Branding your business means presenting yourself to the public in all facets of communication.
From print to digital and beyond, your message must be clear. It must be articulate and it must be monitored.
Branding Your Business
What do I mean by being monitored? It means constantly putting yourself in the role of the customer.
I visit a lot of websites. Maybe too many. But it’s what I do for a living. And you would be surprised at how many sites fail in branding themselves.
Contact forms that don’t work (please read Contact Forms for more) make it impossible to ask a question. Events that are months passed still show prominently on home pages.
Though my favorite has to be this lovely piece of irony, Is My Website Up.
An Example
What do I mean? How complicated is this effort? Not very. Just look at this gem.
Reminds Of This
Another gem. Where a little forward thinking could have helped a bit.
What To Do
So when it comes to branding your business, what is one to do? How should you monitor your strategy?
First, either do this yourself or assign someone, but simply play the role of a customer. Call the main phone number and see what the process for reaching someone is. Sounds like a bit of fluff, but once again the results will amaze you.
One company I contact a bit, plays hold music insanely loud. And it’s some old school dance station. They don’t answer the phone very politely and worse, they never recognize me.
And I’ve been calling them for a few years. They repeatedly ask what company I am with. After a few years!
What Else
Check your website at least a few times a week. I know you surf the web late at night when you cannot fall asleep. At least I think you do. Hell, I know I do. Take a quick peak of your site on your desktop and mobile phone.
Does it look OK? Any weird formatting problems? Did a coupon expire six months ago? Do you have a schedule up that is no longer relevant. Like the holiday schedule in February?
Check email signatures and confirm accuracy of links, tag lines, titles and more. Make sure email newsletters still have pertinent into. Like making sure the April newsletter does not reference November. As it has for the past five months.
It’s Easy
Branding yourself takes creativity. And a bit of work. But monitoring the efforts of that work does not. It’s an insanely simple task. So why not do it?
All your efforts in branding your business can be quickly thrown out the door. Or worse reversed. When you fail to simply monitor your strategy. And adapt when needed.