Whats your Marketing Strategy for 2018

As we are heading towards 2018, I want to share some of my thoughts on the key area of your brand and marketing.

It is such a key time to start to plan for next year, as if you make the right choices you will see a great change in your business and mindset.

I am not saying I have all the answers or some magic formula which will change your business and make you millions.

But one thing I can say with hand on heart I have spent my money on making these things work, and on the other hand spent my money and not made it work.

Logo

To be honest with you, to much time is spent thinking, and over thinking your logo, on the other hand, it is really easy to do a really poor job of a logo.

You will find that most people will look at the logo and make a call on your brand even before they have read the name.

So with that in mind, you need to make sure your logo follows your brand image and guidelines, things like colour and font and even the basic formate.

But you must also remember that some of the biggest brands in the world spent very little time and money on the design if I remember Nike spent sub $50, and I have heard of a big brand doing the design on the back on a cigarette packet.

But the main tip is to try not to spend to much time on the design but make sure it follows your guidelines.

Brand guidelines

This is something that a lot of people forget and when they start to grow start to panic that they have nothing in place to protect all the hard work of the brand and image.

If you have remote teams who are writing or working with your brand this is key to make sure everyone is singing the same song sheet.

This is something that you should really start to think about on day one, even if you keep it basic to start with and add when you go along, the key things you need to think about are.

Colours,

How does your brand write, fun, profession etc,

Size of logo,

What size of text and font of email and publications,

What does your logo go on and position,

What do you want your customer experience to be,

As soon as you start to grow you will find the guidelines become larger and larger.

One thing I would like to mention about guidelines, depending on how far you want to take them, I was seeing a new client last week.

First thing I did was look at the website, google the directors and then start to look at LinkedIn, the senior team was all good, then I started to notice some of the middle management and LinkedIn looked more like a personal facebook page, this can damage the brand if they are representing you.

What is your Why?

This may sound a really odd one, but it is very key to your brand, the “Why” define your complete message from, being a company you can trust to a line of products you cant live without, and to look at this bigger should really be key to the complete message, great examples are Apple, Google, and Virgin.

Where do you want your business to be?

This is a real tricky one, what I mean is what is your market and ideal, client, until you have this 100% you have a problem to build a strong brand and market position.

As no point in building a brand and image across the lines of Rolls Royce or Coutts but your target client or customer is an 18-year-old skateboarder.

How to contact clients?

This is one of the biggest questions for any marketing and sales strategy, I always try and think of this as a two-point attach, first get your message out, social media as low cost and you can contact thousands of people, think about target marketing via email or direct mail.

The biggest things before you do much work on marketing and sales strategy is to make sure your brand and message is on point, then sit down and remember what your clients are, as no point is sending emails to a demographic who never use the internet or the other way around sending paper information to people which are on the internet.

The other key thing with getting your message out is doing something, as doing something is better than not doing anything.