It can take years to develop a firmly established brand. And for good reason. A brand is more than a logo or an advertisement or even an entire ad campaign. A brand is how the market sees your business based on the totality of the information available to them: your marketing efforts, media coverage of your organization – including social media, stories from friends and family – and their own personal experiences.
For new startups, the brand is essentially non-existent. The market may be familiar with the entrepreneurs behind the company, which can add some element of a brand, but for the startup itself, the brand is a blank slate. That’s both a curse and a blessing. The curse is that nobody knows anything about your company: your story, your values, your mission, etc. The flip side to this – the blessing – is that you have the opportunity to attempt to build a brand as you see fit. Continue reading “Brand Building for a New Business”
While businesses can never have complete control of their brand, they absolutely have the opportunity—and obligation—to work to manage and influence how their brand is perceived. Part of that journey starts with some basic market research. You need to understand how you’re currently perceived before you can start planning to get to where you want to be. 
Marketers are understandably concerned about building and protecting strong brands. 
Most businesspeople and students of marketing would probably agree with the statement that your brand is important. Yet, despite this importance, the concept of a brand isn’t always easy to grasp. Part of that problem is because a brand is made of so many components that it needs to be considered very broadly.
Social media is a powerful marketing tool for any business. Business and marketing professionals are particularly drawn to the extensive reach of social media and its potential for driving droves of new customers through their virtual doors. However—and this may surprise you—social media marketers shouldn’t be focused exclusively on bringing in new business.
Since the dawn of the Internet Age, businesses have been quick to see the benefit of a company website to attract customers; however, a company website, like any communication channel, should be thought of in the context of all of an organization’s stakeholders. This includes business partners and potential business partners, as well as employees and – the focus of this blog post – potential employees. 
It’s not always easy to tie marketing spend to an increase in revenue — 