I work with a lot of small businesses. And I’m always struck by how much they (we) are all master jugglers -‐ with so much to think about to run a small business, it’s easy to prioritise immediate concerns – we all have constant and important deadlines.
But this isn’t another one of those lectures about ‘separating the important from the urgent’… my intention is to make you think about why your brand and your marketing is a core priority. Let me put it another way – if you think you have no problem with getting your message and desired image across, and that your market gets exactly what you do and queue up for it, then you’re fine already!
Your brand and its marketing is how you achieve your business strategy, and I know you’d not be reading this if optimising your business’s performance wasn’t important to you. But within it, at the heart in my view, sits your brand strategy. What’s one of those? And why bother?
It should be tailored to every individual business, and what works for one might not for another, however for now I’ll just tell you that although there are thousands of definitions (‘it’s what people say about you when you’re not there’, etc etc) I genuinely believe and can prove that a correctly formed and executed brand marketing strategy is not about ‘soft stuff’ e.g. having a nice or ‘clever’ logo, but will actually directly help you achieve the hard reality of enhanced commercial and financial success. So forget the view that it’s about fluffy stuff you can leave for another day, or can be relegated to someone who doesn’t do it for a living – done properly, it goes to the core of your business and its performance -‐ you can’t get more real than affecting hard cash and your bottom line.
It is the front line in influencing customer choice, creating loyalty, and delivering repeat business and more profitable business.
Oh, and if you think you might ever want to sell your business, it’ll add real value (in additional £££) to your business, guaranteed.