Brand Consulting and Brand Marketing Strategy
for Small Business, Consultants and Entrepreneurs

Are you looking for socially responsible ways to grow your business? Enlightened Marketing helps you increase sales by attracting more clients without selling out on your values.

The Craziest Way to Get Clients

by Samantha Hartley on August 27, 2010

My colleague reported a huge sales boom this week, which we celebrated. “How did you do that?” I asked.

“Oh, I marketed my program,” she said.  “I’d been distracted for a long time by some tech issues and I finally got a chance to promote it again.”

marketing ideas

Everything is, in retrospect.

Hey, that sounds familiar…

My client Christine just got a little burst of business also. She did an event last month and, even though they hadn’t attended, several new clients were reminded of her and called for appointments.

Similarly, I attended a networking event last week and came back with 5 leads to follow up on.

Time and again we’re reminded how effective it is to just …

Do some dang marketing!!

(Crazy, I know.) What exactly constitutes marketing?

Beginners:  Message + Visibility + Intention + Habit

  • Be clear on your marketing message – who you help, the problems you solve and what big benefits your clients get from you.
  • Get out and be seen! Whether in your local community or online, you have to get your message in front of your prospective clients.  You can try networking, speaking and writing, or any one of the twenty-four specific visibility methods I teach in my affordable Attracting Perfect Clients course.
  • Know why you’re doing what you’re doing; carry your intention consciously into each activity.  “I intend to attract three Moms who are feeling stressed about their children and would benefit most from my services.”
  • Build habits, or rituals, that you enjoy and will do regularly.

Advanced:  Improve One + Add One

Often, established businesses struggle to keep up their marketing activities. Consumed by client projects, operations and, well, running a business, they sometimes get lazy in their marketing, or distracted away from their big revenue generators.

My solution lately – and it’s proving to be quite effective – is simply to improve one thing you’re already doing and add one new activity.

  • Improve one: For example, if you’re blogging twice a month, blog weekly.  If you offer a freebie when people sign up on your website, try a new one on a hotter topic.
  • Add one: Then, do one thing you haven’t done, such as speaking engagements in your local area or answering one question per week one LinkedIn.

One of my clients has been giving lead-generating free webinars that attract new clients. Improving the sign-up process has helped him follow up more effectively, and crafting a better offer has gotten him many more appointments with interested prospects.  With that working well, he’s now able to try a new one for him: video blogging.

At this point you may feel skeptical.

“Oh, please!  I know I need to do more marketing, but it’s not like any of these ideas will help.  Real marketing should be comprehensive and strategic, like a military campaign. It’s gotta change with the times!”

Yeah … that’s not what I’m finding. We doom ourselves by looking for overly ambitious, big ideas or magical new methods that will finally do the trick.  There aren’t that many new methods. Social networking is just networking moved online. A website is just a mashup of your brochure and your office.

You can call it South Beach or P90X, but the truth is boring ol’ diet and exercise is how to lose weight.  Same with message plus visibility; it gets you clients!

At this point you may feel overwhelmed.

I do too, sometimes. So, stop doing ONE thing that’s not a good use of your time. It could be a marketing tactic that isn’t working, a task you should be delegating or a time waster like reading news online.

At this point you may feel motivated.  Hurray!  Here are your action steps:

  1. Review the two categories above to see if you need to work on your beginnings or if you’re ready to add more advanced steps.
  2. Schedule time on your calendar to work on getting those activities done.
  3. If you’ve fallen off the wagon, do something today - even sending a keep-in-touch email, placing a 5-mnute phone call or writing a 300-word blog post.  That will get the energy moving again.
  4. Celebrate! You did something crazy-good by getting the word out.  May abundant success follow!

Did you recently do a little marketing and get a good result? Share your story in the comments, why don’tcha?

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What Makes a Good Tagline?

by Samantha Hartley on August 24, 2010

Clients often approach me wanting a tagline. I don’t assume that everyone means the same thing when they say this, so I usually dig for more information:  “When you say you want a tagline, what do you really mean?”

how to write a tagline

Hope Grows

Most of the time, people who want a tagline are searching for a concise, effective way to talk about what they offer.

They want something catchy and memorable, easy for their prospects to remember as well as themselves.

Have you ever had to fumble around for an explanation of what you do, as if it were the first time you’d ever been asked? Many business owners find it so hard to put their value into words that they yearn for a quick easy answer.

But a tagline isn’t exactly it.

When prospective clients approach me wanting a tagline, what they really mean is they need to define their brand.

They need to articulate exactly whom they help and what they can offer them that no one else can.

When you know exactly what your brand’s value is, you can speak confidently about it, and concisely.  And, from this clear defined brand, a tagline will often emerge.

I’m not opposed to taglines; it’s just that, without the foundation of a brand, they’re difficult to create and not very valuable.

However, WITH the foundation of a brand, a tagline can be a great mnemonic device, reminding our target audience quickly of our value.

Just as a logo is a visual prompt, the tagline is a short audio version.

Good taglines are short, punchy phrases that express the essence of a brand, as you’ve seen in famous taglines (also known as slogans) like “Just do it” or “Coke is it.”  With Nike’s “no excuses” command or Coke’s self-confident declaration, you also get a quick feel of the personality of the product.

One of my current favorite taglines is from Secret deodorant for women: “Because you’re hot.” I love the double-meaning, which flatters its users (my secret: I’m one of them).  It also reminds us of the essence of the brand: honoring women, femininity and offering a product “strong enough for a man, but made for a woman” (its tagline from the past).

Back in 2007, one of my clients created an exemplary tagline. April Ambrose, Executive Director and Board Chair of Arkansas Earth Day Foundation, spent hours with me working on the brand for the one-day special event, Arkansas Earth Day (AED).  The essence of the event is delivering “fun activities and educational experiences in a hopeful, motivating spirit.”

Yes, it took hours to distill all that we wanted the event to be down into those ten words! (It always looks easier in retrospect. How many meetings do you think “Just do it” took?)

April had been immersed in the brand for five years, and in the clearly articulated brand definition for over a year.  So, it wasn’t surprising that…

In a fit of boredom in a meeting one day, she gave birth to a new tagline for Arkansas Earth Day: Hope Grows.

[I, too, do some of my best work in boring meetings!]

What makes this one such a winner?

Here are the aspects of the AED tagline “Hope Grows” that make it successful:

  1. It expresses the spirit of the brand, which is “hopeful and motivating”
  2. It uses a nature-based metaphor – “grows” – which is another way of connecting it to what we’re about
  3. It’s fabulously short (so difficult!)
  4. It contains an internal rhyme (the “oh” sound repeated in both words)
  5. It describes progress and momentum which has been achieved in AED’s brief but effective history

In short, it quickly says what they’re about in a memorable and inspiring way. The tagline can be used in all communications next to the AED logo and brand name.  They can add it to merchandise that will carry the logo.  It can be the featured message of advertising and press releases.

If your business could benefit from a tagline, start first with a clearly defined brand, articulating the singular benefits that you offer.  For assistance, contact me to learn how to speak your brand identity with confidence!

Photo: Simon Peckham

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3 Little Known Tips for Getting More Referrals

July 29, 2010

What’s an ideal referral for you? That’s a question I ask a lot, and if you had a hidden camera, the view wouldn’t be pretty.  You’d see: Unspecific, long-winded, confusing answers Phrases like “Well, it’s a little hard to explain” and “Really, anyone who ….” Contorted body language that would make you think a spider [...]

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The Scissor Sisters’ Lesson for Small Businesses

July 13, 2010

The other day, I bought a new record, the Scissor Sisters’ Night Work. While I was having my first listen and gazing at the album sleeve, I realized that there was a great lesson in it for enlightened small businesses. The album cover itself is not of the traditional “glamorous picture of the band” type. [...]

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Home Office: Bad for Brand Credibility?

July 11, 2010

Today we conclude our short series on “looking” like a serious business.  Our first post was about aligning your appearance with your brand, and the second detailed a higher priority than your website. One FAQ I get is: “I work from home, and I’m a little embarrassed about it. Does working from a home office [...]

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What Makes You Look Like a Serious Business?

July 8, 2010

Subscriber Deborah, a “struggling new business owner,” writes: I started my business several times in the last two years thinking that I need something more to get it off the ground.  I struggle with developing the “things” that make me “look” like I am a viable, serious business and not a hobby.  One of those [...]

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Dress for Success – Package Your Personal Brand

July 6, 2010

Image via Wikipedia Subscriber Drew Noble writes: I just want to say how much I appreciate your blog and newsletter. I’m a 25 year old who just started her own marketing consulting company. I’m so glad that someone finally said what I’ve been thinking all along: Elevator pitches are stupid!  I hope you will write [...]

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Social Media Overwhelm? Here is Your Cure

June 30, 2010

From all the highlighting in my copy of The Zen of Social Media Marketing, the inside pages have started to look like the cheerful yellow cover.  There were several smart ideas I wanted to capture, as many for myself as for my clients. The book is subtitled “An Easier Way to Build Credibility, Generate Buzz, [...]

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Are You as Brandable as Kefir?

June 16, 2010

After 7 years in Russia, I take kefir for granted. You may not know what it is, but when I say it’s an Eastern European dairy product that– I’m usually interrupted by someone: “Oh, is that the yogurt drink that helps you live to 100?” Yep, that’s pretty much the definition. Kefir is a cousin [...]

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