Last week posted some comments from my friend David Stone on marketing. This week he talks about building your brand. From my perspective you can also think about your employment brand. What do employees and potential employees think of when they think of you? Are you an employer of choice?

Anyway, considering that marketing is voodoo to many business people, here is David for this week.

First, let’s define what we’re talking about when we say ‘brand-building.’ This is the effort you expend to establish a wide-spread knowledge and understanding of the facts that your firm exists and what it does (name-recognition), that your firm is well-regarded within your target markets (reputation-enhancement) and that the decision makers and influencers within your target markets are familiar with and have a positive view of your firm, whether they’ve ever actually worked with you or not (mind share.)

Traditionally, a design firm’s brand has been established over a long period of time, mostly by word of mouth, and is almost exclusively restricted to the clients with which you’ve worked. Very often, outside that circle of clients, the firm’s name is hardly known at all. But a strong brand name is essential for a firm to thrive today and it’s no longer enough to rely on the slow pace of word-of-mouth advertising. A firm must take a proactive approach to establish its brand throughout its target market.

A well-designed and executed brand-building program ‘surrounds’ every decision-maker and influencer in your target market with reminders of your firm. When they go through their mail, you are there. When they attend their conferences, you are there. When they read their industry journals, you are there. When they open their in-box, you are there. After 12 months or more of this, especially when the high-quality content of your communication shows you to be an industry thought leader, they will have easily reached the conclusion that they owe it to themselves to include you in their list of preferred providers.

The best return on your branding investment comes through regular, frequent, broadly-cast communications to your entire market including those who have never been clients – even the clients of your competitors! The worst use of your resources is to send information irregularly and infrequently. The firm that sends an annual holiday card, or three issues of a newsletter followed by silence, would be better off doing nothing and saving the time and cost.

Since the goal of brand-building is to raise the knowledge and understanding of your firm throughout your market, the best way to measure the effectiveness of the effort is to conduct regular surveys of the market to see how much that knowledge has been raised. A simple perception survey, conducted annually, will provide clear data on the results of your campaign. If perception and understanding is going up, your efforts are working.

Measuring ROI is also a simple matter. Most firms obtain between 70% and 90% of their revenue from repeat clients. Presumably, those clients don’t come back because of your brand-building efforts. They already know the firm. By tracking new client activity, and making a point to determine how the new clients first heard about the firm, you can gauge the return on your branding investment. If you spend $25,000 in a year for brand-building and it attracts one new client with a $50,000 project, your ROI is 200% in the first year. If that client sticks around with additional projects, your ROI goes higher still.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2012 at 3:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.