Kinesis » branding

Your Company Mission Statement is the Soul of Your Brand

Wendy — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:20:06 +0000

When you are developing a brand for your company, one of the most important considerations is your mission. It is your mission that should drive everything else that your business does. I look at it as the internal anchor for everything else that you do in your business. It’s that important.

Up until this moment, you may not have considered a mission statement to be very important…or relevant to you. Perhaps you are under the impression that mission statements are just for non-profit organizations or Fortune 500 corporations. And let’s face it – you’ve probably read a lot of mission statements that are reeeeeally boring. They don’t get you all fired up.

Unfortunately, in recent years mission statements have become watered down in the corporate world to the point where they are essentially meaningless and have negative connotations. In some business circles, mission statements are received only slightly better than tax increases.

In addition, most marketers don’t talk about your mission because they don’t think it has anything to do with your brand.

But they’re wrong.

Knowing your mission will accelerate your brand like nothing else can.

“I believe that purpose and principle, clearly understood and articulated, and commonly shared, are the genetic code of any healthy organization. To the degree that you hold purpose and principles in common among you, you can dispense with command and control. People will know how to behave in accordance with them, and they’ll do it in thousands of unimaginable, creative ways. The organization will become a vital, living set of beliefs.” –Dee Hock

Why You Should Have a Strong Mission Statement

Kinesis approaches branding as a process (not a project) – one that has deep roots inside each company’s mission. A well-crafted mission statement can provide the focus and motivation you need to take your business to the next level. These are the values that drive your business personality, customer service, and marketing messages. In fact, your mission is the soul of your brand. It is your Why. It is the very reason that your company does what it does.

Your mission is about getting really clear and staying really focused. It provides your company with direction. It helps you find the right customers…your most profitable customers. I call this your internal branding. Your mission is something that you should write and post in places where every single member of your staff can see it. As the leader of your company, look at your mission often during the day. Remind yourself of it. Then live it and breathe it. Every. single. day.

Your mission statement should be the driving force behind everything that your team does within your company, and externally with prospects, customers, vendors, and associates. It also shapes your internal corporate culture.

One of the reasons your team needs this anchor is to stay on track. It is so easy for business professionals to get bogged down in the day-to-day of our business lives. We get our to-do list tunnel vision and lose sight of the big vision. Your mission statement always reminds each person in your company of your overarching raison d’etre…where you are going…what you are doing…and why you are doing it.

How to Develop Your Mission Statement

To develop your mission, here are some questions to ask:

What do we do?
For whom do we do it?
Why do we serve our clients in the way that we do?
How do we serve our clients in the way that we do?
Why are we in this industry?
Why did we start this business?
What image of our business do we want to convey?

When writing your mission statement, use vibrant, exciting words. Get really clear about your passion and values for operating your unique business. Create dynamic, visual images and inspire action. Describe your purpose using unusual, colorful verbs and adjectives to spice up your statements. Drop in words like “passion,” “sizzle,” “outrageous,” “fun,” and “marvel” to add zest. Keep your mission statement fairly short and make sure that it feels really good when you read it and say it. It captures, in a few succinct sentences, the essence of your business’s goals and the philosophies underlying them. It signals what your business is all about to your customers, employees, suppliers and the community.

And, woweeee!

When you live your mission through your business brand, then amazing, phenomenal things start to happen. Your perfect, dream clients are drawn to you. People get really excited about what you are doing. They spread the word to their friends, they sign up for your services, they give you great testimonials. You get more customers, make more revenue, and your business grows with ease. And best of all – your team is more creative and having more fun than ever before because everyone is in absolute alignment with your Why.

Examples of Mission Statements

Let’s look at some phenomenal examples of other brands and their mission…their “reason for being.” This should help you get some ideas for developing your own.

Nike: To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.

Starbucks: To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.

Chevron: To be the global energy company most admired for its people, partnership, and performance.

Amazon: To be the most customer-centric company in the world, where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

Intel: Delight our customers, employees, and shareholders by relentlessly delivering the platform and technology advancements that become essential to the way we work and live.

Ebay: Provide a global trading platform where practically anyone can trade practically anything.

Here is my challenge to you and your company: Write a mission statement with a goal that’s an action, not a sentiment. Make it quantifiable, not nebulous. If you have an old wonky mission statement that sounds like a corporate Hallmark Card (you know what I’m talking about), then take it and rip it to shreds. Then reflect on your true passions and values, and write a mission statement using the guidelines above that reflects the difference your business will make in the world.

How to Write a Value Proposition for Your Company

Wendy — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:32:27 +0000

Why should your ideal customer purchase from you rather than anybody else?

If you can answer this question in a sentence, then you have a strong unique value proposition. A strong and differentiated value proposition can go a long way to position your business to succeed in your target market. It is the promise of your brand.

Without exception, Kinesis clients have a company that focuses on delivering incredible value to their customers. Ironically, many of these same clients came to us without a clearly-defined value proposition – while they provide high value, they did not have a concise way of describing the value. Many businesses face the same problem of conveying vague messages about their products and services. I’m going to help to make sure you aren’t in this situation.

What is a Value Proposition?

Let’s start by making sure we are all on the same page: A strong value proposition speaks directly to your target audience and it tells them exactly why they should purchase your products and services (and in the case of non-profits, it’s why your donors should support your organization, members should join your programs, etc.). A value proposition is a clear statement of the concrete results a customer will get from purchasing and using your products and/or services.

A value proposition is a short statement that tells your prospect why they should buy from your company. It is focused on outcomes. Your value proposition distills all the complexity of the value you provide into an easy-to-remember phrase that your client can easily grasp and remember. This helps spread word-of-mouth marketing and it differentiates you from the competition. Keep in mind that your value proposition should identify and remedy an unmet need that your customers face. It should relieve their pain.

Regardless of the size of your business or the type of industry you are in, your company should have a value proposition. To help you, here are some guidelines to follow in creating one for your business. A strong value proposition does the following:

Creates interest, so that your prospects ask questions and want to learn more. Your value proposition opens the door so that someone might be willing to meet with you instead of blowing you off when you call or mail them for the first time
Differentiates your offer from your competitors’ offers and creates a strong differential between you and your competitors
Increases the quantity and quality of your sales leads and makes conversion to a customer much easier
Wins your business greater market share in your targeted segments
Aligns your business operations more closely to customer needs
Focuses on your customers’ point of view.
Include demonstrated results that will catch the attention of decision-makers–results like increased revenues, decreased costs, improved operational efficiency, and faster times.

Examples of Strong Value Propositions

Business Consultant: Our clients grow their business typically by a minimum of 30-50% over the year while cutting costs by 35%.

Hubspot: B2B companies recognized a 61% lower cost per lead and increased their organic traffic and lead conversions by an average magnitude of six-fold in 6 months.

Sales Trainer: I help salespeople crack into corporate accounts, speed up their sales cycle and win big contracts. One of my recent clients won a verbal commitment for $5M in business in just 90 days.

Internet Marketing Company: Our products help people leverage the internet to triple their market reach and cut marketing costs in half when launching new products.

Are you starting to get a feel for a strong value proposition?

How Do I Write My Value Proposition?

Crafting a value proposition requires insight on what is unique about your company and your products/services. Your existing customers are your best resource to learn the value you offer. Your goal is to learn how your customers define value – not you. Call or visit some of your customers who started using your product or service in the past 6-12 months. They remember what things were like BEFORE they started working with your company so they can most readily tell you the value of your offering. Tell them you need help understanding the real value of your offering and that you’d like a chance to learn their perspective. Most people will be more than happy to oblige.

Do you have a value proposition yet? If you do, how strong is it? Have you asked your customers about the value you bring to them? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments section below.

10 Ways to Improve Your Website to Attract More Business

Wendy — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:45:53 +0000

When clients come to Kinesis and ask us to design a website for their company, they often don’t know of all of the exciting ways to leverage their website to capture leads, build customer loyalty, and differentiate their company from the competition.

So, to help give you ideas, here is a list of the top 10 things you can do to improve your website:

1. Calls to Action: On every page of your website, include a call to action. This is a verb that tells your visitors what to do next. People don’t have time to search around your site, so make it as easy as possible for them to do business with your company. When I write website content for clients, here are some I use frequently: Click here to…, Call us today to…, Subscribe now, Visit here to…, Contact us to…, E-mail us to…, and so on.

2. Social media widgets: If you are using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other social media platforms, then make sure you tell people about it! Include widgets on your site that tell your website visitors the other places on the website that they can connect with you. If you have key individuals in your company that have a social media presence, include widgets for them as well on their bio page.

3. Clickable graphics: Graphics are interesting and they catch people’s attention. If there is a service or product that you want to highlight, use a picture or illustration to highlight it. Make it clickable so that people can navigate to the page that will tell them more.

4. Testimonials: There is nothing more powerful than social proof. When other people explain how you have helped them solve problems, it has a very powerful impact on prospects. I recommend creating a separate page for testimonials – you can also weave them throughout your site. Include the person’s name and company to add credibility. Number are powerful, so provide as much quantifiable data as possible. For example: “ABC company saved us $25,000 in taxes last year,” or “XYZ firm helped us increase our efficiency by 34%.”

5. Capture names: People are easily distracted – especially when they are using the Internet. So, while they may like what you have to offer when they land on your site, they may get a phone call or have to check e-mail or go to their Facebook page to upload a picture. Click! And they leave your site and forget about your company. That is why you should have a way to capture the names and e-mail addresses of your visitors. Offer them something of value in return such as a white paper, a report, or a tip sheet. And, along with this, you can subscribe them to your newsletter or ezine. You now have a qualified lead who you can market to over time until they are ready to buy.

6. Optimize your website (SEO): Paying to have your website optimized for search engines (SEO) will give you one of the best returns on investment. This process involves matching specific industry key words with your website and working them into your Title tags and content. Done correctly, SEO will allow your website to rank well for those keywords, helping people to find your company when they are using search engines. You can see my post, Using SEO to Get High Rankings for more details.

7. Contact info: Make it super easy for people to get in touch with you. People typically scan web pages – they don’t read them word for word. So make sure you have your contact info in the navigation and on every single page (and/or in the header).

8. Instructions: You website visitor usually won’t understand your business like you do. And they may not be that accustomed to using the Internet. So, if you want them to take a complex action, give them explicit instructions. It may not be as easy as you think for them to open a PDF or download a report or fill out a contact form. So, make it easy for them by providing the step-by-step how-to.

9. Make content scannable: People scan websites to find specific content. Break up blocks of text with headlines, subheads, and bullet points so that it’s easier for the average Internet user to read quickly down the page and find what they want.

10. Benefits: Most of the things that you are think are interesting and important about your company are NOT of interest to your web visitors. They are on your website to solve a problem. That is it. And, they want to know how you can solve it. So, tell them. Describe what it is that you will do for them.

If you do these 10 things to your website, you will be ahead of at least 75% of your competitors. And here is a bonus tip: make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your site before you begin implementing these changes. Then you can see what effect these improvements have on your metrics. Do you have any more tips? Post them in the comments section below!

Want to Know the ROI of Social Media?

Wendy — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:57:06 +0000

Kinesis clients are asking the big questions:

“What is the ROI of Social Media?

and

“How do I measure the ROI of social media?”

And these are great questions that companies should be asking.

Unfortunately, there is no one answer. While we can certainly obtain some metrics through tools like Twitter Search and Google Analytics, some of social media is simply about building goodwill and nurturing relationships. Like the good old-fashioned golf game and the “Let’s Do Lunch” strategy, people like connecting with people.

That said, to start determining your ROI on social media, you must know your baseline and define your goals. (from Mashable): “As a standard formula, ROI is pretty basic, ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where X is your final value and Y is your starting value. In other words, if you invest $5 and get back $20, your ROI is (20 – 5) / 5 = 3 times your initial investment. In the financial sense, ROI is measured purely in the context of dollars and cents, however, the principles can really apply to any type of investment — monetary or not.”

“Having concrete goals and concrete baselines is crucial to calculating your return on investment. So before you set out to measure and monitor your social media returns, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to accomplish.”

“Once you have your goals defined, you need to gauge the baseline for your levels before starting or changing your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to increase social media mentions of your company, in order to measure the ROI of any actions taken toward that goal, you need to know where you stand now. You can’t evaluate the ROI accurately without a baseline.”

“Although ROI ≠ metrics, traditional web metrics like traffic counts, number of comments, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, etc. are an important component when calculating your ROI.”

“The trick is to not rely solely on the numbers, but on what the numbers end up leading to. For instance, does your increase in website visitors correlate with higher sales? Are people that find your website from Twitter or Facebook then clicking on your product pages or going to the e-Commerce section of your site? That’s the sort of data you want to be able to look for.”

Erik Qualman of Socialnomics has put together another fabulous video that breaks down the staggering numbers of social media into an absorbent format. (See our post, The Social Media Revolution, for his first video.)

Social Media ROI

Click here to view the embedded video.

Erik writes,

While the video uses familiar nomenclature like ROI, many pieces of social media behave so differently than anything we have ever seen, that I prefer to use “What does or will success look like?” rather than “What’s the ROI?” After all, why are we trying to measure social media like a traditional channel? Social media touches every facet of business and it should be viewed more as an extension of good business ethics. Which, if done properly, will harvest sales down the line.

Social Media ROI Statistics

Here are some key statistics pulled from the ROI of Social Media Video:

1. Over 300,000 businesses have a presence on Facebook and roughly a 1/3 of these are small businesses.

2. Gary Vaynerchuk grew his family business from $4 million to $50 million using social media.

3. Vaynerchuk found first hand that $15,000 in Direct Mail = 200 new customers, $7,500 Billboard = 300 new customers, $0 Twitter = 1,800 new customers.

4. Lenovo was able to achieve cost savings by a 20% reduction in call center activity as customers go to community website for answers.

5. Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incented users to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper. The estimated investment for this program was less than $50,000 yet they received 32 million media impressions which roughly estimated equals greater than $400,000 in press/media value. Which to put in context is somewhat like reaching the entire populations of 19 states (understanding this doesn’t account for unique vs. repeat visitors, etc.)

6. BlendTec increased its sales 5x by running the often humorous “Will it Blend” Videos on YouTube blending everything from an iPhone to a sneaker.

7. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter.

8. Naked Pizza, a New Orleans Pizzeria that specializes in healthy pies, set a one day sales record using social media. In fact 68% of their sales came from people “calling in from Twitter.” And 85% of their new customers were from Twitter. So, yes, social media does work for small businesses.

9. Tweets for a Cause sent out a tweet from Atlanta to encourage support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure. As a result of retweets, the Atlanta Chapter site received 11,000 visitors in 24 hours as a result of this initiative by ResponseMine Interactive.

10. Intuit introduced “Live Community” into their TurboTax® products 2 years ago. Due in part to the resulting word-of-mouth, they have seen unit sales increase +30% each year and have now integrated “Live Community” into their other products like QuickBooks, Quicken, etc.

11. Software company Genius.com reports that 24% of its social media leads convert to sales opportunities.

12. During Barack Obama’s rise to the White House, he garnered 5 million fans on social media and 5.4 million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button. Most importantly this resulted in three million online donors contributing $500 million in fundraising. An astounding 92% of the donations were in increments of less than $100.

13. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center witnessed a 9.5% increase in registrations by using social media.

14. Web host provider Moonfruit more than recouped its $15,000 social media investment as their Website Traffic soared +300% while correspondingly sales increased +20%.

15. eBay found that participants in online communities spend 54% more money.

16. 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40% because: a) Low Cost Marketing b) Getting Traction c) We Have To Do It.

Supporting articles:

Lee Oden, “Book Review: Crush It by Gary Vaynerchuk,” Online Marketing Blog

Jan M. Rosen, “Be It Twittering or Blogging, It’s All About Marketing,” New York Times, 3/11/2009

Jon Swartz, “More marketers use social networking to reach customers,” USA Today, 8/28/09

Let’s talk about your company’s social media strategy. Small investments in Internet Marketing lead to big ROI (as you can see): 503-922-2289

Branding Improvements?

Shawn — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:42:45 +0000

A colleague sent me a link to a great site: BRAND NEW. It’s a comprehensive review of corporate “re-brands.” In other words, when companies try to refresh their image.

What I like about the site is the side-by-side comparison of the “before” and “after.” In many cases, you see vast improvements, like with the example below:

However, what’s MORE fun is to watch the “regressive” designs. That is, brands that look worse than before, like this:

Words can’t really describe how BAD this new design is, but the blog commentators do a pretty good job of lampooning the effort.