Four States Small Business Blog

Your brand requires constant attention. That’s because it’s far more than your logo, tagline, or anything tangible — your brand is the sum of every interaction a consumer has with your company. It’s a living, changing thing you can’t entirely control, and it can mean something different from one customer to the next.

We talk a lot about the importance of branding on our blog. Your brand is what helps distinguish your company, products, and services from your competitors. A strong brand creates a connection between your company and consumers, and when it becomes familiar, your brand name helps increase your customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Putting all of your eggs in one basket can be a costly mistake for advertisers if you lack proper strategy and focus. For example, some might think all they need is traditional. Maybe radio or TV has worked before, so why complicate things by adding digital to the mix? But in reality adding digital could mean updating your website and making sure you’re following SEO best practices. On the other hand, younger marketers who gravitate primarily towards digital (it’s what they know!) are missing out on traditional opportunities.

Radio is a rare media channel that reaches nearly all Americans at some point in the day, each and every week. Reaching 91% of Americans over the age of 12, radio provides mass reach, maximizes frequency, and in combination with the right psychographic and demographic data, offers effective targeting. But that alone shouldn’t convince you that radio is a good fit for your marketing strategy.

In a recent post, we shared questions to ask to determine if your digital marketing is working or not. If you’ve had trouble answering those questions or you’re dissatisfied with the answers you came up with, there are a number of potential factors that could be at play.

Digital marketing is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes, and you’ve already taken the leap and made investments to run digital campaigns for your brand. The question is, is it working? Do you actually know how to recognize if it is or isn’t working? You need to be measuring your progress, and if you’re not, you might be wasting your money or failing to reach your true potential.

A CNA (customer needs analysis) is a critical first step to building a good relationship with a media partner, but it’s even more critical to seeing positive ROI across your marketing campaigns. We took a good look at what a CNA is and what it entails in a previous post.

Essentially, a CNA is a business profile that helps media partners understand where your company has been, where your business is now, and where you want to see your brand go in the future. It involves asking questions you should often already have the answers to, and highlight areas where you need help developing better answers. You should expect it to be the first step a new media partner takes because without it, you can’t create a meaningful marketing strategy or achieve the best possible ROI for your efforts.

You may have heard that Facebook is making changes to its news feed algorithm. Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, says the changes are designed to give priority to content with “meaningful interaction” and reduce what he calls “passive content” such as videos, where users tend to sit back and watch, then move on, as opposed to interacting with the content. According to Zuckerberg, these changes in the Facebook news feed come in response to user feedback that indicated branded content was overcrowding posts from friends and family, reducing users’ ability to connect with others.

Are you familiar with the adage, you only get one chance to make a great first impression? Customer perspective — that is, the impression customers have of your business — plays a big role in the success of that business. You see, it isn’t enough to have great promises in your Joplin marketing campaigns; that only gets them to the door. And that’s where you only get one shot at convincing customers that your business is worth their time and money.

 When you develop a plan for marketing in Joplin, MO, or anywhere else in the world for that matter, you’re probably ready to do a few things. You’ll define a budget, choose the right channels to advertise on, select a schedule, and lay out what you want the creative to be. You’re just forgetting one thing — how the customer sees things. That’s not necessarily the same thing as identifying your target audience, which you need to do before you select where you’re going to advertise or how to build your message.