PIGS GORGE CONTENT COMPANY
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Practical, affordable solutions to improve your business's online (and offline) presence.
All Your Cows Should Have the Same Brand
Mark your media herd with consistent branding.
There are many options for promoting your business. Digital marketing, traditional marketing, signage, flailing inflatable monstrosities, even good old word-of-mouth. With the exception of personal referrals from happy customers, which have definitely been the most effective form of promotion since the first business (Sharp Rocks ‘R Us) opened, you control which of those options you use, and how. You probably have a website. You might have print, radio or TV advertising. You could use mass mail (or email) or social media. Each has its own advantages, audience and purpose. They are not naturally inclined to work together. Without careful supervision, they will wander off independently and do their own thing, regardless of what everyone else is up to. If you want to maintain control of your unruly promotional assets, and keep them all moving in the same direction, you have to maintain consistent branding.
Branding originated, of course, with cattle ranchers who wanted to indicate which cows were theirs. They certainly understood the value of consistent branding. If they were branding their cattle willy-nilly, with whatever random letters and designs popped into their head, they were defeating the purpose. It was all about identity. Other people had to identify their brand, and associate it with them. Unless they were just trying to express themselves artistically, in which case cattle ranching was a poor career choice.
Branding has evolved into a marketing practice which practically no one understands. Today, a brand is “intangible”. It’s a “feeling”. It’s voodoo, is what it is. Your brand is now widely defined as the perception that people have of your product or business. People being the subjective, fickle creatures they are, that perception will vary from person to person, and even change over time. Any attempt to establish a “brand”, then, would seem futile. But if we think of your brand as something different, as the personality of your business, we have something to work with. After all, it’s your personality that drives people’s perception of you. Your voice, your tone, your attitude, your character. And the same applies to your business. Your voice can be authoritative or conversational. Your tone can be serious or playful. Your attitude can be self-deprecating or hyperbolically self-aggrandizing. Most often, your business’s brand — its personality — will necessarily be a reflection of your own, because you probably don’t want to be associated with a business you don’t like. Your own character traits will slip in there, whether you want them to or not, simply through the media and messages you choose. So it can be difficult to examine your brand, and articulate its personality, because there is an element of self-discovery attached to the process. Nevertheless, defining your brand’s identity is crucial. And keeping it consistent across and within your marketing platforms is equally important. Otherwise, to return to our cattle analogy, no one will know which cows are yours.
Whether you’re traditional or progressive, respectful or irreverent, conventional or completely unique, there are three things you must be: honest, authentic, and consistent. Being honest and authentic is easy. Just don’t pretend to be something you’re not. You might pull it off for a while, but customers will eventually realize that your brackish, if well-packaged, pond water is less miracle health supplement and more intestinal parasite roulette.
A good way to be consistent is to have one source for all your marketing content. An agency, say, with an army of designers, writers, planners, media managers and various directors to keep them all on the mark. Sound expensive? It is. The next best thing is to hire a qualified content creator and marketer to build a coherent brand foundation — your website content and existing ad copy is a good place to start. After that, it’s relatively easy for other marketing outlets — multimedia producers, graphic designers, social media managers, event planners — to build on that foundation. They’re professionals, and they know how to follow a clearly marked trail. If you have any doubts, and you’ve hired the right content creator, you can always return to them to assess any future campaign and advise you on its effectiveness and branding consistency. The right content creator can, so to speak, keep the herd moving in the right general direction. If we may be so bold, we recommend us.
Don’t take our word for it. Any claim we make is liable to be self-serving horsecrap. Here’s one of our many (one) happy customers, on his experience with Pigs Gorge Content Company:
We were miles ahead from where we were the first week Jack was involved. And it got better from there.
Now we have access and control of a website we can be proud of, search engine results that raise our profile, a coordinated radio campaign, and a brand strategy that ties everything together. And Jack is always there when we need him – for seasonal updates and any problems as they arise. It’s a big part of our business we finally don’t have to worry about anymore, and that means more time to serve our customers and build our business.
