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View From The Bridge, Part II: 25 Tips For Better Brand Building And More Effective Advertising | July 16, 2014 (0 comments)
Lafayette, LA—What’s the difference between a brand name and a brand?
One identifies a product, and the other evokes a feeling, says Ashley Brown, executive director of marketing and public relations for Lafayette, LA-based Stuller.
Speaking as part of Stuller’s Bridge conference series, Brown pointed to Southwest Airlines as an example of effective brand building: consumers know what the company does (moves people from one place to another) and how they do it (by air, cheaply) but the Southwest brand has come to represent a certain feeling of friendliness and customer loyalty that is absent from other airlines.
Brown also used her own company’s brand as an example: the company started out with founder Matt Stuller selling findings and settings out of his car. Today, jewelers associate the brand with trust, reliability, selection, and service: order today, you’ll have it tomorrow.
Brand building is a three-pronged approach involving traditional paid advertising, public relations, and social media, she said. To get the most value for your paid advertising budget, says Brown:
- Make sure all your paid advertising is consistent. Don’t try one style of ad in one place, and something completely different somewhere else.
- Determine a budget and establish success metrics that you expect to achieve before you spend the money.
- Create specific and time-based measurements to gauge how effectively your strategy is working—and if it isn’t meeting your goals, reassess your strategy sooner than later.
Three tips for effective public relations, says Brown, include:
- Socialize! You’re the face of your business, so get out in your community;
- Loan jewelry to local celebrities, for fashion shows, and even for your best customers to wear to a party.
- Donations. It doesn’t have to be jewelry; it can be the use of your store or your time.
All these strategies are designed to get customers talking. “90% of customers trust referrals over any other form of advertising,” emphasized Brown.
Social media is, of course, on every jeweler’s “to-do” list, but Brown emphasized the most important aspect of social media is doing it consistently.
Pinterest and Instagram are more of a product-push than Facebook, which offers a way for jewelers to tell their story the way they want it told. Brown’s tips for choosing the best social media site for a luxury jeweler:
- The best site is the one you’re going to be consistent about doing.
- Choose one or two sites and do them well; it’s better and more effective than a half-hearted effort to have a presence on all sites.
- “If you’re on social media, make sure you have someone who is on it!” stressed Brown. “Otherwise, consider not doing it until you do.”
Easy tips for boosting your visibility online. Steven Domingue, Stuller’s director of e-commerce, outlined seven strategies for increasing a store’s visibility online. These include location-based search, online business listings, Internet Yellow Pages, data aggregators, consistency of information, customer reviews, and social media.
A jeweler that enjoys a premier position in a city still may not show up first in a Google search for jewelers in that area, he explained. And usually the fix is very simple, says Domingue, because what boosts search rankings is far different from what a jeweler has to do to boost engagement on social media. Hint: it's all about consistency.
“Every single time you have your name, address, and phone listed, make sure it is identical,” says Domingue. The more often the online bots crawl across a business’s information, the higher it will rank—but something as simple as having “St.” abbreviated in one place your address is listed, but spelled out “Street” in another place, registers differently to the bot and doesn’t help your rankings climb.
- Use photos but be sure they’re tagged and captioned because Google can’t read photos.
- Make sure you categorize your store properly—choose the most relevant category first (engagement rings, watches) and then supplement with other relevant categories. "Google gives you 10 categories. Use them all!" said Domingue.
- Make sure your business information is as robust as possible. Use all the information fields provided.
- List your local telephone number first and 800 number second.
- Use lots of images, with descriptions.
- Your email should be your domain name; i.e. ________@joesjewelers.com.
- Call out your Better Business Bureau and trade association memberships with logos.
- Post videos of all your commercials.
- For Internet yellow pages, again make sure the information you provide is identical to your Google, Bing, and Yahoo listings, down to the smallest detail, stressed Domingue. If your phone number has the area code in parentheses in one, make sure it is in parentheses in all the others.
“It takes effort to fix incorrect or inconsistent information, but it is worth it,” he reiterated. When it comes to customer reviews, there are a few key points to remember there, as well:
- Get reviews from a variety of sources.
- Ask customers to do a quick review. Follow up each sale with an email asking for a review, and include a link to where they can write it.
- Amazon verifies that customer reviews (on its own site) are legitimate: Yelp is more flawed.
- Respond to negative reviews publicly. It shows you in a better light than ignoring it, and positions you as someone who cares to make things right, says Domingue. This instance is not about improving your ranking; it’s about improving trust in you.
- What Google wants in a review and what you want are not the same. Google+, for example, counts the number of reviews, not the quality of them. For Google+’s rankings, five one-star reviews are better than one five-star review. But for you as a jeweler, the exact opposite is true.
- Do not conduct a massive campaign to get hundreds of reviews from customers at once. A consistent flow of one or two reviews a month is better.
For social media, Domingue reinforced Brown’s point that doing one or two sites very well is better than doing all sites halfheartedly.
“Make sure you are consistent and frequent,” he emphasized, adding that more “likes” can boost local rankings. Link to your website from all social media sites, and make sure your name, address, and phone information is in HTML text, not in an image!
Finally, Domingue recommended two websites to use for evaluating your listing and searchability: www.most.com will grade your current listing status, and www.davidmihm.com offers tons of local search tips and tricks.