Positioning, Branding and Text - Sharing is caring, as they say...
November 09, 2011
Positioning, Branding and Text - Sharing is caring, as they say... (Our thought’s on business identity, branding and positioning in Bournemouth)
Double Exposure have been through three of four websites, numerous ‘strap-lines’ and tons of website and advert text - it’s only after two years that we’ve got anywhere near what we think best represents our business in Bournemouth.
The very nature of business dictates that our brand and website copy will need updating in the future, but we think that if you can achieve harmony for a few years (especially with your brand identity) then your clients will have the time to recognise your company, or gain some familiarity - this can lead to trust and trust generates sales.
Our website text content will change frequently, in fact we update some aspects of our more fluid business operatives weekly (blogs, tuition, dates etc) - however, the primary content might not change for several months, or until we operate in a different way or provide a different service to our clients: this is mainly for SEO purposes. We believe regular updating is crucial, but do it too often and Internet Search Engines won’t index your services accurately.
It would be nice to outsource all the tasks surrounding your business to the best people for the job (there are some amazing graphic design, creative agencies and web developers in the Bournemouth / Poole area, and indeed rural Dorset), but that’s not always affordable, because of this we’ve learnt so much about how to carefully pick and choose the most important updates for our business. We’ve realised that it’s not a case of “can’t afford it”, it’s “can you afford not too..?”
The book ‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout was offered to us by a chap called Richard Spencer (A Thousand Monkeys). This book helped us to understand how Double Exposure fitted into the jigsaw of the South’s markets: who are our clients, where do they work, and how do we position our business services to avoid going head-on with local competition? Discussed in the book is Nytol, a famous pharmaceutical brand that offered pain relief ‘at night’, thus presenting their company as offering something different from the leading opposition, whilst trading in the same market.
We undertook a major rebrand this summer (2011) and haven’t looked back since, we paid for professional ‘logo’ design, a ‘strap-line’ and had a copywriter write up all our content. This has led to increased sales for our company and has put us on the first page of Google for the search terms we want, in only three months!
A few of the services, books and websites we used are featured in this blog - we hope they are of use to others.
A big thank you to the follwing people/businesses:
Lee Taylor (Proserv Marketing and Events) - Marketing Strategist and all round good guy!
Dan Hinton (Pixelfish) - Providers of our fantastic Contere 5 based website.
Richard Spencer (A Thousand Monekys) - The guy to go to for writing advice and positioning.
Justin Allison (Copywriter) - Helped spell out what we're all about.
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind - can be found here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Positioning-Battle-Your-Al-Ries/dp/0071373586
A great example of an Elevator Pitch can be found here: http://blogs.hbr.org/nivi/2009/04/how-to-write-an-elevator-pitch.html
Providers of great business cards can be found here: http://www.jamjarprint.co.uk/
