The brand pyramid. This is a great way to think about what your company does and what your company represents. There’s the day-to-day activities at the bottom of the pyramid. These are the core activities of any business. At the very top is the peak experience, or the essence of the brand pyramid.

Once you get to the top of a brand pyramid, you get to the distinguishing factors. The value adds. These would include having the best or fastest widgets. Your “unique’s”. There lies the essence of your brand. This top level should be very succinct.

It should be succinct because this top level represents you. This is what makes your company really unique. Sure, it’s important to have the best guarantee and quality assurance. But knowing your X-factor from the outset is important and that’s why we create brand pyramids for our clients. It represents not only what sets us apart in business, but what emotionally sets us apart, as well.

Lawyers: Attract New Clients by Managing Your Online Listings

The classic 1950’s western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance depicts newly graduated attorney Jimmy Stewart literally hanging out his shingle.  He’s announcing to the small town that he’s ready for business. In 2017, an attorney’s website is their shingle. And that’s a great first start to market a law firm and attract new clients. However, your website is one among thousands of other attorney websites; Jimmy was the only lawyer in town.

How can I get new clients with so much competition?

According to The National Law Review, almost 90% of the people who contact an attorney end up hiring one. And almost 75% of them contact only one attorney prior to securing their services. Oh, and one more thing ─ Ninety-six percent (96%) of people seeking legal counsel use a search engine to find an attorney.

So, the key question is, if I’m one of thousands of tens of thousands of attorneys online, how do I get noticed?  Your firm must do well in local search engine results, i.e. results customized based on the searcher’s location.

Managing Your Online Listings is Critical to Local Search Success

Listings management is a vitally important part of optimizing your website for local search engine results.  But what exactly is listings management?  It’s simply standardizing the way your law firm’s important information is listed on the Internet.  By the way, this means everywhere. Sounds simple enough, right?  Sure, until you consider that there are thousands of online business directories out there.  Yelp, Foursquare, Yellowpages.com, Mapquest, Superpages, Yellowbook.com, Yahoo Local, BBB, etc., etc., etc.

You can get started on listing management by doing these three things:

1. Start with the basics and ensure the accuracy and consistency of your location data. Make sure your firm’s name, address and phone number are all listed consistently throughout your website. It sounds basic, but you might be surprised to learn that over 40% of business listings contain errors in the address. And 85% of customers won’t return to a business if there are mistakes in its listing.
2. Distribute your listings data to all of the four major data providers and aggregators. They are Acxiom, Factual, Infogroup and Neustar/Localeze. Why is this important? Because they are referenced by over 300 online listing directories, which distribute information on businesses throughout the Internet. All are free except for Localeze, which requires a minimal fee. Each are easy to use, and instructions on how to submit a listing are available on their websites. And in case you’re wondering if Google and the other search engines utilize the four (4), aforementioned providers, the answer is You bet! Just remember, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn do not. These must be updated manually.
3. Claim your business listing on Google My Business. When you search for a company on the Internet and you a map that includes a few companies with their websites, phone numbers and online reviews, you are seeing the magic of Google My Business at work. It’s free and an essential part of your listing management. Just go to Google My Business (https://www.google.com/business) and type in your name and address, then select your firm from the search results. You will need to go through Google’s verification process to claim your listing.

There are factors to proper listings management that we don’t have space to go into here. But the tips provided are a good start towards ensuring your current and prospective clients will find you when they search online for a lawyer.

Apologies for the delayed announcement, but Globe Runner has been busy teaching an old dog some new tricks. Back in January of this year, we acquired Dallas branding agency, Black Lab Creative, to help us take our clients’ brands and businesses to the next level.

The two agencies have a long collaborative history as well as a deep respect for the other’s knowledge base and online activation abilities.

Together, our new team members are helping us evolve to meet the changing needs of our clients. The big dogs from Black Lab come armed with a bag of tricks that help hone Globe Runner’s proven digital marketing capabilities. With our talented creative teams working together, we’re emboldened to provide a refined level of service for our clients and partners.

The past six months have been a creative tour de force and we’ve seen both our internal and client successes grow exponentially. The new team has been instrumental in putting our customers’ brands front and center. They’ve helped us focus on our commitment to maintaining creative consistency both online and offline. We’re also unified in our singular ambition: to take your business exactly where you want it to go.

Our companywide goals remain the same and we’re all working together to generate awareness, leads and sales for your company, while delivering results – measurable results, with hard numbers. We’ll continue to work collectively and strategically, using the best parts of our two agencies to form a new and improved full-service marketing agency.

Make no mistake. We’re still the ever-evolving brand developing firm that provides a holistic solution to your marketing needs.

Though we’re continuing with our strong concentration on digital activation, we’re also committed to bolstering the emotional connections your brand has as well as the values that its loyal customers relate to, and the reasons they remain loyal to it.

It is in unison with these brand-centered emotional connections that we build our strategic digital applications. This helps us ensure each online and offline touch point is infused with an impactful and unmistakable creatively consistency.

With our new team in place, our digital and creative abilities are virtually limitless. We’ve strengthened our team, and are excited to continue bringing you a heightened version of the rebranding, SEO, PPC and digital marketing successes you’ve come to know and trust from Globe Runner.

The merger has been demonstrably successful because each new member believes that brands should never stop growing. They know it’s the people who make a brand great and that together, we can create the unthinkable.

In the end, it’s your brand, we’re just fueling it. Let’s strategize together.

Facebook TV and the art of disruption. To me, this is the most fun way to market. To disrupt. To change the game entirely. And Facebook has done that, continues to do that, and announced maybe their most ambitious plan to disrupt yet with the announcement of Facebook TV.

They have said that their OTT, or over-the-top, content platform will be released this year in 2017. Just like Netflix and Hulu, you will be able to enjoy original Facebook content from the comfort of your living room and streaming platform of your choice. Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire TV will be hardware that carry this new app.

Facebook is bypassing traditional broadcast here, and, quite frankly, that’s the direction that TV is going in, in general. Broadcast in its current form is dying. Streaming is the present and the future.

Facebook is disrupting again by transitioning from a social medium to a streaming content provider. There are others in the marketplace taking note of this and doing the same as well. YouTube has revealed their ambitious plans to create premium content with YouTube Red. Before long, these two services will be competing in the same space as Netflix and Hulu.

Another recent example of disruption that worked tremendously was Google’s introduction of the Android. They decided to disrupt by transitioning from a search company to one that made phones and hardware.

I’ll leave you with this. What can you do, right now, that will disrupt your industry, and potentially others?

Like with any of us, as your organization grows and changes, your image needs to transform with it. Refreshing and re-fueling your brand prevents rote sales messages from overshadowing the core values your customers truly connect with.

Looking to recapture that “magic” that made your company so special in the beginning? See how these five rebrand strategies can rocket your business to success.

Why Rebrand?

If you think branding is simply a matter of redoing your logo, you’re missing the point of a rebrand (and maybe the point of your brand entirely). It’s not just about how your company is perceived externally, although that is part of it.

Rebrands are for companies in or approaching a transition. The transit can be brought on by a variety of factors including:

• mergers or acquisition
• introduction of a new product
• entry into a new channel
• employee turnover
• change in ownership
• breakdown in the company’s culture
• realization that the brand has lost its original focus

More than anything, your brand is your identity. It encompasses your company core, hinges largely on values and goes far beyond what it looks and sounds like. This one move can help you move away from doctoring sales and towards creating true customer loyalty.

1. Start by Asking Questions

Have a loose brainstorming session with both seasoned and green members of your team. Those who have been around a while can give insight to the company’s roots. Newer employees may be able to offer a fresh perspective. You can also do a customer poll to get an idea of how folks are (or aren’t) relating to your brand. Listen closely to glean valuable information about their true feelings about your company and see if they can rightfully detect your core values. If not, start there.

2. Understand Where You Began

Your brand is unique, so is its backstory. Take some time to highlight the values that formed the foundation of your company. Then, make sure those are front and center in both your internal and customer-facing communications.

3. Know Where You’re Headed

You likely have a lot of smart people under your employ. Gather insights from all departments to help piece together the current state of your brand verses where you’d like to go. Map out where you are and where you want to be before you start your rebrand.

4. Approach from an Emotive Place

Differentiate your brand by connecting with customers on an emotional level.  When a company and customer share the same values and beliefs, the brand is permanently elevated and differentiated from its competitors.

5. Create a Little Intrigue

Leaving a bit to the imagination has always been an alluring way to capture one’s attention. Give customers just enough to wet their palate, encouraging them to dig a little deeper and unlock the full mystery of your brand. You could start by reeling them in with a catchy tagline or simple, yet tantalizing design. Just make sure you have an equally compelling brand story and dynamic team or product to back it up.

In the end, a rebrand has several moving pieces and parts. These five steps are only the beginning. One thing we always convey to our clients is that it’s very rare for a brand to be completely “broken.” Instead, we operate under the mindset that you can accomplish a lot with a little rediscovery and recognition of how powerful it really is. From there, it’s simply a matter of packaging it accordingly.

If you’d like some help executing an out-of-this-world rebrand, we’d love to partner up and re-fuel that engine.

Call Globe Runner and talk to a member of our creative team at 877.646.6118 or simply enter your information in our contact form and we will help you get launched.

So this one blew me away. Amazon just bought Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. There may have been hints that we could have seen something like this happening. In a previous blog, I talked about the Amazon Go Store in Seattle where you can go grab your food item, like a sandwich or an apple, and walk right out of the store and they will charge your Amazon Prime account.

So my real shock might have just been in the speed in which they pulled the trigger on a deal the size of this one. This acquisition says a lot of things about Amazon’s ambitious plans to me. First off, I see a much deeper connection between e-commerce retail and in-person retail being formed. Also, they will obviously have more physical locations than just the Seattle stores.

But I think the biggest takeaway from this will be the convenience factor. I’ve spoken previously about Amazon being the kings and queens of removing friction from the e-commerce experience. They were the first big platform to introduce the one button check out. They are now primed to introduce the ease of convenience that they brought to e-commerce to the food, and, more specifically, the health food industry.

What has previously been a chore for many, going to the grocery store when you are tired, is now potentially removed. Specifically on the non-perishable item side of things, Amazon and Whole Foods together can absolutely be a force to be reckoned with here. They will have the systems and the infrastructure in place to make one of the very few things Amazon did not have before, fresh groceries, wildly available and can be delivered in a way to preserve freshness and flavor.

I’m super excited by the ramifications of this deal. This could be a major game changer in the e-commerce and grocery delivery spaces.

Can a small business compete with a large conglomerate? I was at a conference recently and I heard an answer from a speaker that I absolutely hated. The answer was “Stay hyper local and try to win your battles accordingly.”

I just don’t accept that. What if you want business from a slightly larger audience? Here’s the trick. Go deeper than any of your larger competitors would ever dare to do. Let’s look at the travel industry, for example. Big brands, like Expedia, are wide. Look at where your margins are the highest and start creating content that is so compelling Expedia and others will never compete with you.

Another thing to remember is that you’re a CEO. You can pick up your phone at any time and reach out to other CEO’s and C-level executives and work on content and SEO deals that can truly benefit both companies.

Don’t ever forget, even if you are a small giant, you are still a giant. There are many things you can do from an SEO strategy standpoint that will get your content out there.

So this is a follow up from a previous blog. In it, I talked about how Snapchat was primed to IPO, and with it, open up the advertising floodgates. If you recall, Facebook and Twitter very much followed the same path. In the early days of Snapchat advertising, you had to create a campaign with a very prolific agency and it could cost you a lot of money.

Now, you have the creative freedom to use the self-serve tools they have rolled out. The standard Snapchat ad will be a vertical video that will run after a user watches a snap (or a few snaps) of the people they are following. After your video ad runs, which can have a maximum duration of 10 seconds, the user will have four potential calls to action.

The first one is to download a native app from the App Store or Google Play. The second one is to read an article that is relevant to the video they just watched. The next option would be a link to your website. And lastly, the fourth option would be for the user to watch a longer form video and have your video ad act as a teaser to the services your company can provide.

Now with the ease of use of the platform there comes some drawbacks from an advertisers point of view. Unlike YouTube, which offers both the ads that do not allow for the first 5 seconds to be skipped and full length ads that can not be skipped, Snapchat offers nothing of the sort. If they are not compelled after the first second or two, they can tap your ad and will skip right past it.

This is all very interesting and we at Globe Runner can’t wait to see how it develops. We are currently not running promoted Snapchat ad campaigns, but we are actively developing one for one of our clients and will keep you posted with results and good data.

Snapchat. It’s the platform that started out misused but now has become arguably one of the most important social media platforms, especially if you want to reach Millennials aged 18 to 35.

They’re there. They’re using it. And they’re loving it. It went so well that it went public this year.

Why do we care? Because it’s time to get serious about a Snapchat strategy that works for your business. If you’re trying to reach that consumer base, Snapchat is the platform to be on.

Why are they there? Think about it for a second. It’s because of the ephemeral nature of the photo and video sharing that Snapchat allows users to do. It’s temporary, in the moment, and exciting.

It’s going to go away. There’s some limit to this photo experience and you need to be there to be involved with it. That’s what Snapchat’s all about.

When we’re thinking about developing a video strategy to go along with Snapchat, think about its use and how people are using it, and why they are there.

I think successful brands will be brands that embrace that concept, that live with it, and that grow with Snapchat.

With its recent IPO, there is a big opportunity for us to advertise. They have opened up the floodgates, allowing everybody to advertise on it just like Facebook did.

We’d love to help you start thinking about what your Snapchat strategy is going to be and how you’re going to capture your brand. We would love to help you share it with a user base who’s truly engaged and excited about being in the moment with you and your brand.

If you’d like help with that, please give us a call. Reach out to us. I look forward to chatting with you about it.

If you have any other questions that you’d like addressed in a future video, please leave them in the comments. I look forward to hearing from you.