Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

You hear it all the time about companies, marketing, and the company "brand". But WHAT IS a company brand and why is it important to the success (or failure) of your business? Branding has many meanings and definitions. A brand has been known as your company name, a slogan your company uses, a logo, the products you sell, the services you offer, a symbol you use to define your company, or a combination of these items. A "brand" has evolved over time to be these terms and more. A company brand is more than these mere objects.

Part of any good marketing plan is to create a positive buzz in the industry that you are. When people talk about your marketing after days or months have past you know you've created something substantial. An agile company needs to quickly adapt to change. Our own marketing efforts need to change as when you target big publicly traded companies that seems to have endless supplies of cash you need to be creative in everything you do. Recently we have been adding clients from these large publicly traded companies and learning a lot from these clients. Each new client we bring on we always ask what made you switch and choose us over X, Y, and Z. We always ask what is their definition of success and failure as everyone has a different opinion on each. This knowledge helps us in giving recommendations for other companies that we have aligned with to further help drive traffic and increase their business.

We all can't have the most exciting of company brands or huge budgets to make it exciting. You may provide one of the services that truly isn't super exciting to talk about but necessary to everyone in one way or another. You provide products and services that are used either daily or occasionally. Big business is known for their exciting and ever engaging social media marketing campaigns due to the huge budgets that they can get overly creative and take boring into exciting. This doesn't mean if you are a bank, credit union, funeral home, pawn shop, dry cleaner, lawyer, restaurant, etc. without a big budget that you can't have an engaging social media strategy that people will enjoy. In fact, there are ways you can start to engage your audience to make your brand more fun. Let's look at some ways you can go from boring to engaging using social media.

For anyone involved in business or sales, you have most likely heard the term "The Sales Funnel". While the name may seem self-explanatory, there is a considerable amount of thought and planning that goes into a successful sales funnel. While each business's sales funnel will vary with the nuances of their business, there is a fundamental structure that all sales funnels follow. What are these fundamentals? I'm so glad you asked.

In November, a long-lost friend (not really lost) started talking over email. We had been emailing back and forth for a week about his frustrations in getting his website to convert from visitors to customers. I will start out this person is not a customer as he is happy with his current provider and is also a close friend of his. He wanted to be heard about his struggles, what he is currently doing, and think of ways to improve his situation in the upcoming months.

As we talk to more people about taking advantage of generating leads from their website into opportunities we move to the talk of branding and marketing. We find that many people believe they are the same thing rather than two distinct items. Branding and marketing are not the same and each has a very important role that is used collaboratively together in your organization. Using marketing and branding together you can achieve a set of goals. In this article, we will define clearly what branding and marketing is and how each one used collaboratively can be used to grow your business.

This past weekend we met with two great clients on Saturday about how together we will work collaboratively together with their website, branding, and marketing of their organizations. The first lasted several hours about our services and digging deep into the realm of what our social media offered. The next inquired why we would want to work with their specific industry as they said they were slow pay and were by design hard to work with. In this article, we're going to look back at these two meetings and see how two different approaches align well with our Valparaiso Indiana company and why it shows why our three-year building process has put us in a place for rapid growth.

Yesterday we had the opportunity to be part of a Chamber Networking Night, a night put on by a city chamber that brings together local businesses to set up flashy booths, give away free goodies and interact with other visitors, clients, and businesses.

Whenever we bring on a new client or whenever a new client finds their way to JM2, there is one question we always lead with once they choose our services.How are we going to be able to help them?

Building a new or maintaining an existing small business is never an easy task. We don't have all the resources to do what the big businesses do but have the same aspirations of success and growth. We have to take that leap of faith that we will succeed, get over the fear of failure, and initially we start every day off knowing that failure could be around the corner with one simple and honest mistake. Each day we persevere and see that failure grows farther in the rear-view mirror as your business continues to grow.

When building a brand, it is much more than just a logo, brochure, your products, and even your website. Your brand should focus on forging a relationship with your client with the intention of doing more than expected and creating a sustainable value. Your brand is about quality of the relationships that you build on a daily basis. Your brand is aspirational, it's your promise, your values, your relationships, your commitment, and most importantly it is about YOU! In this article we will uncover several of the core aspects that we look at when helping an organization build its brand. Come follow us along in this journey.