Tell your brand's story through infographics

Infographics are my topic of the month as I love their simplicity and how they lend themselves beautifully to the IT and Telco industry.

Infographics provide impactful visual interest that can quickly and concisely explain the values of a more complicated solution. In a time when we are time poor and experience information overload, infographics draw our attention to the most important elements of a subject and can even encourage us to read in more depth a subject that we may have put off reading in the past.

Visual thinking is apparently the most common way we piece together information and considering most of us would have seen visual learning featuring heavily in our early year’s education, it is not surprising that infographics are so popular. Because many of us think in pictures, it makes perfect sense that marketing and communications should leverage this comfort zone where readers become more susceptible to reading content they may have otherwise found too intimidating to read.

The colours and styles you can introduce to an infographic means that you can use it to literally brighten up text heavy collateral. Sales proposals and on boarding packs are just two examples of how infographics lend themselves well to more traditional collateral that may in the past have been quickly flicked through without reading properly. It is also a way of highlighting your company’s main achievements in a manner that your competitors may not be doing.

Before you start getting happy with ClipArt, make sure you cover a few basic rules. Ensure your visual interpretations encourage your viewer to read more, use simple imagery to complement a complex subject and include as much statistical data as you can but ensure the message is broken down into easy to digest sections. Better still use different images to offer both a broad overview and greater levels of detail.

What you need to know about brand marketing

One of the first questions I am asked when meeting a prospective client for the first time is, ‘How do you ensure my adverts will not look the same as the other adverts in the same publication?'. The answer is ‘brand'.

Brand is one of the most fundamental elements of marketing and vital in the promotion of your company. First impressions do count and repetitive brand reinforcement softens up prospects. I see many companies in the channel start out with a quickly thrown together logo and have never invested the time to take a step back and think about how their image and character is perceived by others.

How can companies take their logo and branding to another level and define their corporate personality? Brand identity is a mixture of vision, design, focus and detail. A brand needs to be well thought through as it has the purpose of communicating your corporate personality and values and also your business focus. A flash image is no good if no one has a clue what you specialise in or what your USPs are.

Establish a corporate personality and ensure this is present in all your communications, but be realistic. Just because you like a TV advert showing a gimmick it does not mean it is right for your company or the team that represents it. Ensure that you have full buy-in of the brand with your staff - their interaction with the client needs to further reinforce your image and message.

Detail is key and constant branding really helps to push your company into the forefront of your prospects minds and reinforce existing client engagement.

Finally, make sure your revitalised brand image is present in all corporate material. I often find there are sneaky documents hidden away in hard drives that are used regularly without others knowing!

Key points to ponder

It's that time of year again. Marketing plans are written, activity schedules are being finalised and marketing activity for 2014 is go.

I thought it would be beneficial to list the key areas that many resellers would find helpful for their own marketing ideas. While every company is unique and differentiation is key, some basic rules can be applied.

Planning: This is a vital exercise and was discussed in one of my previous articles. Planning is key and should be firmly integrated into your business strategy and corporate goals. Ensure all key stakeholders are on board with your marketing ideas.

Know your customers: Get a true understanding of your client's business, their key objectives and pain points. If you know this you can offer them meaningful services that will enrich their business environment.

Don't confuse: Be clear on your key messaging and ensure this message is repeated in the same fashion across as many channels and as often as your budget will allow.

Be open minded: There are many more routes of communication than before. Experiment with video, SEO and social media but always ensure it is integrated with your more traditional activities.

Don't be stubborn: Give new marketing ideas a chance to establish but equally do not continue with a route that is not working for your business. Use this knowledge to create a new more successful campaign and move on.

RoI: Always a hot topic. Utilise the monitoring tools readily available for online activity. Speak to your sales team who engage directly with your clients on a daily basis. Although not automated, they have knowledge that offers invaluable insight into your campaign success and how it was received by your target audience.

Content Marketing is King

Key words are old hat but content marketing is a must for your 2014 wardrobe. The good news is that SEO is no longer mythical wizardry costing thousands of pounds a month with nothing to show for a good part of the year.

Our friends at Google have altered the rules yet again in a bid to support genuine businesses and individuals who have something interesting to say. Organic growth in search engine optimisation can now be more easily achieved by simply creating original and meaningful content.
Content marketing complements Google’s aims of creating a fairer, more realistic online search environment that not only offers a better experience for users but also the writers that genuinely have something to say. This means that successful SEO can be more easily achieved by resellers as the focus has moved away from key words and now encourages legitimate, intelligent content that truly enriches reader’s knowledge.

Therefore resellers need to move away from the opinion that you will only get exposure if you constantly repeat words such as cloud, broadband and hosted. Those days have long gone and now you can actually get penalised for over using words. Intelligent news and discussions is what you need to be focusing on as constant, fresh and original opinion pieces will make you the blue eyed boy of the Google Guy.

Prospective clients will see you when they are looking for information for their business as a whole, not just when they are doing the obvious searches for IT and telecoms services. Creating content gives you better visibility in search engines so as your impressions increase so too should your click-throughs and site exposure.

The Five Marketing Ps

 

Hands up who knows the Five Marketing Ps? No it is not Product, Price, Position, Promotion and Place. It is… Planning Prevents Pityingly Poor Performance.

Is your 2014 business strategy done and dusted and crucially is it tying in with your marketing plan? The Christmas Elves cannot commence your 2014 marketing projects if there is no integration with your company objectives as a whole. If your sales team has one set of goals that are not clearly explained to your marketing team in advance, then the lack of communication will fester between the two departments. The sales team will not receive the collateral they require to achieve their sales targets efficiently for, as an example, increasing hosted seats; and the marketing team will be at a loss as to why their product promotion for, as an example, a mobile launch was not well received by the sales team.

Planning and alignment is key, and remember your marketing plan does not have to be set in stone. It should be a fluid document but one that works in conjunction with other key plans within your company. It should not be an afterthought or even worse not exist.

Once you align your marketing and business strategies, your overall goals are clearer and in turn it is easier for you to budget for your marketing activity as you can be more precise in the areas you wish to be active in. If, for example, 2014 is going to focus on your fantastic customer service, then your marketing activity needs to reflect this by not only giving concrete examples on why your customer experience is outstanding, but to engage your client relations team so that they buy into your vision, and in turn professionally reinforce your message with genuine enthusiasm.

The Power of Strong Brand Values

 

We are bombarded daily with marketing messages and calls to action to do things and in some cases not do things. How many messages were fired at you just on your way to work this morning? The radio, bus advertising, posters, car stickers, carrier bags, the list is endless.

How do you make yourself and your company stand out from the noise? How do you get customers to choose you and not your competitor? How can you be unique?

A strong simple message is a good place to start, simplicity is key as not only you have limited time to shout your message but your target audience may not be product savvy and therefore can disengage quicker than you can say ‘cloud’.

Choosing your message is harder than it sounds as it needs to stand the test of time as you are going to invest in promoting and reinforcing the message. For example promoting your service as the best option for disaster recovery when it snows does not have a good shelf life, promoting your offering as the best disaster recovery option for adverse weather and periods of high call demand appeals for a longer period and to a wider audience.

Highlight why you are better and focus on those points with enthusiasm and with true examples. ‘A friendly service’ has been said a million times and is therefore ignored as a reason for client engagement. ‘A friendly service because of X Y and Z’ reinforces that your message is not just empty words.

And finally once you have established a message that your team buys into – shout it from the rooftops. Your message should be integrated into the fabric of your business and further reinforce image consistency which is vital for brand recognition and recall in a deafening environment of marketing messaging.

New Year's Resolutions

The key element to a New Year's Resolution that sets it apart from other resolutions is that it is made in anticipation of the New Year and new beginnings. It is a time when, with the best intentions, we wage war on those extra Christmas pounds, join the gym and reduce the red wine intake. Well, these are a few of my personal favorites.

 

Actually the New Year has always been a time for looking back to the past, and more importantly, forward to the coming year. It's a time to reflect on the changes we want (or need) to make and resolve to follow through on those changes. The New Year is actually represented by the two headed Roman God Janus who whilst staring forward also looked back at the previous year and it is this notion that should have the most resonance for our resolutions.

 

As well as making plans for the future we should also look to our past achievements, challenges and failures and use these to help plan the future. Blindly looking forward may be brave but to really do so without taking into consideration what has gone before may be futile.

 

You may be about to put the first parts of your 2014 business plan into action but take a moment to consider what has gone before for these experiences will help you build a more successful future.

 

As for me I will no doubt re-subscribe to my far too expensive gym whilst cracking open a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pap and making the most of the left over Christmas chocolates.