To Create an Effective Strategy, Work Backwards

lytron team

lytron team

Have you ever heard the term “reverse engineering”? It refers to the process of figuring out how something works in order to replicate it for yourself.

For example, let’s say Ford wants to design an electric vehicle that is comparable to the popular Tesla EV sedan. Their engineers might begin by examining a Tesla and discovering what makes it so appealing to buyers, then designing their own unique vehicle based on their findings.

In a weird way, internet marketing works the same way. If you want a successful brand, product campaign, or another online outcome, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, find something that works and then use it as a model for yoiur own strategy.

Work Backwards

It helps to work backward. What is the outcome you want? It could be more site visits, a larger customer base, more customer loyalty, or all of the above. The next step is to find an existing company that already has what you want. It could be in your industry or in a line of business completely unrelated to what you do.

Once you find a successful company that is getting the kind of results you want, reverse engineer their success to understand how they got there. Then all you need to do is replicate those steps by applying them to your business, making the necessary adjustments along the way, and you can achieve your goal relatively quickly.

Nothing New Under the Sun

Businesses model their success on other companies’ success all the time. It offers a fast track to success by building on what others already have done.

In the Bible, it says, “There is nothing new under the sun.” So even in the earliest times, people understood the benefits of picking the best elements of other people’s work and applying them to their own. Reverse engineering the successful results of an existing business offers a great starting point for your own campaigns.

 

Critical Measures of Success for Websites

wisefundo 1

wisefundo 1

Sometimes the way to measure the success of a website is simple: The visitor takes the desired action, such as clicking through to another page, signing up for a mailing list, or buying a particular product or service.

But for other web pages, success can be more esoteric. So how can you tell whether your website has achieved its objective when there is no obvious desired action? The answer is threefold: Time spent, visitor engagement, and sharing.

Time Spent

The amount of time the average visitor spends on your pages is a more critical engagement measurement than the number of visitors. That’s because many people are going to find your web pages by mistake, will click off immediately after landing there or will be disappointed by your content.

But when the average time visitors spend on your pages is higher, it shows they have found something of value, whether it’s your content, your images, or simply your brand.

Visitor Engagement

Another critical measurement is visitor engagement. Once people find your web pages, what do they do there? Do they spend time reading your text, looking at your images, scrolling through your products, or some other desired action?

Successful websites offer easy, inviting visitor engagement opportunities so people spend more time on the page, develop positive feelings about the brand, and come away with a desire for further engagement.

Sharing

The ultimate measurement tool is the number of shares you get from your web pages. Companies spend a lot of time and energy encouraging people to share their pages with their family, friends, and most importantly their social media contacts.

The reason for this is obvious: When people share your pages, they can go exponentially viral. Making it easy for people to share links to your page to their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media accounts is essential for your business’s success.

Real World Strategies for Building Your Reputation

lytron consulting agency

lytron consulting agency

There are lots of ways Lytron Strategic can help build your reputation online. But there also are many things you can do in the real world to make yourself and your business more well known in your community.

Building your real-world reputation is just as important as promoting your brand online. While a lot of business today is done through the internet, people still value genuine face-to-face connections with real people — especially in service industries like medicine, dentistry, construction, and cleaning.

Raising Your Profile

People will trust you more if you are a respected member of your community. And you are judged by the company you keep. Introduce yourself to civic leaders and join community organizations like your local Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club.

If practical, join the local country club or other private clubs where the most influential people in your local area congregate. Develop relationships with important people, especially those within your industry. They may be able to offer practical advice or even send business your way.

Getting to Know You

You have expertise in your industry so make the most of it by promoting it to local media. Send out introductions to local newspaper editors, radio station managers, and television news producers offering your services in stories or segments related to your field. The more you can put your voice and face out in the public eye, the more your customers and clients will trust you. Plus, being well known is good for business.

Consider writing a regular newspaper column or blog related to your field. Introduce yourself to the dean of your local college or university and offer your services as a guest lecturer.

Finally, keep track of all the public appearances, publications, and other achievements you collect so that you can promote them on your social media.

What Do People Really Think about Your Business?

lovemarble 1

lovemarble 1

It’s often hard for business owners to understand how their companies are actually perceived by their customers and people in general.

There’s a kind of near-sightedness that comes with sitting in the driver’s seat. You are simply too close to your operations to have the kind of unbiased, non-emotional viewpoint of your brand. Fortunately, that’s where brand research comes into play.

Brand Research

As one of the leading brand consultants in South Florida. Lytron Strategic focuses on brand research as the starting point for collaborating with any new client. Not until you can understand how people truly perceive your company — if they are aware of it all – can you make decisions that strengthen the emotional bonds necessary to develop long-term, profitable customer relationships.

Our research team can quickly and accurately assess the state of your brand in the marketplace right now: What share of potential customers are aware of your business? What kind of emotions do they associate with it? How likely are they to engage with your products or services? What brand loyalty do they have?

Only when you understand where you have been can you accurately plan a path to where you want to go. Brand research is the first step in understanding your brand so that you can reinvent it the way you want it to be.

Lytron Strategic

From there, Lytron Strategic can collaborate with you to build on the positive things people think about your business and convert any negative connotations into positive ones. With your direction, we can then implement highly-effective, transformative branding initiatives that will build loyalty, expand market share, and create long-term customers who will be ambassadors for your brand to their family, friends, and social media contacts.

The way people feel about your brand today doesn’t have to be the way they feel about it tomorrow. With the help of Lytron Strategic, you can reinvent your brand any way you want to.

Engagement Should Be the Top Priority

asconnect 1

asconnect 1

For business websites, there’s something that is more important than great design, better than high search engine rankings, and more profitable than instinctive site navigation.

The most important objective for any business website is visitor engagement. Why? Because if you can engage people in interesting and positive ways, they will stay longer, come back more often, and keep spending more money.

Engaging Visitors

The challenge of any web page designer is to find ways to keep people engaged with the website once they arrive there. The key metrics in visitor engagement are the amount of time people spend on the pages, how many times they interact with the content, and whether or not they take the desired action built into the page design, such as joining an email list or actually buying a product or service.

High engagement levels do more than just boost your sales. They also build your brand and help create long-term loyalty with customers. And that’s more essential to your business’s success than simply a one-time sale. When you can get people to buy into your brand, you can create customers for life, not to mention ambassadors for your brand to other people including their social media contacts.

Lytron Strategic

At Lytron, we specialize in creating websites that engage visitors from the moment they arrive on your business’s web page. Our expert brand specialists use the latest design features to incorporate your brand, your business’s values, and even your personality into your pages in appealing and interactive ways. From small businesses to big corporations, web page engagement is the gold standard in today’s digital business environment.

The best web pages are as engaging as they are informative. With Lytron on your side, you can enjoy enhanced brand loyalty, longer page visits, and a bigger bottom line.

When It Comes to Branding, It’s Okay to Copy Success

archetypes site 1

archetypes site 1

In school, we are told that it’s wrong to look at another student’s paper when taking a test. But in business, copying the best ideas of other businesses and making them your own isn’t just acceptable, it’s smart business.

When developing a brand for a new company, one of the first questions we ask is, “What companies are the most appealing to you?” The answers often determine which direction we proceed in developing a branding strategy for that business.

Branding Archetypes

The business you model your branding after doesn’t necessarily have to be in your industry or a direct competitor. In fact, it’s better if it isn’t because similar brands in the same marketplace can be confusing to consumers.

Instead, think about companies outside of your line of business that you like. For example, you may own a florist shop but like the way Coca-Cola promotes itself in the marketing world. Or you could have a real estate company but are drawn to the branding Levi’s uses to attract customers.

What you are attracted to isn’t so much the specific marketing message of that company as much as it is the archetype upon which it is built. And you can use that same branding archetype as a framework for building your business’s brand.

Unique yet Familiar

Successful brands offer a unique message yet evoke feelings that are familiar to prospective customers. The branding archetype you choose for your business determines what those feelings will be when people encounter your brand.

For example, if you want people to have a sense of belonging, Lytron Strategic can use The Everyman — used by companies like Ikea — as the archetype starting point for your business’s unique yet familiar branding. Alternatively, if you are attracted to companies like Nike that use the Hero archetype, we can start there.

In business, everything we do is built upon all the things that came before. Understanding what archetypes appeal to you is the starting point for developing your business’s unique and inspiring brand.

What’s Your Story?

Have you run out of ideas for promoting your business? We have one and it’s a good one: A lot of small businesses struggle to find new ways to make genuine connections with customers when they already have everything they need all along in their origin story.

Screenwriters, authors, and especially comic book writers all know that the origin story is one of the fastest, easiest, and most effective methods for engaging readers in meaningful ways. News flash: It is equally effective for small businesses as well!

Your Origin Story

Why did you start your business? How did it happen? What were some of the challenges you encountered along the way?  The answers to all of these questions hold the ingredients to your origin story. Once you start reminiscing about the earliest days of your business, your initial motivations, and our biggest obstacles, the story practically writes itself.

People are interested in origins. They are drawn to adventure. They love a good story about humble beginnings where the protagonist faces and overcomes huge hurdles to achieve their dream. Sound familiar? Your business’s origin story can serve as the focus of your next digital marketing campaign, enticing new customers and building loyalty bonds with existing ones.

Let’s Write Your Story Together

It’s your story. Lytron Strategic can simply help you tell it better. And then we will amplify it so that your story can be shared with hundreds, even thousands, of prospective customers right in your local area. Once people learn how and why you launched your business, they will have an instant attachment to your brand. And they will clamor for the products and services you provide.

It’s an old story but a good one. Share your origin story as part of your marketing and spread the love for your business and your brand.

People Want Reassurance Before Giving Personal Information

expert analysis 2

expert analysis 3

We have all heard horror stories about people who have had their identities stolen, their computers hacked, or their bank accounts emptied by unscrupulous thieves. As a result, we are all extra cautious when interacting online, especially with new businesses.

Yet it’s important for small businesses to collect information about new customers so they can tailor future marketing campaigns to individual preferences. Knowing things like people’s names, addresses, and even their birthday and buying habits is invaluable for your business’s ongoing relationship with that customer.

That’s why it’s critically important that you build trust with your site visitors by prominently including the following phrase: “We will never share your personal information with anybody else.”

Trust Bonds

Your customers want to feel as if they can trust your business. The fact that they have landed on your web page in the first place indicates that they have at least a passing interest in the types of products or services your business offers. To click through to the “Buy” action, they need to feel as if they can rely on your business’s reputation for fairness, honesty, and transparency.

As such, they need to know that if they give you something of value — in this case, their personal information — you are going to treat it with the respect that it deserves. They want to feel as if they can rely on you not to sell it to a third party or use it for anything other than to do business with them. That’s why it’s so important to reassure your site visitors that you will treat their personal data with integrity, responsibility, and honesty.

Placement

Where to include this all-important phrase will depend on the overall design of your specific web page. But typically it should be prominently featured somewhere near the spaces allocated for collecting personal information.

At Lytron Strategic, we know how to build websites that build trust with your customers.

 

 

Trademark, Logo, and Brand: What’s the Difference?

The nomenclature surrounding business marketing is often confusing to newcomers. A business can have a logo. It can have a trademark. And it can have a brand. But what’s the difference between the three?

For starters, the brand is by far the most important because it incorporates the other to and much more. Your business’s “brand” is essentially the way people perceive your business. In other words, it’s the way people think about your business, especially in relation to your competitors. And it’s defined by both the products and services you offer and the way you offer and present them.

What’s a Logo?

A logo is simply an image or emblem that represents your brand. For Apple, for example, their logo is the symbol of an apple with a bite taken out of it. When consumers see this logo, they instantly recognize it and associate it with Apple’s products, services, and overall brand.

Logos often are the company’s name, frequently presented in stylized script. For example, the name Ford written in cursive in white against a blue background and surrounded by an oval is the global logo for the world’s biggest carmaker that is instantly recognizable by just about anybody around the world.

Trademarks?

A trademark can be any word, phrase, symbol, design, or combination of these things that identifies your business or the products or services you offer. In the US and other countries, trademarks are registered with a central government bureau that grants your business an exclusive license to use your trademark in conjunction with your company.

Trademarks can be logos, company names, or something else altogether. For example, the phrase “finger-lickin’ good” is a trademark for Kentucky Fried Chicken. No other company can use that phrase to promote or sell their chicken without getting into legal conflict with the trademark office.

Logos also can be trademarks. YouTube’s distinctive logo — which features the word “Tube” inside a television-shaped square — also is a trademark and also represents the video streamer’s brand.