You’ve got a great product, app, or even just a great idea – suffice to say, it’s not enough!

So what exactly is a brand? A brand is the service mark that distinguishes your product or service from all others and creates an experience unique to your product.That’s a brand in a nutshell. There are many different aspects that flow from this concept: brand recognition, brand value, brand experience, brand image and brand awareness.

Yes, you can have the most brilliant product or idea since the In-n-Out Burger, but it’s never going to be a viable product in the marketplace unless you have a great package to wrap it up in, a brand.

All of these aspects need to come together to create the most important function in the marketplace, and that is TRUST. This is especially true for e-commerce; customers need to know they can trust a faceless purchase. Most online purchases fall into this category, so customers will always seek out and continue to shop with and for brands they trust for these faceless purchases online.

Let’s talk about consistency

If your product logos and branding are one thing on your website, another thing on your facebook page, and yet another thing on your printed materials or twitter – you’ve got problems. Customers are never going to trust your product unless the product experience is consistent across all of your marketing platforms.

The solution:

Make branding a company policy. Secretaries and Vice Presidents need to know that they just can’t make up their own marketing materials, images and packages willy-nilly. Your company needs a style guide and marketing asset reserve that is mandated from the top down and easily accessible on the fly. Going off brand should never happen!

Hiring a professional to develop your brand materials and leave you with a style guide and reserve of marketing assets should be your first priority before launching your product in the marketplace. Train your staff and yourself to always stay on brand.

Let’s talk about brand awareness & image

What’s the worst thing that can happen to your brand? When customers don’t like or trust you! We’ve discussed how to engineer trust with a consistent brand presentation and product packaging. We already know that customers don’t buy from brands they don’t trust (and thus, the brand will go out of business!); but customers also don’t buy from brands that may offend them or simply rub them the wrong way.

An example:

Your company sells a medical product, and your secretary sets up a Pinterest brand page that she handles willy-nilly posting things that are personally interesting to her, like pictures of her favorite bacon meal and a political book. While this may sound like an over-the-top example of bad practices in branding, this is actually a real world example! Your customers are going to have different ideas about religion, politics and even meals, than you do. Stay on brand and off of sensitive or irrelevant information.

Great brands have great appeal – to everyone. Associate your brand with experiences, images and ideas that have appeal to the entire market segment you are targeting.

Let’s talk about brand value

Doing the wrong things, confusing customers, going off brand, going off on personal tangents will 100% of the time reduce the perceived value of your brand in the mind of the customer and ultimately the marketplace.

Find out what associations with the brand the consumer has. You’ll want to measure the awareness and image of the brand through consumer testing. Brands with high levels of awareness and strong, positive and unique associations are high value brands.

Powerful brands have powerful conversations with their customers, not top down commands!

We get asked a lot about SEO. In fact, SEO is so much on the minds of every ecommerce retailer and business out there. What used to be a somewhat “marginal” practice has blossomed into an entire industry. And, like other industries, some products are better than others; and some products are dangerous. In SEO, bad or inappropriate SEO can kill your business outright; so it’s really important that you vet your vendors (if you are contracting your web development) well and also know a few important things about SEO.

SEO is Search Engine Optimization – just as the name says it is methods of optimizing your site to return the best results from the search engines; namely Google, because Google has about 90% search engine market share.

1. Kinds of SEO

There are 3 kinds of SEO – White Hat, Black Hat, and what we like to call the Party Hat. White Hat is just what you would expect – No application of any artificial techniques to boost search engine rankings, with a focus purely on content and the users. A White Hat site is a site that is mapped out as a long-term player on the web. A longstanding family business, for example.

Black Hat is simply pure spam. It’s intended for short-term sites and large profits in the near future, not as an established business. If you’ve ever seen those “gibberish” results pages in Google when searching for something, the ones that look like a mish mash of words and a bunch of ads – that’s a great example of what Black Hat is. Google is constantly updating their algorithm in an effort to make their SERPS return the most relevant results ; ie, NOT the Black Hat pages!

Party Hat is our name for SEO that has all of the great long-term qualities and beautiful, original content that is user-focused, with close attention paid to the SEO aspects and performance of the site in the search engines. Party Hat is a public relations and social SEO.

Based on your business model you should select the SEO that is appropriate for you and select the appropriate agency to fulfill your order. Here at Bedazzlin! Media we are a White Hat & Party Hat agency, of course!

2. Don’t rely on a vendor or employee to tell you about SEO when you can learn all of the basics right here : Google Webmaster Guidelines .

3. Yes, that company that says they are going to make you #1 in Google results is lying.

No one can guarantee Google placement results and most people that do are Black Hat spammers. Plus, being #1 in the search results is many times not as profitable as being #3 or #6! Being #1 is never as important as converting traffic into sales!

4. Great user content = great SEO!

Good, original content that appears only on your website forms the base of a great search engine optimized site. Without this foundation your site will never place in the SERPS for the return you want.

5. Tracking tools that you have access to and can understand are essential whether your SEO is in-house or an outside vendor.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are not only free but very powerful and at the most basic levels, easy to understand for a business owner that might be otherwise rather flummoxed over all of this complicated web stuff! Your webmaster or developer should establish these account for your site and you can have daily access to your traffic stats, keyword stats, and search engine placements.

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