No matter how big your company, your marketing efforts are continually establishing and promoting your brand. Whenever someone sees or hears something about your company, their impression, the literal branding of your company into their mind grows. The more they find out, the more detailed that impression becomes, the more they understand who you are and how you relate to their needs compared to other companies they know. So how do you make your brand stand for something?
In the early stages of conceptualizing a client’s website, the client usually provides a list of links to websites that he or she wants to emulate. While this is an important establishment of communication, as visual expectations are difficult to express in words, and understanding what works and what doesn’t work in the web medium is critical, the client’s expectations are often focused on what elements of another website to duplicate. By starting the conversation with here’s how we want to be like the competition, you’re missing an opportunity to find out what isn’t being done and which of the market’s needs aren’t being fulfilled.
This applies to big business as much as small business—to local business as much as global business—to my business as much as your business.
In the early stages of growing my own web design firm, I interviewed business owners and spoke with business advisors. Many of these people had either direct experience or knew someone with direct experience building a website. Most of them had hired a small firm or freelancer to build a website for them, and eventually they had a completed website. I asked them for their experience/impressions of the process of building a website. Can you guess the one thing that kept coming up?
They had a miserable experience! Their expectations were not being fulfilled.
Projects were coming in well after deadline, without prompt communication, over budget and not as advertised.
Hardly anyone had a single nice thing to say about the process. My own business advisor, who works in marketing, told me that if I did a good job with the couple of referrals she gave me, I would have more work than I could possibly handle. Why? Because there is a serious lack of customer satisfaction in the web development industry, and if I could fill that hole with prompt, courteous service, keeping in touch and staying within budget, I would have satisfied the market and been the ray of light that was nowhere to be seen.
So my website focuses on the message: “work that you can be proud of, work that I can be proud of, a personal approach to project management.”
I want potential clients to know that I’m thinking about them. This is something that I’ve identified as a hole in the industry in my area, and I focus on the idea that I can fill that hole.
Would I be focusing on this message if web designers were known as reliable, hard workers who always deliver? Of course, not. I would have to find another angle that separated me from the competition.
Is this all that my company is about? No, way! But it is something that I provide that the market knows it needs. Generally, clients do not know they need cleaner, standards-compliant code to make their site more findable. But they do know that web designers are a group they need to be careful with. If I can get clients in the door by promoting customer service, I can always explain the virtues of clean, standards-compliant code later.
Likewise, if my competition focued their branding on phenomenal customer service, would I gain anything by broadcasting the same message? I would have to focus on something else I do well that clients would recognize.
There is always someone who needs help that the market is not yet providing. Successful businesses find the gaps and create the ideas that close them. Maybe your product is of higher quality; maybe you do good work faster; maybe you make people feel better about a service they don’t normally enjoy. Your brand is the constantly evolving impression of the work you do. Whatever your business, your branding efforts should strive to create the impression that you meet the needs of the market like no one else can.
Comments
No comments yet.
I appreciate your feedback. Comments are moderated. Email is required but won't be printed. Include your website if you have one.