz Rank:

It is a general measure of how much authority your website has. The higher MOZ range the better.

Google crawling date:

When Google crawls your site, information related to it is updated, such as keywords and other SEO factors. Therefore, it is important that Google crawls your site as often as possible.

The best thing you can do to get Google to crawl your site more often is to produce fresh content regularly by posting it on your website.

Improve your Off-Page SEO with inbound links

websites with better authority rank better than websites with greater authority.

In addition, you can improve your chances of attracting links from

input when sharing your content on social media and

optimize it for search results, thereby easily

It can be found.

3.- Create a blog and marketing offers

Platforms to make Blogs like Hubspot, WordPress or Blogger have been able to publish blogs easily and effectively.

Making blogs and creating other content such as eBooks and webinars are ways to reach more people with your business online thanks to its wide reach.

The goal of your business blog should be to publish valuable and non-promotional articles as if it were the article for a magazine.

Also, you should think about the words you use.

Avoid the jargon of the industry that only your employees would understand.

As in the process of designing a keyword strategy, think about the words your customers use to describe your business and apply those phrases to the language of your blogs.

Create a Blog The blog makes your site more dynamic by injecting content each time you publish a new article. Search engines reward through high rankings your website if it incorporates

new content, which translates into + views, + leads and + clients.

The contents should generate interest in the volume of visits, and add multimedia content in videos and images. It is important that you find a style that identifies your brand or business that generates added value. This will make people want to buy products or services from your brand

Links The blog makes your site more dynamic by injecting content each time you publish a new article. Search engines reward your website with high rankings if it incorporates new content, which translates into + views, + leads and + customers.

Call to action

Each and every article in the blog that is published must include a call to action in the article to help boost the generation of leads and opportunities.

4.- Promote PPC offers

Pay per click, or PPC, or Pay-Per-Click, is an Internet advertising model in which the advertiser pays his or her ads to the web using a fee based on the number of clicks made on the ad. The PPC model is typically used in search engines, but also in content and product websites.

PPC really comes down to management, matching, and optimizing the purchase of your product, downloading an offer, or something similar.

Offers of PPC (Bidding) and Quality Score (Quality Score)

5.- Promote content through social media

Just remember that before jumping to use this type of social networks, you need to have marketing analysis that allows you to measure the real success of this type of effort.

Use Twitter:

• Use the name of your business as the name of your Twitter account.

• Use your business logo as a photo of your profile and image.

• Create a fund that provides additional information regarding your business.

• Use tools such as Hootsuite or TweetDeck to determine influencers in your industry or leads you should follow.

Use Facebook:

From a marketing perspective, Facebook serves as a powerful platform for building a community and mouth-to-mouth.

The first thing here is to create a company page.

Use LinkedIn:

Known as the social network of entrepreneurs, this network already has more than 150 million business people. It is very efficient for companies that focus on this type of segment (B2B).

To start using LinkedIn, you must make your individual profile, optimize your information by adding links to your website and blog. Take the time to describe yourself and your company, reflecting experience, knowledge, and passion for what you do and sell.

Once you have created your profile, you can explore other LinkedIn tools most used by marketers. There are 2 most important to generate leads and acquire customers.

6.- Convent the traffic of your website in leads

Step 1: Select your offer

Step 2: Create calls to action

Step 3: Create Landing Page

Step 4: Test, measure, and repeat

In order to determine what are the elements that best help you achieve your goals, you have to try different calls to action, Landing Pages and offers.

If a call to action has been on your website for a month, vary the message or exchange a totally new call, and after a month measures your behavior, it is a good practice.

If Landing Page conversions are low, make a change in the page layout and measure the results. Do not be afraid to try different variations, as you can always come back if the previous version worked better.

7.- leads with directed messages

Only send emails to people who have explicitly chosen to receive messages from your company. What is called Permission Marketing?

Be consistent in your communications to set the right expectations for your audience.

Measuring the conversion rate requires integration between the email platform and your marketing analytics.

8.- Optimize your mobile marketing

Measuring the conversion rate requires integration between the email platform and its analytics

marketing.

mobile devices

The mobile visitor is trying to find the key information when they visit your website, to reduce the information contained in the web pages that provide them only information that will be very useful. For example, make the contact information very visible and make the navigation less prominent.

9.- Analyze and refine your strategies

Google Analytics is an excellent tool designed to help marketers analyze the

web traffic

Identify opportunities when reviewing your marketing activities, decipher what

want to improve. Do you want more people to come to your blog? Do you want to convert more visits into leads? Always see new opportunities in that regard.

If you are following the steps described in this eBook and focus on an Inbound Marketing process, you are saving a lot of money.

In summary:

The following points are some suggestions for improving the

steps that have been described in this eBook.

Steps to improve

Keywords or key phrases

Conversions

Content strategy

Promotion in social media

Lead Nutrition & email marketing

 

Summarized and written by May Ling Tong

What is the story behind Mashable and why did they buy it?

Mashable is a social media news and technology blog that has an impact around the world. 1 article is published every 20 minutes and 1 article is shared every two seconds. Since 2005 he proposed the difficult task of becoming an opinion leader in his field. In this way, with a hard effort, the blog ranks 410th in the media and news rankings.

When was it founded?

Mashable was founded by Peter Cashmore in 2005, 6 years later it had 12 million visits monthly. Likewise, to date, it has 30.8 million monthly visits according to the data website SimilarWeb.com

Who is Pete Cashmore?

32-year-old founder Peter Cashmore was born in the City of Aberdeen, Scotland, and grew up in Banchory. In his own words: “I like technology and I do not like the idea of not being part of it, for this reason, Mashable believes.”

Pete founded Mashable when he was only 19 years old: “I like technology and I do not like the idea of not being part of it, for this reason, I created Mashable.”

Why did Pete Cashmore sell Mashable?

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal indicates that during the year 2017 the company was looking for investment, until then the reason for the search for investment was not known, at the end of 2017 Pete Cashmore sold Mashable for the sum of $ 50 million which is a sum much lower than the $ 250 million of its current valuation, from an investment round of $ 15 million that it raised in March of 2017.

Why sell it when you just got an investment round?

The year 2017 was the most difficult for Mashable because despite trying to enter the video market, this resulted in a fall in revenue which decreased its profitability.

How much money did the company lose?

The previous image takes into account the 13 years of evolution in the search for this keyword. In this way, it gives us to understand that the interest in Mashable globally has decreased

According to the attached graph, we can see how global interest has evolved in the search of the website. In addition, you can interpret a constant decline in your web traffic and searches in it. With regard to profitability, it can be deduced that income also declined, this being its main problem.

What is the future of Mashable?

Ziff Davis plans to implement an affiliate marketing strategy in order to increase sales on the website just like he did with Geek.com and Extremetech.com which gave a net profit of $ 34.7 million in 2017.

His second strategy will be to lay off at least 50 employees from his office in New York. Its goal will be to position itself in the United States as a means of technological news and achieve the highest possible profitability for the coming years.

Top countries – SimilarWeb.com

Conclusion

We can say that Mashable is not at its best and being acquired by Ziff Davis is one of the best options. Although there will always be doubt about: what would have happened if Pete had continued with the ‘A’ plan?