Your Website Face-Lift; Strategic Planning and Pre-launch Check List

Strategic planning is the key to business success as it involves deep thought behind setting vision, mission statement and out-of-the-box thinking. This philosophy is particularly relevant for any business that is now planning a face-lift of existing company website so as to remain relevant and current within the framework of contemporary brand-enhancement strategies.

•    Review Previous Project Analysis

Before moving on to a new project, review of previous project analysis will generate valuable insight when calculating all of the pros and cons of the previous project. The strategic planning of a new project depends upon the review of previous project analysis. Real experts learn from previous mistakes and formulate strategies that overcome the shortcomings of prior resources used, and other weaknesses or errors in the course of moving to new project planning.

•    Brand Strategy Planning

Brand strategy planning is a planning of brand identity, company image and the value proposition that you want to convey to your target market.  Our business strategy planners think big and provide insight to your business planning and current needs from a professional view point. We aim to create bigger and better ideas for the aspiring brand names.

•    Website Pre-Launch Check List

While elementary and obvious to many clients, this pre-launched website checklist critical to use as benchmark when working with website designers and developers.

-    Check for Favicon

-    Cross Browser Testing

-    Cross operating system compatibility

-    Removing Borders for Links and Images

-    Set up 404 page

-    Loading time (Downtime & Server Speed)

-    Setting up 301 redirects if needed

-    Set up Web Analytics

-    Set up Google Webmaster

-    Check for broken links

-    Proofread all the content – Spell Check!

-    Check all links on header footer and body

-    Functionality Check

-    HTML Validation through w3c.org (Remove all warnings and Errors)

-    Copyright statement

-    Disclaimer

-    Meta Information of all pages (Title, Keywords, and Description)

-    HTML Sitemap

-    XML Sitemap

-    Robot.txt

-    URL optimization

-    Develop Newsletter (campaign for opt-in subscribers)

-    Social icons links to your social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+, etc.)

-    RSS Feed

Your Website Face-Lift; Strategic Planning and Pre-launch Check List

“Why Does Your Brand Exist? The 4 P’s Test for branding strategy

Thanks to Jennie Wong, for sharing this week’s interview of “Ask The Mompreneur” with Jaun Garzon, a marketing strategist. In her recent article “What is your firm’s branding strategy?” She discussed what the brand is and what is branding strategy? As explained by Mr.Jaun Garzon in an interview.

To help entrepreneurs and small businesses better understand the core of their brand and branding strategies, I use a system I developed called the 4 P’s of Branding. It boils down this hidden part of your brand into 4 aspects: your purpose, your promise, your personality and your positioning. By asking yourself these questions (in this order), you’ll be well on your way to understanding what your brand is all about.

Purpose:

Why does your company, whether you are 1 or 100 employees, exist? Why do you get up every morning and do what you do? Why did you start this business to begin with? Your purpose is about connecting your business to its “Why?” and ensuring that the branding decisions you make support because doing what you do, including putting it out for the world to see. For example, Southwest Airlines states their purpose right on their website, “To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable and low-cost air travel.” Whatever that reason is for you, that’s the foundation of your brand.

Promise:

It is imperative to know your target market and communicate such things you guarantee always to do for them (in your promotions, social awareness, sales brochures, etc.). Such guarantee may include pace, quality, attention to detail or any high-level benefit you can constantly offer. The goal is, customers should realize that if they opt to work with your company, you will stick to certain promises and can do everything to make it achievable. This promise is ultimately responsible for brand reputation.

Personality:

Brand personality depicts the personality of users consuming it. Brand personality can be feminine or masculine. For example, to get you the meaning of different brand personalities, think about two different motorcycle brands, Honda and Harley Davidson. You would unlikely to confuse the two, even though they both are motorcycle brands. Honda bikes are mostly used by low-mid income class individuals or young small families. It reflects affordability and fuel-efficient features. While, Harley Davidson is usually own by well off individuals who are never worried about fuel-efficiency and affordable cost. What most matters for Harley user are uniqueness, prestige and competition from peers.

Positioning:

Your customers are might be aware of products or services you are selling, but not necessarily aware of why particular product or service is valuable for them or how certain offering may add value in their lifestyle. Here brand positioning strategy works to divide the market into segment and sub-segments. You have to clearly define your brand through advertising and promotional efforts. For instance, Volvo and Mercedes are both higher-end cars, but Mercedes is all about prestige and quality whereas Volvo has positioned its brand as the safest cars in the world.

There are numerous strategies floating in the market to make your product a BRAND, but these 4 simple P’s of branding strategy could help you define the scope and purpose of your brand. If there is any anonymity between your brand and 4 P’s then you must to revamp your strategies.

“Why Does Your Brand Exist? The 4 P’s Test for branding strategy

Case Study for Corporate Marketers, Bankers, Branding Gurus and PR Positers: Skybox Inc

Skybox Imaging Inc. Team

How to differentiate your disruptive and innovative company from the rest? Have your chief cheerleader (presumably your CEO) make an epic statement in which your entire company and your constituents can continuously hang their hats on..  The following is a classic example:

“We think we are going to fundamentally change humanity’s understanding of the economic landscape on a daily basis.” Skybox co-founder Dan Berkenstock

The above words from an entrepreneur whose offering is seemingly perceived to be something simple: satellite technology.

If you are an aspiring tech czar in the capital raising mode, a brand enhancement specialist, a venture capitalist doing due dili, or a mere investment banker who is working with an advanced-stage company whose execs are also looking to you to help ‘craft the value proposition” to investors, your target audience will always be more inspired when you perspire passion to the point where its dripping from your pores.

The context of the above quote is in connection with a very compelling piece written by WSJ reporter Christopher Mims in his aptly-titled column “KEYWORDS”

Below are select extracts from the June 16 WSJ article: The story itself is not merely about enterprise valuation techniques and not only about the next great technology innovation, the story transcends borders for those who can read in between the lines..

Silicon Valley lately has seemed like the land of wild—or at least puzzling—valuations.

Facebook bought WhatsApp, a messaging service with paltry revenue and at least a half-dozen sophisticated competitors, for $19 billion. Uber was just valued at $18.2 billion in a round of private-equity financing. Even Beats Electronics, a company with a music service in its infancy and technologically inferior headphones that could fall out of fashion at any moment, was valued at $3.2 billion to Apple.

But Google just bought a company that could have a bigger impact on its bottom line and on the world than any other recent acquisition by the search giant or its tech brethren—for just $500 million.

For 1/38th the price of WhatsApp, Google acquired Skybox Imaging, which puts satellites into orbit 185 miles above Earth on the tip of the same Russian missiles that once threatened the U.S. with nuclear destruction. And here’s what Skybox could allow Google to accomplish: Within a couple of years, when you want to know whether you left your porch light on or if your teenager borrowed the car you forbade her to drive, you might check Google Maps.

That’s because by 2016 or so, Skybox will be able to take full images of the Earth twice a day, at a resolution that until last week was illegal to sell commercially—all with just a half-dozen satellites. By the time its entire fleet of 24 satellites has launched in 2018, Skybox will be imaging the entire Earth at a resolution sufficient to capture, for example, real-time video of cars driving down the highway. And it will be doing it three times a day.

And yet, as I discovered when I visited Skybox recently at its modest, low-slung headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., satellite imagery isn’t even the business in which the company’s founders see themselves. As at Google, the business of Skybox isn’t data, but knowledge.

“We think we are going to fundamentally change humanity’s understanding of the economic landscape on a daily basis,” says co-founder Dan Berkenstock.

Here’s an example of what he’s talking about. In 2010, an analyst at UBS discovered that if he bought satellite images of parking lots of Wal-Mart stores, he could predict the company’s sales figures before they were revealed in its quarterly report, because cars in lots equal shoppers in stores.

“We’re looking at Foxconn every week,” Mr. Berkenstock says, because measuring the density of trucks outside the Taiwanese company’s manufacturing facilities tells Skybox when the next iPhone will be released.

Skybox can determine how much oil is being pumped out of the ground in Saudi Arabia by imaging oil-storage tanks from above. The company can peg the likely price of grain months in advance by measuring the health of every square yard of cropland on Earth. One city has used Skybox’s data to determine who built illegal backyard pools and might use it to identify water-restriction violators during a drought.

It’s competitive intelligence as spy craft. And it’s compelling enough that a Skybox employee once told a reporter for Wired that the company might someday simply become an unreasonably profitable hedge fund.

Yet these known uses of satellite data—which have never been available in the abundance that Skybox says it can achieve—are just the beginning. It’s the unpredictable applications that could be the biggest.

If Google can get a cut of those services by charging a licensing fee for the underlying data, it could be a new business that might move the needle on Google’s revenue mix, which, ample as it is, remains stubbornly linked to search advertising.

Case Study for Corporate Marketers, Bankers, Branding Gurus and PR Positers: Skybox Inc

6 Rules for New Brands Seeking Minimum Viability; Do It Right, Not Right Away.

Thanks to Denise Lee Yohn for her observations in the HBR Blog Network.

Many brands fail due to having no or otherwise, a vaguely pre-defined brand strategy. Some entrepreneurs assume that their new product or innovation is so brilliant that they only need to “make it available” in the market and people will immediately embrace it.

 

Others, typically technology companies, develop core applications that have multiple possible uses, and because they are not sure enough which of the applications will be the most compelling, so they just place them in the market to let the consumers decide.

In both of the above mentioned scenarios, entrepreneurs overlook the brand strategy and its importance related to the success of the brand. Pre-defined brand strategy aligns the internal employees with the common ground of brand goals and objectives, as well as helps determine the product differentiations and parities.

Most entrepreneurs are usually in such a rush to get a new product launched, they forget the value of brand strategy as the foundation for a successful launch. And some mistakenly presume brand strategy with the product strategy, without realizing that the brand is much more than mere product.

At The JLC Group, we often caveat guidance to clients with a basic tenant: “Do it Right, Not Right Away.”

Today, entrepreneurs like Eric Ries have introduced a new hypothetical concept to test product or brand hypothesis with minimum resources called Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or Minimum Viable Brand (MVB). It is comprised of the core brand elements that are mandatory to assure internal focus and alignment as well as external relevance and differentiation. The MVB model revolves around 6 WHAT questions, to be answered for better brand strategy:

1)    What we stand for – Brand Promise

2)    What we believe in – Brand Values

3)    What people we seek to engage – Target Market

4)    What differentiate us – Point of Differentiation

5)    What we offer – Brand Credibility

6)    What we represent – Brand Image

These are the six questions that need to be addressed and understood within an organization prior to making a new product launch. Contrary to popular belief, customers’ brand perception determines the value and strength of the brand, but it’s an organization that creates perceptions on customer’s mind about the brand through promotions and marketing efforts. What I personally believe, we should never leave any determinants in the consumers’ court to let them decide the future of the brand. This is something organizations need to inject effort from their end.

6 Rules for New Brands Seeking Minimum Viability; Do It Right, Not Right Away.

Madison Ave Marketers Move To Wall St With Index For Advertising Pricing

Having spent more than 15 minutes within the “World of Wall Street” and since migrating to the fringes of Madison Avenue, we’re always intrigued to notice how the world of marketing and advertising continues to merge with Wall Street-style advertising buying and selling schemes. As best evidenced by Media Post Communications latest initiative,  this Madmen enterprise seeks to emulate respective roles of financial behemoths Standard & Poor’s aka “S&P” and Dow Jones’ by providing an index that enables tracking of real-time benchmark pricing for ad placements.

The initiative’s goal, profiled by Stuart Elliott in today’s NYT Advertising section starts with a new index called “RTB”, which stands for Real-Time Buying, is to provide a gauge for pricing based on the top 500 on-line publications.

Suffice to say, we’re fluent in the topic of index trading, whether in form of exchange-traded-products (ETFs), futures contracts and/or options on underlying indexes. These products are intended to provide pricing transparency and the means by which ‘investors’ can manage investment portfolios. The world of advertising, according to most industry experts, is bereft of pricing transparency. It is a world that until recently has been stuck in the ’60s, no different than the days gone by in which Wall Street fund managers were dependent on telephones to communicate with brokers who could provide visibility as to latest pricing for stocks and bonds.

The good (or bad) news is that Madmen from Madison Avenue have embraced a broad assortment of trading technology tools and strategies typical to today’s financial markets.. Below excerpt courtesy of Stuart Elliott’s column

“There is so much sophistication being brought into the marketplace,” said Robert D. Liodice, president and chief executive of the largest trade organization for marketers, the Association of National Advertisers, “and through programmatic we are giving ourselves the ability to understand data better to help in our real-time decision-making.” Mr. Liodice said he was told about the MediaPost plans by Joe Mandese, editor of MediaPost, who has been testing the index for more than a year with colleagues like Jeffrey A. Loechner, the company’s president.

MediaPost plans to have the index go live on Thursday. The index, using 100 as a baseline, will be available on the MediaPost website, mediapost.com, as well as in MediaPost newsletters like Real-Time Daily. There will also be 15 subindexes covering websites by categories like entertainment, games, magazines, music, newspapers, portals and sports.

 

Madison Ave Marketers Move To Wall St With Index For Advertising Pricing

How To Use Social Platforms To Boost Reach: 6 Ways to Get More Social Media Shares for Your Blog

We are used to observing social media sharing on a routine basis; as soon as we connect to the internet and login to our social media accounts we see likes, tweets and pins. These social media platforms are great ways to expand the reach and share content across the digital border. In the digital world of businesses, it is rightly said that “Content is KING.” However, what I believe, whether the Content is King or “Jack of All Spades,” it must be truly optimized for reaching your audience via effective social sharing.

Here are 6 ways to get more social media shares for your blog.

1) Use floating social bookmarking widget to increase the shares. The sharing bar keeps moving when a person scrolls down the post.

2) You can use two or more headlines (aka double-whammy headlines) for the post to grab attention of the readers. Much like the approach we use in this blog.

a) How to use social platforms to boost the reach

b) 6 ways to get more social media shares for your blog

3) Reframe the content each time. Do it by posting a part of a blog with an image and tag the link of the whole blog in the end. For instance, you have seen many articles and blogs saying Click here to read full article or See more.

4) Repost your content after a specific interval of time such as 3 months or 6 months to get it noticed by new followers.

5) Use Popup to encourage users share your blog.

6) Last in sequence, but not in importance. Make sure your sharing button is not hidden or dead and it is always prominent at the eye-catching location.

Do you have more ideas to increase the social sharing? Let us know your experience in the comment box…

How To Use Social Platforms To Boost Reach: 6 Ways to Get More Social Media Shares for Your Blog

Are powerful Brand Mantras really helping increase Brand Equity?

The answer is straightforward; YES, they can magically increase the brand equity and its vital components such as brand awareness, brand resonance, brand perceived quality, and brand loyalty. Brand Mantras are 3-5 small word phrases (not a Tagline or Slogan) that confine the overwhelming promise and essence of the brand and its values.

The term Brand Mantra was initially coined by an American advertising executive, Scott Bedbury, former Nike and Starbucks marketing specialist. It encapsulates the point-of-differences (PODs), point-of-parities (POPs), and the competitive frame of reference into one brand idea. Fundamentally, the brand mantra is an imperative part when marketers design the strategy to position their brand. Great brand mantras can effectively position the brand in prospective buyers, creating highly perceived overall value of the brand.

Mercedes – “Quality and Prestige”

According to Scott Bedbury, he invented this term during his tenure in Nike, giving probably the best brand mantra ever for Nike, i.e. “Authentic Athletic Performance.” Remember that brand mantra is something different from slogans and taglines, because Nike’s slogan or tagline is what everybody knows, “Just do it.”

Actually, marketers derive taglines from brand mantras and they serve as a critical building block not only for the brand tagline, but for the complete brand equity or organization itself. When brainstorming mantras, marketers should focus on their core values, vision, mission and the corporate culture of the organization, without compromising on the brand positioning aspect as well. Your brand and your values should incorporate with each other. If there is something tricky between these two elements, then on off the chance that you’re on wrong track and your customers might perceive the branding as negative. Some people also describe brand mantras as the DNA of the organization that can effectively help in decision making process for branding strategies and user expectations.

In my experience, creating great brand mantra could help you hit the targeted audience smoothly in positioning world of brands. The mantra is an emotional attachment of a brand that let people knows how uniquely it will benefit them and how they feel using the certain branded product. So you can say that powerful “Brand Mantra” not only provides the brand positioning and brand image, also helps decide the prospect of the brand and organization.

Are powerful Brand Mantras really helping increase Brand Equity?

Importance of Business Process Outsourcing

Before going into an in-depth detail about outsourcing, let’s clear it here that the concept of outsourcing is not new at all, but the term dates back to the 1970s, when enterprises started outsourcing some subordinate processes of their businesses to outside forces.

Did outsourcing work well at that time? The answer is yes, it did well, and the practice of outsourcing started getting popular across boundaries. With the passage of time and success stories of outsourced business processes, companies got into the culture of outsourcing major parts of their business processes. Today, it can be easily noted that big corporations as well as mid-level companies outsource 50% to 60% of their business content to outside firms.

It is worth-mentioning that most of the large organizations outsource half of their IT operations, while some other prefer outsourcing their all back office operations including IT, HR and accounts. Chances are in the near future all business functions would be outsourced because currently companies are outsourcing different horizontal and vertical business units. The cross functional approach adopted to follow a process horizontally across a company is called as Business Process Outsourcing (BPO).

With the emerging trend of business process outsourcing, it is no more only a method of sharing your responsibilities with outside sources, but it has become a strategic move. Big organizations do not even hesitate quoting business process outsourcing as the secret behind their business success.

How BPO Contributes in the Success of Company?

The answer may need long detail, logical back up or evidence; while keeping it short and simple it can be noted that there are two major parts of every organization namely, administrative functions and strategic planning.

Administration functions contribute in running, monitoring and management of all business units. Be it finance and accounts, human resources function, production team or IT support all these are part of administrative functions. Tough schedules, project deadlines and meeting stress and all other business functions, take focus away from strategic planning that result in static business position. It means that a business keeps on running smoothly, but it does not show growth because companies lack focus on strategic planning.

Secret behind success of most big corporations is that they outsource all efficient processes and keep core focus on strategic planning for the company. They keep on expanding their visions and targeted goals and then formulate strategies to achieve those goals and keep growing in the competition.

The JLC Group provides diverse service portfolio for business outsourcing, including but not limited to:

1)      Marketing & Corporate Sales Strategy

2)      Brand Awareness

3)      Public Relation Consultancy

4)      Social Media Campaigns

5)      Corporate Sponsorships

6)      Competitive Analysis

7)      Strategic Partnerships

8)       Corporate Web Design and Development and more

Importance of Business Process Outsourcing

Learning is Proportional to the Accountability

New research proves that people only confront failures when they cannot find ways to attribute failure with something – or someone – else.  But when we avoid accountability, we detach ourselves from learning.

In the recent working paper of HBS (Harvard Business School), researchers identify, “How internal attribution and ambiguity of responsibility affect learning from failure.” Almost every one of us have had heard many quotes from intellects, emphasizing on the connection between “Success & Failure,” “Failure & Learning”, and “Experience & Failure.”

For instance, take a look on Bill Gates’ famous saying, “It’s fine to celebrate success, but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure.”

To explain why most of the saints, scholars, and other super minds always link success with failure is straightforward, because they never found a way to success other than failed experiences. In other words, they got learning from failures and sooner or later, make themselves accountable to combat failure without giving excuses and reasoning or blaming external circumstances.

But in some cases, where a person is unclear if he/she is directly responsible for the failure then there is chance that a person would not attribute the failure internally and ultimately less likely to learn from failure. The dilemma of real world is that we cannot easily decrease the ambiguity of responsibility when it comes to failure because most of our assignments and projects involve team players and colleagues as well.

So is there any way managers can encourage learning without accusing others of responsibility?

One of the authors of working HBS paper, Christopher G. Myers, gives some recommendations;

1)      Remove barriers creating ambiguity in the priority.

2)      Carefully designing the job roles, scope of responsibilities and reporting structure.

3)      Creating a psychological safe culture within the organization, where employees are encouraged to accept and learn from failure.

4)      Make a norm of experiencing new tasks as the challenging opportunity for learning process, rather than as a threatening stress.

5)      Analyzing root-cause of the failure without penalizing anyone when team fails, this can increase the thirst for learning among employees.

In my experience, learning is more about failure than success. When a person fails, his curiosity for success increases but the person should be sincerely curious about his work and life. In the end, all we need is to prepare ourselves to be accountable and responsible for the particular failed attempt rather than pinpointing others and uncontrollable external factors.

How beautifully it is summarized by Zig Zigler in just once sentence,

“If you learn from defeat, you haven’t really lost.”

Learning is Proportional to the Accountability

Palantir: Goes Boldy Where Marketers Had Only Dreamed Of

As profiled by the most recent edition of the Sunday New York Times, 10-yr old Palantir Technologies, a software company whose investors include the US Central Intelligence Agency-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, Palantir helps clients unlock secrets. In the world of marketing, and more specifically, within the context of marketers who now foam at the mouth when provided tools to extrapolate insight from tons of metadata, for those Mad Men (and women) intrigued by the rhetorical question”What’s Next?” within the framework of marketing technology and applications, Palantir is very possibly the next generation’s Google Inc; irrespective of the assortment of privacy-related concerns that go hand in hand with the company’s secret sauces.

An audacious call perhaps, but this blogger was [presciently] one of the very earliest proponents of Google search technology in the late 1990′s, well before this company went public in 2004. It has forever since become a ubiquitous tool for research, and of course, a Wall Street darling. Now this blogger is banging the table and shouting “Pay Attention to Palantir.”

Palantir’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif., house computer monitors galore, not to mention more unusual desk décor, a cot and games. Credit Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Though Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp says he eschews the notion of monetizing this business enterprise via a public stock offering (much to the chagrin of its early and latter stage venture investors), the company’s list of corporate clients now extends across every industry, including the world’s biggest financial companies, manufacturers, and healthcare concerns. For those using Palantir tools to analyze buying decisions, trends and for projecting just about anything a business (or government) would want to forecast with reliability, Palantir software is seemingly light years ahead of Google and the assortment of other tech czars focused on number crunching and data analysis.

For the full story from the NY Times, please click here.

Palantir: Goes Boldy Where Marketers Had Only Dreamed Of