HOW TO BUILD BRANDS THROUGH SOCIAL MEDIA .. ??

Social media can help building brands like no other thing. All you need to know is the right approach.

There should be absolutely no doubt in anyone’s mind that social media is one of the most effective marketing tools the marketers are using today. If you are looking for brand building, social media is the answer to all your problems.

Do you have any idea how powerful the social media can prove to be .. ??
50% of the daily INTERNET traffic consists of online social media usage.

I can tell you so many stories about how people used social media to complain about a product or service and received a response or follow up from the company.

BRAND

Here are some mantras which will help you in building a brand through social media .. !!

1. SET YOUR GOALS

Your objectives should be very clear in order to proceed with your brand building. Start up by asking yourself what am I trying to accomplish by the use of social media .. ??
Maybe you want to create an online presence in the social media.
Maybe you want to develop brand awareness.
Or maybe you wish to register an increase in your revenue which is one of the most common objectives. 
After you clearly know what your goals are, here comes the next step.

2. MANAGING YOUR CONTENT

You need to figure out that who is going to manage your content on the social networking sites. You need to have someone who can serve as the online face of your business. If you think you can handle this on your own, then that is great but if not, then you need to find someone who can handle your online work and someone who can write well.

3. KNOW YOUR MARKET

Now this is really very important. You need to know about your market.
What do they like and dislike talking about .. ??
What are there tastes and preferences .. ??
What kind of product or service will delight them .. ??

4. PROVIDE VALUE

Always keep in mind people are out there on social networking sites to connect with their friends and family, they are not there to listen to any kind of advertisements or promotional offers. So you cannot just keep giving them your marketing message because that would not help you to connect with a large no. of people.So what you can do here is to proving them with some kind of valuable information at regular intervals. But you have to remember that this information should be valuable to target markets/audience. By valuable i mean that this information should be interesting and useful to them. This will make them connect with you in no time.

5. ENGAGE

You need to engage. Start with sharing your status. Even don’t hesitate to comment on other people’s blogs, ask random questions on some current ongoing topics and wait for there replies. This will help you to communicate with your target audience. Remember social media is about two sided conversations.

6. LET AUDIENCE CONTROL

You must let your audience take control of the online conversation and make it their own so they develop an emotional attachment to you, your brand, and your business. You being a single person cannot be as active as your audience on web and regular updates and comments are very important. Remember, on the social web, invisibility is a bigger problem than negativity.

7. EVALUATE

After you have done all that was needed now its time for you to evaluate your performance. Track the no. of likes and comment you get on your posts. Doing this weekly will help you getting a rough idea about your growing popularity. U can even try to google your page or brand, which can again give you an idea for the same.

Top 5 Things To Consider When Building Your Brand

Building Brand 

   

1) Identify Your Target Audience

Your brand's "target audience" is the specific group who your product or service is trying to reach. In order to reach this group you need to first figure out who they are. Ask yourself these questions: "who would buy my products?," "who currently buys my products?," "where does this group shop at or frequent?," "what other interests do they have and how can you best cater to these interests?." Your brand can't be all things to all people. However, your brand identity should be based to some extent on who your target customers want and need you to be.

2) Create An Identity

The key to successful branding is building an identity. Now that you've recognized your target audience, the next step is defining who you are. Discuss with partners and employees your brand's core values. Ask customers what keywords or values they associate with your company's services. These values need to be present in everything that you do from here on out in order to transmit a cohesive image. Your brand must reflect what your customers and employees think about your business to have any credibility. For example, if being friendly
is one of your brand values, make sure anyone who answers the telephone or has direct contact with customers is friendly.

3) Discover Your Competitive Advantage

A brand's competitive advantage is it's unique offerings that differentiate it from similar offerings in the marketplace. What makes your brand unique? Identify and isolate the things that make you better than your competition. This will allow you to maximize these characteristics moving forward, easily conveying them to consumers. Make sure your company literature reflects your brand values.

4) Set Brand Goals And Plan Accordingly

"He who fails to plan is planning to fail," -Winston Churchill. This is true for embarking on building your brand. List the objectives you want to achieve with the brand and most importantly, achieve them! An effective brand knows what it wants, how it wants to achieve that, and when it will have these objectives completed. Your brand strategy should be inline with your general business plan. Opting out of setting your goals for moving forward leaves your brand vulnerable to loosing its purpose. Once your image has been created, following some simple rules should ensure its continued effectiveness. Always think about what your business achieves for your customers and structure your business to achieve it effectively and continuously.

5) Be Relevant and Flexible

A well managed brand is always making adjustments. Branding is a process, not a race, so expect to constantly tweak your message and refresh your image. If your old tactics aren't working anymore, don't be afraid to change them just because it worked in the past. Take the opportunity to engage your followers in fresh, new ways. Look at Old Spice, around since the 1930s, but still relevant and finding new ways to present itself. Over the past few years, Old Spice has managed to create quite a buzz with their new ads (which are hilarious)! In this fast-changing world, marketers must remain flexible to stay relevant. Use new strategies to connect with new customers and remind your old ones why they love you.

Top 5 Mistakes Made in Marketing

Marketing Mistake

1. Lack of Research and Testing

Market research and testing should be done to determine the performance of every marketing effort. This takes the guesswork out of what your potential customer or client wants. Always make sure you have done your due diligence when it comes to testing different offers, prices, and packages. Get the input of your customers.

2. Improper Focus and Positioning

Don't market to build up the company, but approach marketing to demand an immediate response from the recipient. Improper focus and market positioning can be avoided by following the proper solution positioning of marketing.

3. Marketing without a USP

Your USP is your unique selling proposition. It is the one single statement that will single you out amongst the competition. It should be used in every piece of marketing material. Think of your USP as the philosophical foundation of your business. Don't market without it!

4. Failing to Capture Repeat Customers

Keep in mind that when marketing 80% of your business comes from existing customers and 20% comes from new customers. Failing to resell to your current customer base could have a detrimental effect on your profits. It will cost you 5 times the expense to sell to a new customer than to sell to an existing customer.

5. Lack of Focus on Potential Customer's Needs

Do you really know what your potential customers need and want? If so you are ahead of the ballgame and probably don't need to be reading this article. Truth is very few businesses have a good grasp of what it is that their customer needs from them. The secret to avoiding this common error is to find a need you can fill and then fill that need better than anyone else.

Branding Tips for New Businesses

Technology has changed the landscape of how businesses communicate with their customers. These days, marketers reach a target base by implementing online techniques such as search engine optimization or by utilizing social media. But even though modern businesses exist in a state of hyper-competition in the online world, the fundamentals of business strategy have remained relatively the same. One such cornerstone of a successful business is effective branding.

Those who don’t place much importance on branding need only to look to Coca Cola or Apple or any number of other titans of industry that have remained profit-generating goliaths over decades or even generations. And like any fundamental value, many of the best ways to build a successful brand are still based around core principals that have informed businesses practically since their inception.

1. Know the Customer

It’s an old adage, and one that is still relevant even in today’s world of SEO and Google Analytics. The key to successful branding is still identifying a target base and defining it through segmentation. After this is accomplished, it’s up to the marketer to link his or her service or product to that customer base with a promise. It’s in this way that a particular brand becomes superior to the competition.

2. Stay on Top of the Competition

One of the main reasons businesses fail is because they fail to see how customers respond to their competitor’s brands. This goes beyond looking for chinks in competitors’ armor and includes looking at how they are successful as well. It’s only by fully understanding these two key aspects of the competition that marketers can then find their differentiator, which is ultimately what will set their brand apart from the competition.

3. Think about Compatibility

There are plenty of ways to understand a customer base, one of which is through brand compatibility. This takes into account everything: the customers’ spending habits, their lifestyle, their media interests – even their general attitude. To this end, marketers will want to focus on the strength of the connection between the purchase behavior of the customer and the brand’s differentiator.

4. Position the Brand Effectively

This goes back to communication, because how well a brand communicates its message to a customer base will ultimately determine its success. But it takes more than merely telling a customer about a product; the marketer needs to establish a relationship with the customer through positioning. And the two keys to successfully positioning a brand are simple: pre-planning and market research.

5. Merge the Business with the Brand

Those most successful brands are also most successful at blurring the lines between their business and their brand. And this goes beyond simply hiring positive employees to represent “service with a smile.” Go into any Apple Store and the first thing a person sees – aside from the sleek devices – is a group of employees who represent the brand to the letter.

While the above list may not be a complete blueprint for how to achieve ultimate success in business, it should provide startups or new entrepreneurs with those fundamental notions to bear in mind during every step of the game. Because without core guiding principals, many businesses languish right from the get go.

5 ways to build customer relationships even during a slowdown

Customer Relationship

1. Be Wise, Ad-Wise

As a new business owner, no one understands the meaning of 'austere' better than you do. You do not have the budget for a big ad spend, but you cannot afford to stop advertising either. The prudent thing to do is to manage your ad spends well. Kaushik Chakravorty, founder of Breaking Rules, a photography institute in Mumbai, says you need to figure out which advertising avenue gets you the best leads. "Depending on your target audience, concentrate on placing your ads in a channel that works best for you instead of putting your eggs in different baskets." Since his target audience is largely cosmopolitan college-goers, Chakravorty is making the most of the social media platform and focusing his ad spend there.

2. Improve Your Customer Interface

If business is not at its peak, don't fret. Make good use of this slowdown to take a close look at your website and at your customer contact form. Shailesh Velandy, founder of e-commerce platform buynsellindia, believes that a slowdown is the best time to re-asses your website. "Begin with checking if your contact form is too long, because that's a turn-off for potential customers. Ask short, relevant questions and restrict the contact form to three fields, at best." According to him, it has been proved worldwide that business owners who have concise contact forms on their websites have often seen potential leads turning into paying customers.

3. Honesty Is The Best Policy

There will be times when an interested lead will go beyond the web interface and like to have a telephone conversation with you, to know more about what you can offer. When things are slow, business-wise, it may be very tempting to drum up your business and your product or service offering to a potential customer. Chakravorty of Breaking Rules strictly advises against it. "Be clear, honest and tell your lead exactly what you have to offer." Do not think of a lead as a naive person who has not conducted his research before taking the trouble to call you. In that case, anything you say is crucial to him or her. If you exaggerate, rest assured you will have driven him away!

4. Always Follow Up
 
The trick to turning a lead into a paying customer is adequate follow-up. Now this could be a slippery slope as you never know how much is too much or how little is too little, right? Velandy of buynsellindia believes in being cautious. So don't call him or send him an email or text message every other day. That reeks of desperation and is a major turn-off for a lead.

Chakravorty of Breaking Rules agrees. He advises that you play it by ear, depending on the nature of the customer. If a lead seems genuinely interested, it makes sense to drop in a mailer once a week or fortnight, just to keep him posted about your latest activities. Once again, you can make the most of your social networking platforms, says Chakravorty. "If a lead likes or follows you in any of these social media platforms, your job is half done as that will help him keep track of your activities without you having to send him an email or call him up to seek business."

5. Help Customers Complete A Purchase
 
If you are into e-commerce, you will encounter a host of customers who develop cold feet just before they make a payment. Here are two things to remember. Velandy of buynsellindia says it is of utmost importance that you make customers feel secure while making an online purchase. "Make sure you have a secured payment gateway to ensure that your customer does not feel that you are likely to flee with his money. Also ensure that the backend technology is working at its best so that the payment is fast, secured and hassle-free."

In spite of this, if a customer has not completed his purchase, send him reminders about his unfinished transaction. This may be in the form of better service offerings, new product lines or industry tips. In marketing parlance, this is called 'nurturing a lead' and if you can do that successfully (once again without spamming him), you are likely to turn a lead into a paying customer.
 
As a business owner, never underestimate the importance of maintaining good customer relationships. Instead of going into panic mode during a slowdown, turn adversity into an investment by nurturing your leads and turning them into gainful business over the long term.

5 Major Reasons Why Small Businesses Fail

5 Reasons Why Small Businesses Fail

Running a small business is an exciting venture that can lead to the financial freedom simple employees work their whole lives to attain. However, with the great rewards come great risks that can lead us small business owners to financial failures.

I have witnessed friends and family members pursue their own entrepreneurial dreams only to see them shattered not a year into their short-lived careers, mostly due to a number of fatal but avoidable reasons. Let’s take a look at some of them.

# 1. No Business Plan   

Business Plan

Knowing what your business will be and how you will sell your products or services are not enough to keep it running. You need to have a business plan written out, including (but not limited to) the following:

• your short and long term goals;
• the business’ finances for labor, production equipment, etc.;
• your target markets; and
• marketing.

Having one which outlines every detail will guide your business to the right path.

# 2. Inefficient Management

Inefficient Management

Small business entrepreneurs usually come into their industries with little to no knowledge of handling the multiple facets of a business such as financial management, employee relations, advertising and other essential responsibilities. Educate yourself through short business and finance courses, or hire managers who have expertise in the fields where you are lacking.

# 3. Poor Marketing

Poor Marketing

A small business needs to market its brand considering the tough competition it will face against more established businesses. You need to invest enough resources into promoting your products through the right channels. This is so your target market knows exactly that you can fulfill its needs. Online marketing is a must these days, but you should not ignore the physical reach of traditional marketing methods such as brochures, flyers and business cards.

# 4. Lack of Capital

 Lack of capital

Some entrepreneurs think they will be making profits for their beginning operation cycles, spending most (if not all) of their resources immediately, only to find out later that they will not have enough funds to start the succeeding cycle/s. Consider every possible cost (overhead, production, equipment, etc.) and save enough money that can be used for at least one fiscal year despite poor sales.

# 5. Bad Location

Bad Location

It is not enough to set up a store at a location with high human traffic or with a very cheap lease. Opening a restaurant near a school campus can seem like a good idea, but don’t expect too many customers if the food is expensive and there are much cheaper alternatives around.

You need to consider your target market and their habits, as well as the direct competition in the area. Don’t be afraid of spending on prime location, as the increased rate of customers coming into your store and making a purchase will make up for the initial cost.

Ultimately, it is a matter of planning out your overall strategy, assessing your own strengths and weakness, and keeping a good eye on all of your resources—be it financial or human. Consider each of these possible pitfalls, and you can find your small business not just surviving, but thriving in this competitive world.

ICICI Bank is not Providing Service . They are providing solution of a problem of NO TIME or BUSY LIFE

ICICI Bank promises to take care of customers at home, with Tab Banking

Watch the ad film conceptualised by Ogilvy & Mather

ICICI Bank has launched a campaign to showcase ‘Tab Banking’, through which it is promising customers a smoother account opening experience from the comfort of their location. The TVC conceptualised by Ogilvy & Mather went on air on 3 January.

The ad film features Amitabh Bachchan as the protagonist. He is engaged in a game of kite flying with a few youngsters on a rooftop. An executive seated a storey below awaits him. When asked, Bachchan explains to one of the youngsters that the man is from ICICI Bank for opening his bank account. Another youngster pointedly asks him if that meant Bachchan didn’t have to go the bank. Concentrating on the kite on hand, Bachchan says, “If I had to go the bank then how would I get this yellow beauty?” As he says that he manages to cut the thread of a competing kite to cheers from the youth. He then steps down to join the executive and asks him if the form is done, to which the executive says yes and requests Bachchan for a photograph. After clicking one on his tablet, the ICICI executive asks for a photo ID and address proof. Bachchan provides his Aadhar card. The executive informs Bachchan that they are done and hands him an envelope. Bachchan runs up to join the boys to fly kites again. A voice over explains “With ICICI Tab Banking, you can now open a savings account from home, so that you have time for the more important things in life.” Bachchan receives a message on his phone: “Thank you for choosing ICICI Bank.” He shows it to the young man next to him and says, “This is what is called khayal rakhna” (This is called taking care.) The film ends showing the group flying the kites against the super, ‘To open your account SMS TAB to 5676766. ICICI Bank- khayal aapka.”

Abhijit Avasthi, NCD, Ogilvy & Mather, said, “It is such an interesting and innovative product that we did not have to struggle at all. We were thinking about what were the various advantages of using it. One of the biggest points is that anyways life is so hectic for all and then a mundane but important chore like opening an account can take up so much of your time. As a result, there is not much time left for yourself or time to do things that give you pleasure. So, even if you save an hour or hour and half, you can use it to do something that gives you pleasure and do important but fun things. We were keen to use Mr Bachchan and he epitomises one person who has an extremely busy life. We wove a story around what he would like to do if he had few spare minutes.”

Credits
Client: ICICI Bank
Creative agency: Ogilvy & Mather
NCD: Abhijit Avasthi