Amy Will - Launching & Building a Brand For Dummies

When only a few brand name candidates remain, you can debate the merits of each in the hopes of narrowing the list further. If that approach doesn’t work, you may want to engage in another brainstorming session.

Try to avoid choosing a brand name by popular vote. That approach often results in choosing a brand name that’s simply not as bad as the others. Instead, continue debating which brand name candidate is best, or conduct another brainstorming session to generate fresh ideas to consider.

Once you’ve landed on a name you’d like to use for your brand, you need to make sure it is not trademarked and that you can legally use it. For more information on trademarking, go to Chapter 19.

Chapter 4

IN THIS CHAPTER

Setting branding goals

Mapping out your branding activities for the year

Making your goals measurable

Monitoring your branding success and making adjustments

One of the biggest mistakes people make when they start branding is that they start branding. I know that sounds odd, but my point is that most people start by creating a website or blog or podcast before they have any idea of what they’re trying to accomplish. As a result, they work too hard at it, everything they do has little or no impact, they have nothing in place to figure out why, and they begin to wonder what they’re doing wrong. What they did wrong is that they started branding when they should have started planning.

As Steven Covey, author of the best-seller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, advises, “Start with the end in mind.” After all, how can you hope to get where you’re going if you don’t even know where that is?

In this chapter, I encourage you and guide you through the process of starting with the end in mind by establishing branding goals and figuring out the best methods to achieve those goals. Then I proceed to explain how to put a system in place to measure success and identify what’s working and what’s not so you can make well-informed adjustments moving forward.

Ultimately, many people have the same branding goals: a better, richer life: more money; more free time; enjoyable, rewarding work; and delighted customers/clients. We can all dream, right? Unfortunately, “a better, richer life” doesn’t cut it as a branding goal because it’s not SMART:

Specific: The goal of “a better, richer life” is vague. Specifically, what do you want to accomplish? Increased sales? Lucrative speaking engagements? More and better clients for your consulting business? Book deals with major publishers?

Measurable: Setting a measurable, quantifiable goal provides a way to evaluate success. A better goal than “increased sales,” for example, would be “a 10 percent boost in sales over last year.”

Attainable: Aim high, but make sure you’re setting up goals along the way. Smaller goals that help you achieve your end objective are important to keep momentum going in building a brand. If you have high goals, simply make a roadmap to help get there.

Relevant: Be sure that your goal will strengthen your brand. You must have a good answer to the question “If I achieve this goal, how will it improve my brand?” Be mindful that as your brand evolves, so do your goals and your relevance.

Time-based: Specify a deadline for achieving your goal. Otherwise, procrastination is too easy.

In the following sections, I introduce five branding goals/objectives to consider and present different ways to achieve each one. These goals/objectives are just a small sample to get you pointed in the right direction and spark your creativity.

Goals and objectives are basically the same, and I use the terms interchangeably, but I draw the following distinction in the context of planning to meet goals: A goal is the one big thing you want to accomplish, whereas an objective is a smaller goal that you need to accomplish to meet your big goal. Suppose that your goal is to increase sales by 20 percent over last year. Your objectives could be to increase direct traffic to my website by 10 percent, grow your email contact list by 5 percent, and increase positive word of mouth on social media by 20 percent.

A top goal of all branding is to increase brand recognition and awareness. Brand recognition is the ability of consumers to identify a brand by its attributes, such as its logo or distinctive colors. You may see the familiar green-and-white mermaid logo, for example, and instantly recognize it as the Starbucks logo. Brand awareness is the extent to which consumers understand what a specific brand represents or stands for. You see the Starbucks logo and know that it represents quality coffee and a relaxing and enjoyable experience.

Brand recognition and awareness are fundamental to a brand’s success. After all, if people don’t know about your brand, it’s not much of a brand. Brand recognition and awareness can open doors to customers, opportunities, and partnerships. These factors are especially important if you’re hoping to partner with large corporations because they’ll want social proof of your brand’s intrinsic value, such as number of friends and followers.

If you’re looking to form strategic partnerships or get your products into the big-box retailers, building brand recognition and awareness is the way to do it.

When building brand recognition and awareness is the goal, you may find the following branding activities to be particularly useful:

Giveaways: A giveaway is just what it sounds like: providing free merchandise or services to consumers. Giveaways may involve swag, such as branded pens, key chains, koozies, and retail bags; sample products or services; free trial subscriptions; or contests. You can do giveaways alone or in conjunction with partners (see Chapter 9). You can do them at physical locations (see Chapter 11), online via your website or blog (see Chapter 12), or via social media (see Chapter 13).

Press releases: Harnessing the power of the press (print, television, radio, and online news) is a great way to create buzz with very little effort. All you need to do is plan something newsworthy, such as an exciting event or a product launch, and distribute a press release about it. (See Chapter 10for more about teaming up with the media.)

Influencer campaign: An influencer campaign is a marketing tactic that involves recruiting or hiring people who are well known and trusted in target markets to give their endorsements. See Chapter 13for guidance on how to launch an influencer campaign of your own.Whenever I add a new product to my Girl Gang brand, I initiate a small, organic influencer campaign. Over time, I’ve developed strong relationships with a small group of influencers, who contribute significantly to the success of every new product release. You may be able to expand your brand’s reach with one macro influencer or multiple micro influencers. A macro influencer is someone with celebrity status (a household name) — someone with tens of thousands to millions of followers on social media. A micro influencer , on the other hand, has followers in the range of 10,000 to 50,000. Micro influencers charge significantly less for their services and may even promote a brand they really like for free.