Business Marketing Strategies

Brand Marketing: How to Customize Your Google+ URL

Consistently Using Brand Marketing Strategies Strengthens Your Company Message

If you have a business it’s crucial to your success that your customers can find you easily. You wouldn’t set up your bakery shop in an obscure back alley. It’s essential that your customers be able to easily find you.

If you have a Twitter account as one of your business marketing strategies, most likely it’s branded with your, or business, name. It makes it a lot easier to direct customers to your information.

Google has now introduced a new social marketing tool Google+ and it’s a great application to combine your business and personal contacts. Once you set up your account you’ll notice in the browser bar an incredible long sting of numbers that’s associated with your account – your URL.

It’s hard to direct anyone you meet in person straight to your G+ Profile because of this long URL. A fantastic lady and business owner I recently met, Andrea Lyons, shared a way to make it easier to direct your friends and customers to your G+ Profile.

The Little Problem With A Google+ Profile

This is another place, if you set it up correctly, that customers can connect with you. It can add to your current brand marketing strategy and reach even more clients. There’s only one problem, the URL address is a series of 21 numbers, not to easy to remember. And according to Mashable it’s probably not going to change,

“The reason Google+ doesn’t use vanity URLs is because those could lead to spammers figuring out the email addresses of millions of Google+ users (since many Google Accounts are linked to Gmail accounts).”

So how can you get customers to your G+ Profile easily? Get a vanity URL!

How to Get Your Own Google+ URL

This will take you all of 5 seconds. There’s a new application Gplus.to http://gplus.to/ that takes your name (or however you want to brand your account) and Google+ ID and creates a URL that’s easy to share and a lot more attractive.

Something to Consider

Most people are going to want their URL to have their name in it. So, if your name is already taken, you’ll need to come up with an easy variation of it. Or, combine it with your business or even use your business name, if you set up your G+ Profile as a business hub.

What To-Do Now…

Go to Gplus.to and get your branded G+ URL, then stop by and say, “Hi” and add me to one of your circles. You’ll find me at gplus.to/TheresaDelgado.

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How do you plan to use your customized Google+ URL in your brand marketing strategy? Please share below.

Thanks for reading,

~ Theresa

3 Effective Ways of Marketing Your Brand on a Budget

Marketing your brand, even on a budget is very doable, you just need a few tips to get you going in the right direction.

How do you build a strong brand?

How can you consciously construct how people think of you and your company, without having a corporate advertising budget?

Here are a few smart ways of marketing your brand without breaking the bank.

Negotiate Advertising

Advertising in your local radio or newspaper is just too expensive for the small business. Or is it?

If an ad’s rate card rate is $1,000 a month, there’s a very good chance you could get it down to a more reasonable price with some shrewd negotiating. With the increase use the internet local papers are more open to working with advertisers.

How?

It’s important to realize that most newspapers struggle to get advertisers. When a newspaper goes to print, any unused ad space is basically money lost. It costs them the same amount of money to print the paper; they’re just not making as much money. So they’ll often be happy to take your money, even if it’s far below what they’d normally want.

Start by asking what their remnant rate is. Remnant is basically the price for unused advertising space. You can often get a 30% discount right off the bat this way.

Then ask if they honor the 15% in-house agency discount. Basically, ad agencies always get a 15% discount, which isn’t passed to the client (they take it as profit). In other words, by not using an ad agency, you can take the discount for yourself.

Now you’ve already saved 45%. Now try asking for their bulk rate for 3 months, 6 months and 12 months.

The rest is up to you. The goal is to try to get the 12-month rate for a one or two month test to see if the medium works out for you. Using a combination of negotiation techniques, you can get as much as 80% off.

Small Businesses Need to Focus on Response First

A large business can afford to put their time and energy into just branding, rather than direct sales efforts. A small business, however, needs to focus their main attentions on building sales today and branding for tomorrow.

If you’re spending money on advertising, your goal is an action taken by your target market. Those can be email sign-ups, sales or phone calls, but branding just isn’t enough for a new small business.

Aim for sales and reap the benefits of marketing your brand as a side benefit.

Use a Variety of Media

Research has shown that people who see an ad again and again through different media are a lot more likely to buy.

Let’s say someone sees your banner ad on a relevant website. Then they see an article you wrote on an industry leader’s blog. Finally, when they’re searching for information on a related topic, they see your Google AdWords ad (because you did your keyword research properly).

By now, you’ve built up so much credibility just by appearing multiple times in different media that they’re likely to click just out of curiosity.

Where are your customers?

If you’re marketing a local business, try mixing local media like radio, newspaper and perhaps even direct mail or postcards.

These are a few smart ways to build your brand effectively. Take care of your bottom line first by generating sales, while being conscious of your brand. Use a variety of media to target the same audience.

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What have you done to market your brand that work very well? What about something that didn’t turn out like you’d hope? Please share your experience below.

Thanks for reading,

Theresa