Thinking

A wise man once said "Good is the enemy of great." If you think about it, it's the truth. How often do people stop at good, rather than go all the way to great? This is especially true in marketing. I once suggested to a client that if we made a couple of changes to their site, they would have the best site in their industry. Their response was, "It doesn't need to be the best, it just needs to be as good as everyone else." Way to reach for the stars, dude!

In her recent and timely blog post this active hurricane season, my colleague Tracy Hartman writes about crisis preparedness when it comes to communications planning. But as this relates more specifically to branding, what are some of the risks and — for better or worse — opportunities that arise when disaster strikes? The double whammy (so far!) of Harvey and Irma paint a pretty telling picture for us.

The historic surroundings of Crewe Hall provided the setting for a property seminar this morning, where high on the agenda was the issue of High Speed 2 - the new railway link that will see travel times drastically cut between London and other towns and cities in the UK.

During late summer and early fall, it’s not unusual to hear about tropical depressions or tropical storms, which sometimes develop into full force hurricanes. These hurricanes vary in intensity from category 1 to category 5 (the most severe). It usually starts when a meteorologist forecasts some sort of “activity” on the weather maps as a potential risk in the coming days or weeks. And then, depending on how things develop to intensify or weaken the hurricane, the weather service can either announce a “hurricane watch” (meaning a hurricane is a possibility) or can elevate to a “hurricane warning” (a hurricane is expected).

Do you understand your customers’ journey through your website? Understanding how your customers and prospects arrive on your website and where they navigate to from there is vital to increasing your digital conversions. There is no point in creating great content if your website visitors aren’t finding it or seeing it.

Stop promoting your brand and write something useful to your target.

This “new era” of content marketing, the effective way of providing helpful content that your target audience wants to consume, is really taking a page out of the book of PR best practices — namely the bylined article.

Think about it. The era of pushing out self-promotional content is passé. Content strategies now revolve around the premise that your target wants to read content that they WANT to read and is HELPFUL to their situation. And yet, PR professionals have been chugging along with this concept long before the term “inbound” was ever heard of with what we call “bylined articles”.

Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time with a disabled and blind, formerly homeless, 80-year-old man named Frank. Being in the branding business, I began to wonder how Frank would recognize and/or associate with different brands. He wouldn’t be able to see the vibrant colors of a logo or the uniqueness and creativity of a logo’s elements, so how could he identify a brand?

There are two kinds of WordPress developers, those who build custom themes and those who use purchased themes. Custom themes let you do what you like, but you also must do all the codding. Purchased themes come with a ton of features built in, but it’s easy to end up with a site that looks like many other sites. I personally prefer purchased themes as they save development time and typically have some support. They also usually have a user community where you can get help if needed. The problem is that when 100k people use the same theme, they can all end up looking the same. That's why I like to limit the number of themes that I work with so I can become an expert with each of the themes I use. And, to prevent the site looking like other sites that are also using that theme, I try to choose themes that offer a number of customization options.

1. Embrace Facebook’s Branding Power.

Facebook, like other social platforms, allows you to customize your profile picture, cover photo, about section and provides a call to action button. The branding of your Facebook page should be consistent with your website and other social platforms. Your goal is that people will recognize your page by the branding, because this is something they are familiar with. For new audiences visiting your page, if they then find your website or twitter, they shouldn’t feel an entirely new experience. 

As we head into July, I’m willing to bet that at least one or two of those New Year’s Resolutions that you started with back in January have evolved or been abandoned altogether. Be honest here. How many times have you really hit the gym? Or opted for your inexpensive brown-bagged lunch instead of heading out with your coworkers? A lot can change in six months — priorities shift, the environment changes — and so should you. The same could be said for your content strategy. What you put down on paper back in January likely will not be (and probably shouldn’t be) what you end with in December.

It’s time for a mid-year assessment. Here are some questions to ask yourself as we head into the second half of 2017.