What Does Your Brand Represent?

Often the focus is directly on the money spent on building a brand. But creating a successful brand takes a combination of time and money.  It involves a lot more than simply hiring a graphic designer, web-designer and agency who will produce designs and a strategy for your promotion.  A truly successful brand represents something more than just a facade –  it represents a philosophy, an experience, a promise.  Think of Apple: simplicity, elegance, ease of use; or Coke: refreshment, excitement, consistency.  As a negative example, think of your last brush with a government agency: bureaucracy, waste, powerlessness.

Large or small, your business brand is built on far more than your logo and colour-scheme.  It relies on the quality of your service, the value of your information, how well you keep your promises.  You can only get so far on awards, and superficialities – over time it boils down to a steady building (or eroding) of your good name.  So, what actions can you take to build your brand?

Use Your Website to Build Your Brand and Add Value

Obviously the quality of your product/service, and the way you treat your customers are the foundation of brand-building, But your website design and content are also vital.  A sloppy, low-functioning website tells your customers that you don’t care about their experience.  A website that provides no value or information suggests that you don’t have any to share – or that your work is so commoditised that if customers knew many details they could replicate it themselves.  A poorly-written website full of typos tells customers that you are more interested in saving money, than providing service.

If you are going to invest in a website – and you should – then you need to make sure that that website communicates how much you value your prospects and visitors in every way!  Your website should convince prospects and customers that you care about them – and that you care enough to help them understand who you are.  If it does that well, then when they do contact you, they are already have a good idea that they’d like to work with you so you don’t have to deal  with as many unsuitable inquiries.

Which brings us to the content on your website …

Inbound marketing, or content marketing isn’t really advertising per se, it is more like asset-building.  Your advertising budget gets spent monthly and either generates results, or it doesn’t.  Effective or not, once that money is spent, it is spent!  Adwords, magazine and newspaper ads, television, radio, direct mail, Yellow Pages are all based on a fixed spend for a particular period.  Once that period is over your impact is gone and you will need to spend more money to get more exposure.

Contrast that with creating content for your website – or to send to prospects and customers.  You pay for an article, case study, newsletter or blog post once, and it goes on generating exposure – slowly building your authority and your reputation over time.  You can use that article in many ways – on your website to educate prospects pre-sale, generate leads, and build rank in Google; mailed to clients to provide value and increase loyalty; in a book to expand your authority; a part of your staff training materials – but one way or another it stays there, building your reputation and your brand for years into the future.

Content Generates Web Traffic For Years to Come

Research shows that well-written articles, highlighting the keywords prospects use to find your company continue to generate revenue for businesses for years.  On average the statistics show that close to 67% of the traffic coming to a website is generated by articles more than 2 months old, and the articles written in the previous month account for only 22% of traffic (the other 11% of traffic fluctuated greatly between articles that were 1-2 months old, older and thoses written in the last month).

This is not an advertising expense.  The time and money invested in building a large, valuable content library is an investment in an asset that will continue to generate revenue for years to come, but if you simply count the cost of creating the content and budget that in the month it is expensed you will come up with misleading figures.  It’s more like R&D for a manufacturing company: there is no immediate ROI, but it’s a question of looking to the future and building towards that.

As a company, how do you look at content creation?

If you are seeing the creation of content as a short-term expense, you’ll view it quite differently than if you view it as an investment that will bring increasing revenue and authority in the future.

It’s difficult to put an objective dollar value on your content, but many companies don’t even try.  they just lump it into their advertising budget.   In a future post I’ll discuss some metrics which are useful for evaluating the impact (apart from direct dollar value per sale), but for now I’d like to leave you with the question:

What is the content on your website doing to build your brand, and add value to your business?

If you don’t know, then you may need to take another look at the content you’re creating for your business.