Branding Your Business

A guest post by Robyn Sharp Captive Agents

Brand or Die...

The concept of developing a brand for your business has been around for a long time.  But branding has changed over the last few years as blogging, internet marketing, and social media have grown.  A business can’t just have a nice logo and a good tagline and call it a day.  You must get creative and make your business unique from all the others that are competing against you.

How to assess your brand

Start out by seeing what customers and employees think about you now.  Internet resources make it possible to look directly into the customer’s mind and see what they think.  Take advantage of it!

Google Alerts – this is one of my favorite ways to keep up with my company.  Google Alerts allows you to set up searches for certain terms and it will deliver the search results to your email inbox every day.  Set up an alert for your name, your company’s name, your industry, whatever you want to measure  Every day, Google will give you links to articles containing those search terms.  They will include news sites, blogs, and even videos.  Best part is that it doesn’t require you to do anything but check your email.

Twitter Search – put in a search term and instantly find out about customer satisfaction, complaints, and suggestions.  This is a great way to get the pulse on your brand, plus you can reply directly to customer complaints and help to resolve them.  Use a free download like Tweetdeck and set up columns for each search term.  This keeps it visual and easy to respond to.  You might even delegate this brand monitoring task to an employee.

Employee Survey – survey your employees about your company, your brand, and your mission statement.  They might not see things as you had intended them to and they are the ones on the front line delivering your brand to customers!  You could also consider surveying your customers if appropriate.  Use a tool like Survey Monkey for an easy to set up and free survey with anonymous responses.

Now what?

While, I believe it is important to have visual elements in your brand like a logo, creating a unique business is even more important.  With a little creative thinking, you can give new life to any industry.  Think of ways you can incorporate new services that will make you stand out.  If you own an insurance agency, send text message alerts when their bill is overdue or create a free service that no one else offers.  Every insurance agent gives free life insurance reviews.  Instead, offer free shredding services to your clients.  Hire a shredding company to put a locked bin in your office that they empty once a month.  Its unique, it’s free to the customer, inexpensive for you, and no other agent does it so it makes you seem different and a little more valuable.

One of the best ways to think about this concept comes from marketer Seth Godin.  Godin says to consider adding a free prize to your business, much like a free toy that comes inside a box of cereal.  His book, Free Prize Inside, gives brainstorming lists to help you create the perfect free prize for your service or product.

I hope these ideas will give you a good starting place on developing your brand.  The more creative you are the more customers will talk about you.  Give them something great to blog, Tweet, and tell their friends about!

Robyn Sharp is a former insurance agent who blogs about captive insurance agency marketing, social media, and management at www.captiveagents.com.

Disclaimer:

This article is for informational purposely only. There is no legal advice being suggested or proffered and the author assumes no responsibility or liability for the actions take or not taken by the readers based upon such information.

Thank you,

Ryan H.

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