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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Creating the most effective branding for your small business is just the beginning. The next step is managing your brand so that it:

1.) Reaches target customers, and

2.) Raises public awareness about your business.

Branding is not something you do once and then forget about it. Small business owners need to develop and distribute their brands weekly, daily, even hourly. So it’s a good idea to have a point person who can take responsibility for the day-to-day management of your branding strategy (more on this in a moment).

A Brand Culture

Branding begins with the people who work most closely with your business: Your employees. The approach and attitude your workforce has on your brand have a powerful effect on how people outside of your business think about it. When your workers understand and buy into what your brand represents, their actions will demonstrate your brand culture to customers, clients, vendors, even visitors.

As your brand leader, it’s crucial that you continually reinforce your branding message to your employees so they understand why your brand is important. For example, let people within your organization understand that breaking a promise to a customer even once can be enough to damage your brand, your business, and the trust you all have built so hard to develop with customers and the public.

Spreading the Message

When your employees are on board, it’s time to spread the word about your branding to the outside world. This will take place on every level, from daily in-person and online interactions to advertising to social media marketing and beyond.

The key to success is to develop a clear, concise, and consistent brand message then continually reinforcing that brand strategy both internally and eternally. That’s a lot of work and you likely will be busy running your business.

That’s why Lytron Design can handle brand management for your business. Our expert branding strategists can not only help you develop your best brand message, but also manage it so that it works toward the success of your business.

It’s possible to be too close to your brand. No, in fact, it’s commonplace for companies to take their branding for granted and be blind to how people on the outside actually view their business.

Business owners “touch” their products, services, marketing, and social media all day every day. But ironically, all that focus can create a kind of near-sightedness that allows them to lose touch with the reality of actual perspective.

In other words: Your clients and customers probably won’t see your brand the way you think they do. 

Brand Consulting

Brand consulting is a fast-growing segment of business today that offers an experienced outside perspective into the actual look and feel of your business. Brand consultants are experienced at identifying brand vulnerabilities and offering an honest assessment of how people see your business without the myopia of being too close to it.

At Lytron Design, we offer brand consulting services that give business owners analysis, solutions, and effective marketing strategies that help businesses avoid the pitfalls of overfamiliarity.

We can give your business a clear-sighted analysis from the perspective of an impartial outsider and help you get a clearer picture of how your customers, your competitors, and your target audiences actually view your business. Then we give you the tools to improve your business brand, enhance your reputation within your industry, and expand your market share.

Essential to Success

Nobody knows your business better than you. But working so closely to it on an everyday basis, you may not have the same perspective as people on the outside.

The brand consultants at Lytron Design apply successful, proven strategies to give business owners a genuine, clear understanding of how people actually perceive their business. Then we collaborate with you to develop effective strategies that align your vision of the way you want people to see your business, your services, and your products with the reality of the marketplace.

Branding is one of the most important elements of any enterprise. People aren’t going to trust your business, your products, your services, or you unless they feel comfortable and familiar with your brand.

Yet branding typically falls low on the priority list of many business owners. Most unsuccessful business owners believe people will simply find their business organically or be attracted to their brand just because they are good people.

But while you may be a nice person, have great products and services, and even offer an appealing and innovative business model, that’s not enough in today’s busi9ness environment unless you also have an effective, well-planned brand strategy.

Big or Small Businesses

The size of your business doesn’t matter. Every enterprise — from a one-person startup to a massive multinational conglomerate — needs to have a brand strategy to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. Branding is the foundation for every marketing platform, from word of mouth to social media to paid print, broadcast, or display advertising.

Consistent, effective branding lets people feel familiar with your business. It helps establish and solidify your reputation before customers know anything else about your business. And it’s what causes them to seek out the products and services you offer and keep coming back again and again.

Brand Management

Yet crafting an effective brand is only the first piece of the puzzle. Once your brand is visible, it’s equally important to continually manage and expand your brand image so that you can build market share, increase return customers, and keep your business growing.

Lytron Design specializes in both brand strategy and brand management. We can help you define your business’s personality in the minds of your targeted customers, then craft a successful brand management strategy that keeps pushing the outer limits of your brand expansion further and further.

When it comes to branding, Lytron Design has the answers you need to successfully influence and promote positive customer interactions.

In most business schools, one of the first things you learn is that successful brands stand out from the competition. Maybe they offer unique innovation, such as Apple. Or perhaps they have valuable safety features, such as Volvo. Or perhaps they are reliable and familiar, such as McDonald’s.

All of these three elements are known as “brand differentiators” and when you focus on them, you can set your brand and your business head and shoulders above the competition.

Uniqueness

What sets your brand apart from your competitors? Are the products or services you offer different than everybody else’s? If so, you already have the first brand differentiator: Uniqueness.

When people look for the types of products or services you offer, yours need to stand out. If you offer the exact same products or similar services as everybody else, there’s no motivation for people to choose you over your competitors. Find the one thing that makes your brand unique and focus on it so you can explain to potential clients or customers what it is that makes you different and better than everybody else in the marketplace.

Value

The second brand differentiator is value. The uniqueness you promote should be quantifiable to people in some specific way.

That could mean price, but it also could mean time value, convenience, safety, or any significant value difference that distinguishes your brand from all the others.

Dependability

People need to know that your products or services are reliable, dependable, and consistent. Successful businesses focus on creating dependability as their third key brand differentiator. Once customers know they will get the same great products or consistent service from your business, they will return again and again. Plus, they will share their experience with family, friends, and social media contacts.

Brand differentiators — uniqueness, value, and dependability — are what separate average companies from the great ones. Which one does your business want to be?