Welcome to My Blog

In marketing, it seems like the word “brand” is used a lot — the leading brand, off-brand, personal brand … you get the picture. 

But there’s often confusion around its meaning in business. What does it entail? Do I need to hire an expert? Branding is expensive, right?

To that very last point, it doesn’t have to be. As it turns out, there are some pretty creative ways to brand your business without a ton of cash. And while it can require an investment of time, the ROI won’t go unnoticed — in some cases, it can actually help you save money.

So read on, and see how you can start building a brand today.

How to Brand Your Business on a Budget: A 6-Step Guide

1) Know your personas.

It’s no coincidence that 82% of companies with better value propositions also use buyer personas — the semi-fictional “characters” that encompass the qualities of who you’re trying to reach.

The needs, goals, and behavior of your potential customers dictate how you convey your product or service. Understanding those things helps you determine what kind of media your personas are consuming, what motivates them, and where they “live” online. You can see why having that information helps develop a compelling, effective brand — it helps you reach the right people.

Figuring that out doesn’t have to come at a price. A great way to get started is with our free MakeMyPersona tool, which guides you through a series of questions about the ideal person you want to reach. Take your time with it. The questions are meant to get you thinking about how you want to be perceived and by whom — and that shouldn’t be a quick process.

2) Develop an identity and a voice.

Once you’ve identified your buyer personas, your brand can start to take shape. That involves creating a brand identity — the things that make people aware of what your brand is — and its voice, which is the tone you use in any copy or public communication.

As a writer, I’m particularly interested in the voice aspect — but what does that like for you? Figuring that out follows a process not unlike the one that’s used to determine your personas. But instead of answering questions about your target audience, you’re answering questions that are a bit more introspective to your brand. What are its values? What does it represent? How do you want people to talk about you? (Check out our guide to answering these questions and more on brand voice here.)

Even if you’re not starting from scratch, establishing a strong(er) brand voice can be valuable. Just take the instance of the Zoological Wildlife Foundation — during its recent rebrand, finding its voice was a top priority. The results? Its overall online presence increased by 343%, with website traffic alone seeing a 63% boost.

3) Have a consistent social media presence.

So, we know who your personas are. And now, we know what to say to them — and how to say it. But where are they?

Since you might have a clear picture of the different pieces of your audience, it’s important to figure out where they’re spending the most time, especially on social media. We’ve talked before how effective it is to reach people where they’re already present — that includes their online behavior, too.

We recommend checking out Pew Research Center’s Demographics of Social Media Users, which profiles the users of five major social media platforms — Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Pay attention close attention to the data. Maybe the majority of your personas spend most of their time on one network. While that doesn’t mean you should ignore the others, it does give you an idea of where to dedicate the most resources.

And once you do establish that presence, maintain it. How many times have you gone to a brand’s Facebook Page only to find that nothing has been posted in the past three months? Chances are, it didn’t have a positive impact on your perception.

That can be avoided by diligently planning and scheduling social media posts like you would with any other marketing calendar. Something like our free Social Media Content Calendar can help, and get you thinking about things like the seasonality of what you post. That’s a huge part of staying relevant to your audience — by sharing content that pertains to what they’re likely thinking about at a given time of year.

4) Blog. 

We’ve covered the importance of blogging before, and we really can’t emphasize it enough. It’s a core part of our Inbound Methodology, especially the “attract” stage — the one that turns strangers into visitors to your website.

In fact, blogging might be the most fundamental step of inbound marketing. It helps you reach qualified customers, like your personas, by creating the informative content that matches the information they’re searching for. That’s why it’s so important to make it relevant to this audience — when you’re writing, make sure the content is optimized for those searches. (Here’s a handy list of places where you can learn search engine optimization).

Believe us — your personas are definitely looking for the information that you’re able to provide — if you write about it. After friends and family, blogs are the third most trusted source of information. Plus, that content will also serve as material to populate your social media networks, and we’ve already covered what a crucial part that plays in branding on a budget.

While blogging is fiscally inexpensive, one of the biggest struggles we hear about is the cost of spending time on it. For that, we reference the joke about a doctor asking his patient, “Would you rather work out one hour per day, or be dead 24 hours per day?” The inbound marketing version of that question would ask, “Would you rather blog for one hour each day, or always have insufficient content to draw in visitors?”

Like planning your social media presence, having an editorial calendar for your blog can be helpful in maintaining consistent timing and fresh content. That’s why we put together a free blog editorial calendar template, complete with instructions and content management tips.

5) Make customer service a priority.

When we hear the name “Zappos,” most of us immediately think, “unparalleled customer service.” The online apparel retailer built this level of service into its core approach to doing business — and into its core values.

Why is that so important? For Zappos, making excellent customer service the cornerstone of its brand actually saved money on marketing and advertising. That’s because it created word-of-mouth among existing and potential customers, which is what we call earned media — the recognition that your brand has earned, not paid for, from people talking about something remarkable you did. (Psst — U.S. businesses, as a whole, lose about $41 billion dollars each year because of bad customer service.)

Whether you’re serving customers or clients, the goal is to create a delightful, sharable experience. And when the client or customer experience is a priority, it shouldn’t cost you much for them to talk about it — remember, your work earned it.

But that revisits the importance of your identity and voice. As you go through these brand-building steps, think about the values that you want to be resonated in those things. Is excellent service one of them? Those values are what shape the brand’s culture, and that influences the voice you project to an audience.

6) Take advantage of co-branding.

I’ll never forget what my colleague Lisa Toner told me when I asked her about negotiating co-branding agreements.

“Larger companies may have a large reach,” she said, “but what do they not have?”

When you’re just starting to build a brand, you might not have the reach that Toner’s talking about. You can take the steps to build it, like we’ve described so far, but that takes time. Until then, one way to get your name in front of a broader audience is to partner with a brand that has one.

But don’t just pick any old brand to work with. Make sure it’s one that’s aligned with yours — the partnership has to make sense in the minds of your audience. Here’s what we recommend in seeking a co-brand:

• Consider your partner’s audience. Would it be interested in your brand? Is it that difficult for you to reach without this partnership? How well does it trust your co-brand? That’s crucial to getting them to listen to you, too — people don’t trust traditional advertisements anymore. So make sure your partner reaches the audience in a way that instills confidence, not doubt.
• Have something to offer your co-brand. Just like Toner asked, “what do they not have?” The experience should be a win-win-win: for you, your co-brand, and the consumer.
• Consider selecting a well-known and respected nonprofit as a co-brand. More and more people’s purchasing decisions are based on a brand’s social responsibility — in fact, 85% of millennials say that makes them more willing to recommend a brand.

Get Branding

Building a brand might seem like a huge undertaking, especially when resources are limited. But as we’ve seen, there are plenty of economical ways to not only get started, but to continue the momentum you start with these efforts.

And please, have fun with the process. Of course, there has to be a degree of strategy and logic involved — that’s why we’ve built the tools to help you determine what the different pieces of your brand will be. But it’s a creative exercise, so keep that in mind if you get bogged down in technicalities.

What were some of the first ways you started branding your business on a budget? Let us know in the comments.

 

Earlier this year, I wrote about a little thing called “imposter syndrome.” It refers to the feeling we get when, no matter how much we’ve achieved, we feel like we don’t belong or don’t deserve to be in a position of leadership.

About 70% of us will experience it at some point, especially the bosses among us. No wonder why so many of us constantly ask if we stack up. And how do you measure that, anyway?

It turns out, we’re probably overthinking it. Sometimes, a simple question-and-answer flowchart can help us with that introspection, and answer the question, “Am I a good boss?”

You’re in luck. The folks over at Headway Capital have created such a flowchart, chock full of important questions to ask about your leadership style, priorities, and more. Check out the infographic below to see how you measure up as a boss — and where there might be room for improvement. (P.S. Love infographics but struggle with design? Download our free infographic templates here).

For schools, having a great website is no longer an added bonus. Parents and students alike make decisions online, and your website has a great deal to do with that process. 

The good news, is that it no longer takes an entire IT department to turn a mediocre website into a great one. In our new ebook for education marketers, 15 Website Must-Haves for Driving More Inquiries and Applications, we offer quick wins to help you optimize your school’s sites to both attract more traffic, and drive more leads.

You’ll learn all about: 

1. Inbound links
2. On-page SEO
3. Meta Tags
4. 301 Redirects
5. First impressions
6. Consistent layout and structure 
7. Compelling images
8. Clear navigation
9. Accessibility and mobile responsiveness
10. Perceivable value
11. Quality content 
12. Blog
13. Social sharing 
14. Student or Parent Testimonials
15. Landing Pages and Forms

Ready to dive in? Snag your copy of our free ebook here >>

Back when Sean Ellis first coined the term “growth hacking” in 2010, many marketers were skeptical about whether or not it was just a passing fad. A few years down the line, growth hacking tools, tactics, and strategies have proven hugely successful for both big name brands and unknown startups.

But what exactly is growth hacking, and how is it different from regular marketing?

In short, growth hacking combines technology, creativity, analytics, and innovative marketing strategies all with one singular goal in mind: growth.

To help you navigate the constantly changing word of growth hacking, HubSpot and Brandwatch teamed up to create The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Growth Hacking. This playbook for growth will help you identify what the right growth strategy is for your business, and how to execute on it.

More specifically, this guide will cover:

• Using the PIE framework to prioritise and conduct tests
• Five core metrics to tangibly measure growth against
• How to build an experimental funnel to test your hypotheses
• Tactics and tools used by GrubHub, Airbnb, HubSpot, and more to drive accelerated results in a short period of time
• Hacks to grow your database, boost your brand awareness, and launch new products.

Access your copy of The Smart Marketer’s Guide to Growth Hacking today.

Human beings consistently struggle with perfectionism — the idea that everything we do has to be right on the first try, or else we have failed.

Consciously, we know better. We realize that perfectionism causes more problems than it solves. Even so, creative professionals still have trouble putting “good enough” into practice.

Web design projects, in particular, seem to be a magnet for delays, unexpected hiccups, and ever-expanding launch dates, all of which make life more difficult for clients and agencies alike.

We are no longer living in an era where delays on projects are excused as acceptable or even inevitable. Deadlines are no longer suggestions — they’re set in stone. Speed is now the most valuable currency of business, and the rapid pace of technological innovation means your competitors are pushing new products and new ideas into the market faster than ever.

In this landscape, we all have to learn to let go of old habits — especially (my fellow) web designers. We hate having our wondrous visions restricted by pesky things like time, budget, and reality — yet many of us struggle for a way to make new and better habits.

Growth-Driven Design (GDD) is a new way to approach web design that can help your agency launch better sites, faster, and with better end results for your clients. The methodology provides a step-by-step guide to run web projects that create what end users actually want, all while minimizing the many risks associated with traditional web design. Visiting this page will help get you started.

As you learn more about how GDD can change your life as a web designer, keep in mind these important lessons.

Why the Best Designers Don’t Care About Being Perfect

Let Go of the Idea of “One Big Launch.”

Understand that there is no longer one single, ceremonious launch for website projects. “Launch Day” used to be a very proud and emotional moment for us: releasing that flawlessly polished work of art, that took many long months to create, out in to the world. Letting that moment go can actually be quite difficult for us; We feel like we’ve lost out on a way to take pride and satisfaction in our work.

We may forget in our nostalgia that there is also often a darker side to “Launch Day.” It often only comes after numerous delays and expansions of the budget, each one lowering our clients’ satisfaction and patience.

We might have rationalized this to ourselves as a necessary concession — after putting so much extra time and money into crafting everything just right, it would all be worth it when you pull back the white sheet and the client’s eyes light up with delight at the dazzlingly perfect end result! That’s the best sign of success… right?

With GDD, site launches are much smaller affairs. They aren’t as sexy, they aren’t as wow-inducing, they aren’t always emotionally satisfying. But they are always improvements over the previous version, however incremental.

Client satisfaction remains a constant and relevant factor in design work, but equally or perhaps more important is to impress the client’s customers, or better yet, to drive them to action. Strangely enough, the two groups often have very different opinions. If that’s the case, it’s up to the customer to have the final say on what works. GDD gets your work closer to the customers, and faster.

Learn to take as much pride in the process as a whole as you used to take on just one single Launch Day. Be proud of your team’s ability to release quality work quickly. Take to heart how much value the client is getting from your speed to market. Remember how each iteration is also helping to improve the lives of customers as well as clients, and now those customers are receiving value faster than ever.

Solve Problems by Doing, Not by Thinking.

GDD’s Strategy phase provides a framework for doing plenty of qualitative research — diving deep into the client’s current situation, exploring what we think are the customers’ needs and wants, setting goals for the short and long term, and making certain fundamental assumptions based on the team’s experience and expertise.

Without real world feedback, however, the power of research has its limits. That’s why the process aims to put a limit on how much time is spent on strategic planning. Eventually, we do need to get out into the real world via our initial release “Launch Pad” site, and start to collect quantitative data as well.

You’re the expert in your field. You’ve got a ton of ideas on how to improve metrics and satisfy customers. When you combine your expertise with the GDD process, you have a way to best optimize that expertise towards generating results. Do things that will conduct experiments to help answer those questions. After the Strategy and Launch Pad phases comes Continuous Improvement — and that means that improving and learning never stops.

Set a realistic, yet hard-stop, deadline for when the strategy phase — the “thinking” part of the project — ends, and when the doing — building the Launch Pad site — begins.

Let Go of the Need to Get It Perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of “done” as well as the enemy of “good.” Growth-Driven Design (notice how it’s not called Perfection-Driven Design) wholly accepts — even assumes — that our first hypotheses about the website will be slightly incorrect. So don’t be afraid of not getting it right the first time. Nobody’s life will be ruined if your first iteration doesn’t hit ideal metrics goals.

Perfectionism is one of the largest causes of design project delays. Designers get bogged down in the search for that “just right” solution. If we don’t find it, we’ll keep on trying ad infinitum, generating more ideas, on and on and on, without limit, because nothing we’ve come up with so far satisfied us one hundred percent. All the while, we’re losing track of time, missing deadlines and milestones.

The perfect solution to a design problem isn’t in the designer’s head, or even anywhere inside your office. It’s out in the market. Your office is a nice comfortable bubble, and the outside world is gritty and scary — but that’s where your customers are. That’s where your answers are. Use your Launch Pad site to collect real user data to make informed decisions.

Remind yourself, and counsel your team, that perfectionism is not expected of anyone. Nothing that your team can come up with will be one hundred percent right the first time. This is not only okay, but is the expected norm. Do not extend deadlines in order to gain more time to chase after perfectionism.

Don’t Start What You Can’t Finish.

Here’s one for the project managers. Though there’s no hard and fast rule, a typical Launch Pad site goes live 30-60 days after the project begins. That’s not a lot of time, and it’s certainly not enough time to do everything both you and the client want to do for the site.

Nor is it supposed to be. What a Launch Pad site is supposed to be is a notable improvement over the old website, as well as a tool for learning, experimentation, feedback, and improvement.

When planning a project timeline, be pessimistic, especially if you are new to the GDD process. For your Launch Pad site, you may streamline the process by simplifying features, or postponing the release of certain features or pages until the second launch.

Remember the “80/20 Rule” — around 80% of the value customers get from the website likely comes from around 20% of the pages and features. When your team is successfully able to identify those high-impact areas, you can be confident that you’re allocating time and resources optimally.

GDD workflows take very tight team communication. When a single day constitutes a much larger percentage of your work time than ever before, a single unproductive day where someone was blocked, or wasn’t prioritizing or focusing, is a huge hit to productivity. For my team, I mandate a minimum of two check-ins per day.

To help the team maintain focus on what they can finish, keep a wish list of tasks to be done in the future. This helps calm the anxiety associated with not being able to get everything done at once, and goes a long way in managing expectations with the rest of your team.

No one’s ideas need be rejected, merely saved into a trusted system and postponed for a later time. It’s this wish list that you and the client often refer to when deciding what to work on for your next release.

Nothing looks professional when it’s half-baked. “Done” is the key word here! If you can’t finish a page or feature in time, it’s better to leave it out entirely, put it back on your wish list, and plan to finish it for a later release.

The Key Takeaways for Agencies and Designers.

Once you learn to embrace the “done” rather than the “perfect” in your work, it’s quite a liberating feeling. Launch dates aren’t nearly as stressful when there are many small ones instead of one big monster launch.

You aren’t fearful over making a mistake. The thought of not finishing everything on your wish list in one go doesn’t cause crippling anxiety for your team. You take pride in the fact that every new launch is a chance to improve your work, learn truths that are actually backed up by real data, and improve customers’ lives. In time, you come to a place where true growth can happen for your clients, your team, and you as a designer.