Co-branding bliss

Would you like your product or service to have a stronger market impact? Do you want to reach new customers or reduce the risk of failure for a new product introduction? Co-branding strategies can help you achieve these goals and more.

"Co-branding" is a marketing term that describes the cooperation between two distinct brands to leverage the assets of both brands.In a co-branding strategy, brands work together to create a market presence that neither brand alone could readily achieve.

Barnes and Noble engaged in a co-branding strategy when it began including Starbucks coffee shops inside its bookstores.The company could have developed a proprietary Barnes and Noble brand cafe, serving Barnes and Noble brand latte and Barnes and Noble brand scones. It's certainly a large and powerful enough company to have done so. But the Barnes and Noble brand means books, not coffee and food. A Barnes and Noble-branded cafe would mean little to consumers. The Starbucks brand, on the other hand, stands for certain qualities that hungry or thirsty bookstore patrons find appealing and familiar.

Barnes and Noble and Starbucks are in no way competitors. The association of the brands therefore harms neither, and both have new customers and have extended their relationships with consumers. Starbucks increases its distribution, and Barnes and Noble keeps customers in the store longer. Co-branding benefits both partners in this marketing marriage.

Co-branding can offer a higher return on marketing investment than other strategies such as brand extension. If you'd like your business to offer a product in a new category, for instance, you could spend years building up that product's brand attributes in the marketplace. Adopt a co-brand, however, and you can reduce the time and marketing dollars needed to develop and nurture a completely new product line for your business.

Let's say I've owned an office supply company for 15 years. Over that time, "Edd's Office Supplies" has come to occupy a particular niche, with a brand that appeals to downtown legal firms. One day, I realize that adding a courier service to my business might expand its market presence and extend its relationship with existing legal firm customers.

But "Edd's" means notepads, pens and ink, not couriers. "Edd's Courier Service" would be an unknown for my targeted audience, and it would take a long time and much advertising for the new service to establish its own brand identity. If I reach an agreement with an established courier company that already caters to the same downtown legal firm audience I'm seeking to expand, I've got a built-in name recognition factor to work with. "Edd's Office Supplies Featuring XYZ Legal Couriers" becomes a smart way for two strong, noncompeting brands to expand their businesses - another marketing marriage made in heaven.

Clearly, co-branding can be a shrewd strategy to increase customer access points and distribution, as well as provide additional sales opportunities. If you decide to pursue this strategy, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Recognize that the co-branding effort must be mutually beneficial to both brands. You want to be certain the association will strengthen customer relationships with both brands and not dilute the brand of either party.

Find a brand that complements your own brand. For instance, "Edd's Office Supplies," which concentrates on the downtown legal firm market segment, shouldn't co-brand with a courier firm specializing in transporting medical records. It wouldn't be appropriate for Barnes and Noble to co-brand with McDonald's, since the bookstore's brand does not communicate the same speed-of-service attributes as the fast-food chain. Instead, it found a brand that complements its book-buying environment.

Think of co-branding as a long-term strategy. Co-branding isn't meant to be a quick fix and should not be confused with promotion. A promotion, such as a limited-time offer of a free Coca-Cola with every hot dog purchase at your diner, is meant to bring in a few extra customers for a short period of time. Co-branding works over the long haul, building your brand and business in a more permanent way.

Anticipate investing time to work effectively with another company. Your firm's culture differs in many ways from that of your co-branding partner, and it's sure to have a different organizational structure and procedures. Both parties need to be flexible and understand these differences for co-branding to go smoothly.

Co-branding is similar to a marriage because it's a union of compatible companies working for a common goal. And like a marriage, both partners gain something by working together that they never could gain separately.-Edd Johns

Contact Reformation Productions to build a proactive strategy that's right for you. Should you consider co-branding? Who would you co-brand with? Give us a call.

Developing a Small Business Marketing Budget

Many small business owners feel like they're running their business on a shoestring budget, and of course, that wasn't the intention when they set out to follow their passion in their own business. Just like many young families have to pull back the reigns on spending and follow a budget, the smart business owner must develop a plan and then stick to the plan in order to become profitable. The Small Business Administration offers some help with budgeting in all areas of business expenses but determining the ideal marketing budget doesn't seem quite as straight forward as other expense areas such as rent or salaries.

You will find many different formulas for the ideal amount to spend on marketing including a percentage of sales, a flat dollar amount, or matching the competition — and of course the ideal amount will depend on your industry, the age of your business and how competitive your marketplace is. But one thing is for sure, everyone know that you have to market yourself in order to stay in business. To be proactive and not reactive, to maintain control of your business and not let your business control you, to be strategic, effective, and smart - you must set a budget for this instead of trying to wing it.

One approach is to determine the value of new clients and how much you're willing to spend in order to acquire those clients:



For example, a physician wants to add a new service to his practice for which he will charge $1,000 (it’s a cash procedure – no insurance.)

This is a one time procedure and we’re ignoring the upsell potential as well as the fact that the patient will likely return over the next few years for other types of procedures. This physician is really good and expects to get lots of referrals from his patients but we’ll assume only one referral for every two patients (0.5). His practice overhead is roughly 50% so his profit is 50%. He wants to perform this procedure three times per week over the next twelve months which means 150 new patients (he’ll take two weeks off for vacation). He only wants to pay for acquiring ONE new patient out of every three (0.33).

This physician can easily see that spending less than $3,500/month to advertise and market this new procedure will net a profit of, at the very least, over $75,000 per year, and he knows that it will be even more when those new patients remain his patients and come back for more procedures. In other words, for every $1 he spends on marketing, he’ll make at least $3.



Now with your number in hand, it is especially important to focus those limited dollars on the most cost effective methods of reaching your prospects — and even more important to track the ROI of those efforts. -D. Hibbs

Reformation Productions specializes in helping local business determine the most cost efficient and yet effective ways to market themselves. It's a process we call Straight Line Marketing. Contact us today to find out more by calling 404.862.8814 and asking for Rachel Bennett, our director of new business.

Confirmed – Social Media has Major Impact on Local Business Search Engine Marketing

We’ve been clear that social media has an impact on local business search engine marketing for some time now, but with social media still being a relatively new marketing tool in its infancy, how much of an impact it’s had in total for businesses has been a bit unclear… until now.

MarketingSherpa, an external research firm and publisher of marketing know-how, recently released and presented the results of their Search Marketing Benchmark Report that included 2200 survey respondents and reviewed best practices to improve search and social media marketing integration. The key finding of the survey per the Company is “search and social media have incredible synergy”.

The survey showed that 64% of the organizations surveyed do indeed integrate social media with search engine marketing, with those organizations in the strategic phases being much more likely to integrate the two. Also, the report indicates that social impacts organic search performance where “search marketers who integrate social media achieve a 59% better rate of conversion”. This is far from insignificant. In fact, it’s quite significant. By integrating social with search, it:

-Provides a means to produce and facilitate more relevant content that’s search engine friendly.

-Gives a means for creating a solid brand with expert status and authority that helps build customer loyalty and perceived business credibility.

-Allows for more traffic via inbound links to a local business website.

-Increases the business’ number of search engine listings.

Now that we have more solid concrete evidence as to how much of an impact social has on search, how can a local business implement a strong social media campaign? Important elements include:

The right content.
Hire a writer or use one of our Social Marketing Media Management services if you need to, but be sure to keep your content fresh, new and relevant to your local business target audience.

Keyword focus.
Be sure to incorporate your SEO keyword strategy into your social media campaign, being mindful of using them as naturally as possible to keep readers engaged.

Consistency in motion.
Blog and microblog on a regular basis to keep this information coming for your audience, and to continue to build your links and search engine friendly content.

Complete profiles and pages.
To successfully build a brand image that states authority, be sure your profile pages, be it FaceBook, Twitter, and so on, are very professional, brand relevant, complete and accurate to support your local business.

Utilize synergy between social media venues.
Take advantage of the synergies available between all of your social media campaigns to boost your inbound links. Post your blog links on all of your social media sites, for example, use your Facebook link in your email campaigns and email signatures, and so on.

If you’re not currently set up on at least Facebook and Twitter, get your local business page set up yesterday so you can be in with the majority of businesses who see results from the social and search strategic integrations vs. the minority who don’t integrate the two.

-Chris Marentis

Ask us about Social Marketing Media Management services available by Reformation Productions.

Marketing is a system, not an event

Small business marketers love the chase. Love the new fangled way to make the phone ring. They love to think of a marketing promotion as a single event. But it's precisely this view of marketing that holds most small businesses back. They fall prey to the "marketing idea of the week" and never fully explore what it takes to create and build a completely functioning, consistently performing, marketing system.


In this article, we am going to outline the basic steps that any business can follow on the way to creating their very own marketing system. But first let's explore this word system in the context of marketing. Small business owners have no problem thinking systems when it comes to say, accounting or hiring. When it comes to marketing though, all bets are off. It's as if they are waiting for magic fairy dust to fall upon them with the next great marketing innovation.


Look, effective marketing is little more than creating and operating an effective marketing system. Now, when I use the word system I mean several things. 1) The system is documented - You can't have a system or a step in a system unless you write it down. 2) The system is built on sound marketing principals and 3) You constantly measure, innovate, and refine the system.


Okay, so on to the system building steps.


1) Narrow and define a target market - Small business owners love to say yes. "Sure we can do that." The next thing you know the target market is roughly anyone they think will pay them. You must commit to a narrowly defined target market and you must focus all of your attention upon serving that market like no one ever dreamed of. A narrow marketing focus might be - Estate Attorneys - as opposed to Law Firms.


At Reformation Productions, this is part of the IDENTIFY and LISTEN stages of the Straight Line Marketing process.


2) Discover and communicate a core message for that market - Until you can show how your firm is different and offers something unique, you will always compete on price. You must find a way to tell your newly defined narrow target market why you have something to offer that they value. Your core message might be - We show estate attorneys how gain all of the business they can handle - as opposed to: We help law firms.


This is also part of the IDENTIFY and LISTEN stages of the Straight Line Marketing process that we use at Reformation Productions.


3) Develop multiple forms of permission based lead generation - No one like to be sold to and more and more advertising is falling on numb ears and eyes. Your lead generation system must be built on several fronts, such as public relations, referral marketing, strategic partnerships, and targeted advertising. Your lead generation message must offer the target market a reason to want to know more. Forget about the sale, look for ways to build trust.


This is brings in the THINK and CREATE stages of the Straight Line Marketing process.


4) Construct a lead conversion and customer reselling process - No amount of leads in the world will help your business if you don't efficiently turn those leads into clients. You must have a plan that maps out what you will do when phone rings, when you make the sales call and when it's time to do more business with the clients you already have. Most small businesses completely ignore this aspect, but this is where the real success of marketing lies.


Reformation Productions offers this as a part of business consulting.


5) Create entertainment or educational based marketing and presentation materials - It's not just for the traditional, glossy sales brochure, you should use your marketing materials to teach how your firm is different, how you solve real problems, how you work, why you work, what you believe and your marketing will be much more successful. Your web site must come from this point of view as well.



This also comes out of the THINK and CREATE stages of the Straight Line Marketing process.


6) Define the most important marketing success indicators - Setting marketing goals for such things as leads, appointments, sales, phone calls, referrals, impressions, mentions and anything else you can think to measure is how you turn marketing into a game and how you keep score of the game. Everyone loves and game and the only way to improve something is to measure how well you are doing in the first place.


This is the piece we see ignored the most. We call it "tracking" or measuring your results. If our process had five stages it would be this one... we'd probably call it MEASURE or EVALUATE & REPEAT.


7) Build an annual marketing calendar and budget and stick to it - Once you have spent the time and energy to think through steps 1-6 you need to commit your plan to a marketing calendar and then allocate (or at least think about) the money it will take to implement your plan each year. Once you create a calendar it is much more likely that you will look at the tasks assigned to each month like a "to-do" list. So, instead of whining that you should do more marketing, you simply scratch each item off your list and plan for the next. It's an amazingly simple but effective device.


This is a major part of the THINK stage at Reformation Productions. After presenting our recommendations for marketing tools and strategies that we base on the information gathered during the IDENTIFY and LISTEN stages, we develop a strategic marketing plan that includes this calendar/chart.


Okay...now the last bit of advice.



Every system needs a champion. Either find someone in your organization who does little else but operate the system or hire marketing professionals like Reformation Productions and charge them with helping you develop, implement and run the system.


Properly fed and maintained, this little marketing system can become the engine that drives your firm's climb to the top.


John Jantsch and Reformation Productions

Contact us at Reformation Productions to discuss your business. 404-862-8814

What is the responsibility of Branding - - really?

Recently a colleague was approached by the professor of a top journalism and advertising program with a question about branding. He wanted his opinion on whether or not branding should be a major point of emphasis in the program. "Don’t get me wrong," he said "it’s been a staple in the curriculum for a while", but they were looking at the idea of making it a part of the degree emphasis for graduation.

Well, here‘s the short answer – heck yes.

Here’s a more thought out answer -
Now, we know that Advertising is without a doubt the one element in Marketing that receives the most attention and the most dollars. It has the responsibility of taking all the other elements in the marketing mix and crafting a persuasive message in a creative fashion that will sum it all up and communicate it to your consumer target. Branding is way more than a function of advertising. It should be a function of business. Because it permeates all elements of sales, operations, marketing, etc..

Let’s look at the traditional 4P’s of marketing and see how they can affect branding:

Product – We all know product is king. It dictates your brand offering. But the way you shape the touch, taste, sound, smell, name or experience of your product is all branding. Calling your Kentucky-based fried chicken company Kentucky Fried Chicken is branding. Changing it to KFC to lessen the negative affects of health conscious consumers is also branding. So is the really cool buckets they come in.

Price – More than just a unit of revenue, your price tells customers whether you are a premium brand, great reward or an inexpensive value brand. You can buy a .99 cup of coffee or a $4 cup. Again, that's part of branding. Depending on your consumer target, free may be a great word to use in promotions or it may be the kiss of death to your brand.

Place (distribution) – The way you deliver your sales experience is also about your brand. The fact that a fast-food restaurant can be found everywhere is branding. Your website’s appearance is branding (the role of websites today are no longer interactive brochures – they are a company’s 24 hour visitor center). If it were not, we’d all have plain type on white backgrounds for our websites. The decor of your store front and the atmosphere of your restaurant are all branding

Promotion – Okay, this is what people really think of when they think of marketing. It includes advertising, direct marketing, online media, events – heck anything that allows you to proactively tell other people about your product/service. The way you say it, the how you communicate, is again branding. A cardboard sign with a handwritten message that says “Fresh Corn” is branding. So is the same message typed out on a digital billboard or neon sign. Which one would you buy from?

Not only should the college advertising program be teaching branding as a major emphasis in marketing, but it should also make its way into other areas of study like public relations, fashion design, interior design, hospitality management and restaurant management. Yeah, it's that important.

Contact Reformation Productions to discuss your company's brand and how it permeates your business. Are all the parts working together for good or do some of the various elements in your business seem to fight against each other? Is your business a unified army of you? Does there seem to be one mission or several? Are you unsure about what you are saying as a company? Do you know how what you are saying is being perceived by others?

www.ReformationProductions.com

5 Benefits of Branding

Almost every business has a trading name, from the smallest market trader to the largest multi-national corporation. Only a minority of those businesses however, have what could be classed as a brand.

Branding is the process of creating distinctive and durable perceptions in the minds of consumers. A brand is a persistent, unique business identity intertwined with associations of personality, quality, origin, liking and more.

Although most people associate brands with big companies, the smallest of enterprises can use branding techniques with great rewards.

RECOGNITION AND LOYALTY
The main benefit of branding is that customers are much more likely to remember your business. A strong brand name and logo/image helps to keep your company image in the mind of your potential customers.

If your business sells products that are often bought on impulse, a customer recognising your brand could mean the difference between no-sale and a sale. Even if the customer was not aware that you sell a particular product, if they trust your brand, they are likely to trust you with unfamiliar products. If a customer is happy with your products or services, a brand helps to build customer loyalty across your business.

IMAGE OF SIZE
A strong brand will project an image of a large and established business to your potential customers. People usually associate branding with larger businesses that have the money to spend on advertising and promotion. If you can create effective branding, then it can make your business appear to be much bigger than it really is.

An image of size and establishment can be especially important when a customer wants reassurance that you will still be around in a few years time.

IMAGE OF QUALITY
A strong brand projects an image of quality in your business, many people see the brand as a part of a product or service that helps to show its quality and value.

It is commonly said that if you show a person two identical products, only one of which is branded; they will almost always believe the branded item is higher quality.

If you can create effective branding, then over time the image of quality in your business will usually go up. Of course, branding cannot replace good quality, and bad publicity will damage a brand (and your businesses image), especially if it continues over a long period of time.

IMAGE OF EXPERIENCE AND RELIABILITY
A strong brand creates an image of an established business that has been around for long enough to become well known. A branded business is more likely to be seen as experienced in their products or services, and will generally be seen as more reliable and trustworthy than an unbranded business.

Most people will believe that a business would be hesitant to put their brand name on something that was of poor quality.

MULTIPLE PRODUCTS
If your business has a strong brand, it allows you to link together several different products or ranges. You can put your brand name on every product or service you sell, meaning that customers for one product will be more likely to buy another product from you.

Talk with Reformation Productions about the benefits of branding as part of the Straight Line Marketing process and how the IDENTIFICATION process helps to make your company's marketing efforts more efficient and effective.

www.ReformationProductions.com

Why Should Local Businesses Have A Blog In Their Marketing Plan?

Good public relations is one of the most important elements to any marketing campaign a company has at its disposal. But not all public relations are equal: some campaigns involve massive outlays of cash, while some other methods can be extremely cost effective!

Blogging is at the forefront of publicity mediums in today’s connected world, giving anyone or any business the opportunity to get their message out around the world. And with the recession hitting companies hard, it’s more important than ever to find cost effective ways to attract new customers and increase revenue.

Here are some reasons to start a blog:

1. It helps your SEO ( Google loves consistently new content )

2. You are seen as an expert in your field, a ” Thought Leader” - reinforcing your brand.

3. Depending on content, you can been seen as an advocate for the community or another cause.

4. Companies should blog to engage with customers and demonstrate that they are people.

5. Great content gets people a reason to keep coming back to your site.

6. Blogs are a much more trusted source than company press releases and official company PR.

7. It moves customers to a conversion point of trusting and believing enough to buy.

8. You can beat the competition to it. If your competitors don’t have a blog and you do, that already puts you ahead of the game. You will be immediately at an advantage from a media and public relations stand point as potential customers will be more likely to hear of you first. If you are lucky enough to have an extremely successful blog there is no end to its ability to accelerate the growth of your business as readers link to it from their own blogs and social network profiles.

9. You can engage and understand your customers better.

10. You maintain control over your communications. Starting a blog gives your business the opportunity to inform customers of upcoming products, services, conferences, trade shows or even to give an insight into the day to day running of the business. It allows you to become your own news reporter and gives you control over what reaches the public domain.

11. Marketing has moved ahead with the times. In days gone by the consumer would wait to have a flyer drop on their doorstep to read about the latest news, deals and offers available to them. Today millions of people subscribe to regularly updated blogs and use their feeds to stay abreast on everything from news and current affairs to sport and fashion. So it is absolutely necessary for businesses to keep up with the trend and become multi-faceted in how they interact with the public.

12. The beauty of blogging is that it encourages interaction between potential customers or other businesses and yourselves who are able to leave comments that you might address in a later blog post. By adding questions or provocative statements in your blog, you are in effect inviting subscribers to leave feedback.

Ask Reformation Productions about your company and blogging. We can evaluate your marketing picture and see how blogging fits in and what we can do to help make it happen for you. Contact Rachel at 404.862.8814.

www.ReformationProductions.com