How long has it been since you're company's last reality check?

http://www.manta.com/resources/tip-of-the-day/swots-it-all-about/

Everything from future sales & profits to market share & branding starts with a SWOT checkup - ideally guided by a dispassionate third party.

Why draw lines between a brand, branding & marketing?

Branding developed without audited
marketing intelligence may be wasted.

It is not uncommon for executives who finally bless a brand review do so as a necessary backlash to years of brand neglect. However, discussing Brand and Branding outside the context of an overall Marketing self-assessment is an exercise in the proverbial tail wagging the dog. If you can start the healing anywhere, start the process with marketing. Here’s why.

Historically, most in the small to medium business category are challenged to effectively manage their brand. With scarce resources, an executive who ignores the foundations of an essential marketing foundation squanders opportunity and a viable long term path to success in favor of short term flash and unnecessary risk. We’ll begin by describing the differences and overlap of Brand, Branding and Marketing, starting with the most visible (the Tail) and work our way through to the most strategically important (the Dog).

The word brand derives from a burning mark, a sign and a certification. In today’s narrowest marketing parlance, a brand is a logo. Virtually all who are exposed to our commercial world are fundamentally aware of the significance of logo as brand. None can argue against the caretaking of an identity, a logo design (or redesign) with attendant usage guidelines as a noble effort.

Lacking brand application guidelines or direction, well intentioned employees will populate their communications with every conceivable possibility for personal expression, causing employer mis-representations and contributing to market confusion. Symptoms of brand neglect include:

• Abundance of logo tweaks and settings - simply because it’s so easy!
• Tag lines that come and go with popular tides.
• Corporate, division or department identities presented inconsistently with a logo creates an amateur impression of the company as a whole, does not instill confidence.
• Sales channels that plop corporate logos willy nilly into jarring displays of affiliation, hinder more than help the desired effect of a stable relationship.

Today, in its broadest sense, a brand has come to signify everything an entity stands for, and thus begins the overlap and confusion with Branding and the over-arching Marketing function.

Branding is the act of promoting a company or product with distinctive design or advertising. The term Branding is a natural extension of activities associated with a corporate brand and requires extended creative attention and management. Why split such hairs? Beyond establishing a Brand, or a corporate mark, Branding also involves art and direction approved at the highest corporate level. Branding brings discipline to: graphic design, photography, illustration, videography, and all forms of content development to unleash a powerful gamut of promotions on a mission to proactively charge markets. The harmonizing of corporate Brand with Branding efforts results in effective market perceptions.

Marketing encompasses and supports all actions required to communicate a corporate value proposition to its target markets. As a science, marketing includes the identification of meaningful markets, their motivations, and response triggers.

A larger issue looms even as we have ironed out the finer distinctions between brand and branding. Consider:

if…

Brand = logo = identity
Branding = Brand x distinctive promotions.

If we were to end our argument here at branding, essentially a multiplier of promotions, our branding activities would be unchecked.

So, we need…

Marketing = Branding ÷ value research

With the addition of Marketing to our series of equations, Branding becomes focused, directed at where and how it will do the most good, and Brand provides the essential market signature. An organization’s unique value proposition supported by an overall look and feel that is managed for consistency becomes that company’s brand

Conclusion:
A brand as an identifying mark needs and deserves TLC. Branding demands more and therefore requires more information gathering to be cost-effective. A company has the best chance of success when its marketing; that is, information gathering and direction for how it is to be precisely communicated; takes the lead in sales operations.

Emil Walcek, President,  EJW Associates Inc.

Sure, "Ready, Fire, Aim" marketing might work...

...but let's not kid ourselves - it's still a gamble. 

Who are we to judge? We've all been at the crossroads of Time, Money, & Results.  At some point, every marketer has shot from the hip, and shot themselves in the foot, too! In "just doing it" to make a campaign happen - without knowing everything there is to know about a product, its market, and expectations - a marketer is rolling the dice. You can win, but odds are you could have won bigger. And, with Las Vegas odds always with the house, more often than not you'll not meet campaign goals doing READY. FIRE. AIM. marketing.

Some rationals for shooting first and asking questions later include:

• I need results yesterday.
• Don't have the time or money for market research.
• I feel real good about this. Success is in the bag!
• My boss respects the "act now, apologize later" methodology.
• Cost of failure may be judged another day.
• Potential for success is simply too great to delay.

Experienced marketers I've known have almost always regretted not doing a campaign right the first time. Others simply write-off bad results by blaming everything and everyone but their own choices. In "Ready. FIRE. Aim." mode a marketer completely by-passes the vetting we all know should be done.

Yet, I have to say I've seen marketing shortcuts work. Better than doing nothing, or when perfection becomes the enemy of good, a niche, industrial or technology marketer may have just enough insight and experience to take a marketing risk and achieve some ROI.

But here the kidding stops. Marketing is as marketing does. Hero one day, loose cannon the next. There's a reason process, buy-in, creativity, and accountability win out in the end. Ready, AIM, Fire not only reduces risks, but improves the probability of long-term success while gaining the marketing practitioner respect within an organization and (most importantly) among customers!

And if you think you can't afford it, think again. Learn about Marketing Consulting for B to B marketers here. Than look for another link to a "Unique Outside Looking In Trial Marketing Consulting Offer" at the end.

Marketing, shmarketing. Who needs it?

Everything starts with a sale. Marketing does not equal sales, or vice versa. Yet, smaller organizations frequently get along fine without a formal marketing function - for a time. Many companies view the sometimes complex functions of marketing as a cost-of-sales, rather than a driver of sales. They wait too long before seriously considering an investment in marketing. Marketing is best implemented before the first dark clouds appear on the sales and profit horizon. With marketing in place, businesses can even circumvent sales and profit-zapping issues as they crop up, and new challenges arise.

Every sales professional knows instinctively what it takes to prospect for leads, right?
Yes, and no. The vigilant sales person:

1) sows the seeds for sales throughout a network that extends to industry groups, peers and acquaintances;
2) is in personal touch with customers to short circuit any customer service issues while probing for new ways to add customer value.
3) provides market intelligence for future product or service development.
4) cannot consistently deliver the same message to every customer all of the time.

Sales is king, but even a king needs support
The need for improved sales and profitability - the multiplication of sales - manifests itself when existing sales processes need a marketing kick, i.e. help that goes beyond one-on-one selling, especially as sales goals change.

Marketing is the multiplication of sales efforts, and comes into play before, during and after a sale. More than simple one-shot-wonder promotions and advertising, marketing orchestrates many tools to help develop and maintain customer dialog - and profitability.

Marketing:

1) softens the field for sales.
2) gets prospects to raise their hands for a sales contact.
3) Perhaps most importantly, marketing helps convey a company's brand to knock down barriers to a sale, lift customer expectations for doing business with a company, creating a preference in the market for a company's goods or services.

Send in the clowns
Prospecting, networking, customer support, and all aspects of customer development that lead to long term customer value is a continuum to be broken at great risk to sales and profits.

Marketing, the anecdote
Marketing is comprised of the strategy, tactics, and the creative implementation of a plan to ensure: fresh sales leads, timely customer communications, non-stop customer service, and continuous development of relevant product and services leading to improved sales, market share, and profitability. Coordinated advertising, PR, website, and other media campaigns create value in a customer's mind. With these tools savvy marketers are able to rise above their competition with better profit margins.

The Dirty Little Secret of SEO

SEO is not a one shot deal. It's not a magic wand. What's more, it can ZAP marketing resources better applied elsewhere to boost sales. Optimizing a web site for high search rankings (Search Engine Optimizing) can be a slow and steady effort over time, or major investment up front with ongoing maintenance to match. Regardless, SEO as a marketing budget line-item must be cost-justified based on traditional marketing parameters, including its role in contributing to customer value.

Because SEO demands so many unique skill sets, in-house SEO is rife with just as many management and execution challenges as an out-sourced solution. SEO demands industry, product and sales knowledge coupled with writing, website development, and marketing management expertise.

Just like in brick-and-mortar retail, not every business can cost-justify the overhead of a prime real estate location. If not justified and held accountable like any other marketing project, SEO can become the proverbial bottomless money pit for B2B marketers.

Yet, because every business has clamored for first page search visibility ever since top management twigged to the idea that a website really can effect sales, SEO companies have sprouted like mushrooms with some very slick salesmanship - eager to match expectations with acronym-laced rhetoric and a hefty contract.

Alas, after signing and the honeymoon ends three months into a Search Engine Optimizing contract, many marketers are left wondering just what they got after lots of boilerplate SEO reports, to-do lists that never get done, and account reps that call less and less frequently. When will the magic kick in?

Or, on the other hand, an SEO project plays out the proverbial "be careful what you ask for" scenario. The SEO provider is successful in gaining top ranking for the client, but site visitors are not converting, leaving the marketer to play catchup while would-be customers and costly sales leads vanish.

So, how badly do we need yet another marketing tool like SEO?

A subset of the general category of search marketing, SEO demands a healthy investment in time and/or expense to achieve a reasonable return on investment. Place SEO in perspective before initiating a search optimizing program. Treat SEO as just one more arrow in the marketing lead-generating quiver that includes:

• Search Engine Optimizing

• Adword or "Click" advertising

• Direct marketing e-Promotions

• Integration with traditional advertising, PR, events, and other sales and marketing promotions

Planned properly within the scope of an overall marketing program, the right dose of SEO at the right time will yield a respectable ROI. An independent marketing services company that combines SEO, business marketing experience, and relevant industry expertise can ensure all pieces of a marketing puzzle come together. On the other hand, highly specialized SEO companies exist solely to get more eyeballs on a client site. Never mind that your site may be ill-equipped to handle new-found visitors, capture relevant visitor information, track traffic patterns, or otherwise encourage visitors to raise their hands and identify themselves as sales prospects.

How much SEO should you be doing?

As with any lead generating program, budget as much SEO as you can realistically handle. By that I mean working a plan, developing a conversion process, tracking and measuring against a target ROI. eCcommerce sites can clearly benefit from higher volumes of high quality traffic from both natural and pay per click campaigns. B2B sites without a direct ordering mechanism or other clarion call to action may have a harder time cost-justifying the resources required for an SEO program that consumes more than its fair share of a marketing lead generation budget.

The really big question comes back to your choices for implementing SEO. Realize that even legitimate third parties committed to providing the best SEO services will inevitably require more than your cash to make their services work for you. Improving a site's natural ranking with the major search engines (at this time these include Google, Yahoo and MSN) requires just three major things of your web site:

• Tons of relevant, keyword-rich content

• Lots of relevant links to your site (popularity)

• Easy to follow site structure with relevant naming conventions

In other words, even when outsourcing be prepared to do more than write a check when it comes to both content and link-building especially if you are a manufacturer, technology products/service company, financial services provider, or other industrial company. B2B marketing departments will be tasked with developing much of the new site content, regardless of who does the final SEO. For SMB (small to medium business) marketers on a limited budget, the following proves to be cost-effective SEO choices:

• Moderate investment in a site upgrade that includes SEO best practices coding.
• 
Regular site content additions that improve a site's worth to prospects and customers.

• Ongoing research and registration on important industry directory sites.
• Well-planned click advertising campaign.
• Integration of existing PR, article and lead generation programs into your website.

• Add site analytics that work across all search engines - study what’s working and what is not.

• Add staff capabilities as appropriate to handle one or more of the diverse components required for SEO.

Remember to fulfill the promise

Does your existing website separate curious visitors from sales prospects?
A business website can be both a destination to fulfill market information needs, and a revenue-generating tool. Its marketing function is to service existing customers and encourage new ones. Number one: it must "fulfill the promise" that drove the visitor to it in the first place. Just as your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) draws prospects, your site must work to inspire qualified visitor interaction. SEO is important, but the marketer must first get his marketing house in order.

EJW Associates offers powerful marketing solutions