Why Brand Building is an Essential Part of Your PR By: Janette Burke, Your Marketing Magnet

Contrary to popular belief, small businesses branding is not about slick advertising. Rather it is about getting your target market to see you as their preferred choice - the problem solver to their specific needs. Building your brand is not just about what you do; it is about what you do differently from your competition and how you tap into your client's emotional needs.

Brands have a number of strategic functions, allowing you to...

• Differentiate yourself from your competition
• Position your marketing message in the hearts and minds of your target clients
• Persist and be consistent in your marketing efforts
• Customize your services to reflect your personal brand and image
• Deliver your message clearly and quickly
• Project credibility
• Strike an emotional chord
• Create strong user loyalty

According to Steven Van Yoder, author of "Get Slightly Famous: Become a Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business with Less Effort", your brand is your unique promise of the value that only your clients will receive from using your services and products. Your branding integrates customer service, sales promotion, public relations, direct mail, newsletters, discounts, event sponsorship, word of mouth and other communications tactics to present a unified message about your company, its products or services.

In an amazingly complex and competing world--where it's increasingly hard to know what's real and what's not--having your customers not only acknowledge but support the promise of your brand is the key to building a thriving business.

So how do you go about building your brand? You've got to become entirely clear and focused on what you do that adds value to your services. For example, do you deliver your work on time, every time? Do you anticipate and solve problems before they become crises? Do your clients save money and headaches just by having you on the team? Do you complete projects within the allotted budget?

In order to be effective, your brand must encompass all of your marketing efforts around your core idea or vision. When it does, selling yourself becomes a whole lot easier. Why - because your message becomes uniform and powerful.

Therefore, every business should evaluate its brand identity against the following criteria:

Relevance to their Market

Does your brand stand for something that is meaningful to the members of your target market and does it entail the total experience of doing business with you?

Consistency of Behavior

Are your customers able to depend on your brand to deliver the same experience every time? Does your market experience your values through your brand? They must if they are to truly become loyal to it and to your dedication and consistency.

Relationship-Building

Do you think your brand is merely your logo or your advertising/marketing/PR strategy? Wrong - it's much more. "The strength of your brand is in the relationship it has between your company and your customers. The stronger the relationship, the more business they will do with you, and the more likely it is that they will also refer you to their friends and business associates.

Loyalty

The test of your brand is, in fact, the strength of loyalty it generates. If you have a strong relationship with your target audience, then you have a strong brand and a strong business.

Reputation

The only way to be successful in business is by establishing a good reputation, and a brand can help you do that. Your reputation works as your strongest marketer by communicating the relationship you have with people who've done business with you and your target market in general.

Good brands stand the test of time. To develop a brand that will last a lifetime, go beyond what you do right now. Think long term. Look at Coke, Ford and General Electric. No matter what they sell or how they change over time, they can rely on their brand equity build on a foundation of customer trust to take them deep into their customers trust quotient and keep them there.

If you establish a place of trust and relevance in prospects' minds, you're already in the door. The more people believe in your brand, the more it will spread throughout your niche market without your pushing. If your brand is clear, distinctive, easily understood, and expresses a unique, compelling benefit that people believe in, it will bring you all the business and media exposure you can possibly handle.