Building your Brand
Sales, marketing, advertising and public relations campaigns need to be targeted toward achieving the fundamental goal of building your brand.
Whether print, radio, television, Internet, networking or social media, there are very few publicity campaigns that are more powerful and effective than having your company editorialized in a news or media story.
Building a recognizable brand provides enormous advantages. When your company is recognized by its brand, all of your advertising, marketing and public relation campaigns achieve exponential results with substantially less capital.
Implementation of an in-house media relation’s agenda can be more effective than hiring a Public Relations firm. No one knows your business like you. Your in-house Corporate Communications Department can development an economically efficient strategy that produces substantial and positive market exposure through constructive editorial copy and publicity.
All media outlets are clamoring for stories to fill space. However, the stories must be “news worthy,” and generally those companies that have developed a rapport with media stand the best chance of receiving favorable placement.
An initial Press Kit is essential to developing media relationships. Among other important elements, a Press Kit should include your company time-line, major milestones and achievements, product and service offerings, how your company differentiates itself from its competition, management biographies, geographic market, historic and projected growth and the pertinent facts that make your company extraordinary.
All media outlets are clamoring for stories to fill space. However, the stories must be “news worthy,” and generally those companies that have developed a rapport with media stand the best chance of receiving favorable placement.
An initial Press Kit is essential to developing media relationships. Among other important elements, a Press Kit should include your company time-line, major milestones and achievements, product and service offerings, how your company differentiates itself from its competition, management biographies, geographic market, historic and projected growth and the pertinent facts that make your company extraordinary.
It is important to note that a Press Kit is an evolving document. All published articles and major news releases should be added to the Press Kit. Quality photographs and illustrations are highly recommended.
News Releases should be frequent, fresh and credible. News releases need to be news worthy. What is “News Worthy?” We coin the phrase, “Your most recent significant event.”
What is your company’s Most Recent Significant Event? If that significant event is more than a couple of months old, then it is time to focus on superseding it with a new most recent significant event.
Only the CEO can run the race and he or she must set the pace and champion the cause.
Companies rarely grow by themselves. People grow the company and it is the CEO’s responsibility to grow the people.
Some suggestions on how to implement strategies that grow the people can be reviewed in the personnel tab.
Your team can create a new most recent significant event every month. Indeed, this needs to be a dynamic and evolving team goal. Each month, the
bar needs to be set just a little higher, a new record must be broken and the team must consciously and deliberately pioneer events that are more significant than the prior most significant event.
When your team fully embraces this ideology and it becomes a part of your corporate culture, your company will be generating genuine news worthy editorial content on a consistent basis. Your company will appear in the news frequently.
In addition to media relations and pursuing editorial content, advertising and marketing are two additional and necessary components to a good growth strategy.
Advertising has evolved significantly during the past decade with the Internet, web, social media, Smartphone’s, tablets, and a significant expansion of cable television. The plethora of potential advertising medium is almost endless. The question is not so much where you advertise, but how you advertise.
Among the most successful advertising strategies is to capitalize upon media horsepower.
Take an issue that is already generating a media buzz and use that hot topic to intensify the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns. Click here to see a few examples here.
Marketing can and should be automated. There are a number of Customer Relationship Software (CRM) programs available. Whichever system your company chooses, KOCH Consulting Group will work with you to streamline an automated marketing campaign that is focused on increasing sales and revenues.
Relationship selling is a function of identifying your market demographic and making them aware of your product and service. There are very few products or services that cannot benefit and grow by developing a good sales department.
Production quotas are frequently used to measure sales department effectiveness. In many instances, activity quotas are more effective.
On average, it takes seven impressions before a prospect remembers your company’s name. Relationship selling can accelerate how quickly those seven, and many more, impressions / contacts can be made through automated processes.
Activity quotas are set as number of daily customer contacts, which includes telephone calls, letters, post cards, email newsletters, and personal visits. Additionally, relationship selling requires that a sales person contact a customer on his/her birthday, wedding anniversary, company employment anniversary, children’s birthdays with their names, and any other date that might be important to the person whom makes the purchasing decisions. As a sales person develops lists of thousands of prospects, remembering all of these dates must become automated, and sending the salutation must be an automated process as well.
The market is rich with choices for a CRM program. It is important to select one that is cross platform and that will integrate with the unique requirements of your company toward achieving its objectives and goals.
