Building Your Brand: Why Your Marketing is Step 3

We hear from small business owners every day looking for help with their social media, blog, email campaigns, Google Ads, search engine optimization (SEO) or marketing materials before they have a strong brand and website in place. We could easily fulfill their requests and make a quick buck doing it—but we don’t because it is not in line with their long-term best interests.

You will only see a good return on your marketing investment after you have a strong brand and effective website in place.

That’s right. If you’re looking for sustainable, long-term results from your marketing efforts, you need to first invest in your logo and website. While it is possible to see short-lived “sugar high” sales bumps from clever social media campaigns and mass email blasts, over time you’ll see diminishing returns on your time and money. To build your brand for long-term success, you need to do your logo first, website second and marketing third.

For some context, we recently wrote about the benefits of starting with your logo and the pitfalls of starting with your website when building your brand. If you’ve got a minute, they’re both worth a quick read to help you get the full picture of why the order in which you build your brand can not only determine its success or failure, but can also save (or cost) you thousands of dollars.

Why It’s Best to Save Marketing for Last

Marketing can take on many different forms throughout the life of your business, but one thing is for sure—if done right, it can help expand your reach and grow your business beyond what you ever thought possible. On the flip side, if done wrong, marketing can quickly become a black hole and monthly drain on your cash flow with nothing to show for it.

So what determines if your approach to marketing is “right” or “wrong?” Most people jump straight to asking if they’re using the right marketing tools or if they’re putting the right amount of money behind those tools each month. While strategy and budget are important to your long-term marketing success, what if the most important question was “When should you invest in your marketing?”

TIP: If you’re seeing diminishing returns on your marketing efforts, you may be doing the right things in the wrong order.

The point of marketing is to lead people to your website or your doorstep so they can do business with you. If you don’t have a strong brand and effective website in place, you’re probably making a lot of noise with your marketing but seeing very little return on your investment. Your business is very forgettable without a strong brand in place. To make things worse, your website is a dead-end if it is not designed to quickly tell people who you are, what you do and how they can use your services. It is a waste of your time and money to market a brand-less business or drive people to a dead-end website.

To see sustainable, long-term results from your marketing efforts, you’ll want to first invest in a strong brand so people will recognize you. From there, you’ll want to design your website to have clear user journeys and a strong call to action so people will know exactly where to click and how to use your services.

Once you have a strong brand and effective website in place, congratulations! Now you’re ready to invest in your marketing and anticipate predictable, repeatable, sustainable results. To start the conversation about building your brand the right way, contact us.