Strategic Consulting Agency. Fort Lauderdale Web Design, Branding, Digital Ad Marketing Agency, CRM Software

Differentiating your business from your competitors in the marketplace is essential. If customers discern little to no difference between what you do and what everybody else does, it’s going to be practically impossible to attract new customers or retain existing ones.

The key is the figure out why your business is better than everybody else’s, then promote that difference in your branding, marketing, and everyday practice.

Good, Better, Best

There are probably lots of reasons why people should choose your business over everybody else. Your job is to simply identify them and then transform them into selling points.

It could be the quality of your products or services. Or it may be price or perceived value. Or it could be something as simple as the power of your personality or professional reputation. But whatever it is, that needs to be the centerpiece upon which the rest of your marketing and branding pivots.

That’s because there are lots of people doing the same thing you are in the marketplace right now. New customers aren’t going to be able to find you if they can’t see you among your competitors. And existing clients aren’t going to remain loyal if you don’t give them any reason to keep coming back.

Identify and Target

Often, business owners know why they are better than their competition but they take it for granted that their customers understand why. This is usually a mistake. To keep growing — or even just stay where you are — business owners need to constantly and continually remind prospective and existing customers just what it is that makes them the preferred choice within their market.

Effective branding and marketing focus on what businesses do better than everybody else. Identify what that is for your business and you can win over customers before they choose your competitors.

Does your business have a personality? Of course, it does! Your business’s personality is likely similar to your own. But it also has its own unique features depending on what types of products and services you offer, where you are located, and a number of other factors.

One of the easiest ways to understand your business’s personality is to match it to an existing archetype. These are personality types that psychologically link your business to specific personality factors and include categories like the Sage,  the   Explorer, the Outlaw, the Magician, and many others.

Your Business Archetype

Understanding which archetype is most akin to your business’s personality can streamline the road to your success. It can tell you what type of customers are attracted to your business, what types of marketing and promotions are going to be most effective, and which are the fastest and easiest ways to make genuine connections with new customers that lead to long-term loyalty relationships.

Lytron Strategic offers a free quiz that lets you discover the archetype that most closely matches your business’ personality. By answering a few simple questions, in just a few minutes you can gain more insight into your business and get real answers to important questions that can pave the way toward your success.

Roadmap to Reality

Your archetype is an important factor in planning critical elements of your marketing and branding. When you understand how the average person perceives

your business, you can play to your strengths and exceed people’s expectations. This makes it easier for people to want to keep coming back to your products or services again and again.

And it all begins with taking our FREE business personality test. Your business has nothing to lose and everything to gain. So let’s discover your business’s personality archetype together right now!

Like it or not, you are the face of your business and that’s exactly how people like it.

Most people want to associate a person with a business. When you use your image on your business’s marketing materials, collateral, and even packaging it makes it easier for customers to make genuine connections. They are more likely to trust your business when there is a real person behind it. Putting your name and face on the products and services you offer tells prospective customers you stand behind what you offer. That makes them more willing to believe in your business, too.

Goodbye Anonymity

As the owner of a business, you have to get used to the idea that you are something of a public figure. Using yourself to promote your enterprise is the fastest and most effective way to get people’s trust. It offers a fast track to creating the effective branding you need to promote your business.

People want to believe in your business. And they are more likely to do that when they can put a name and a face on it. Namely, your name and your face.

Perfect Examples

Think about the biggest and most successful businesses in the world today. Even though each of those businesses has hundreds or even thousands of employees, it’s usually just one person that you think of when you think about that company.

Apple had Steven Jobs (and now Tim Cook). Tesla has Elon Musk. Facebook has  Mark Zuckerburg. Your business has you. Get used to the idea of living in a fishbowl because the bigger your business gets, the more people will associate you with the things your business does. And that’s just good business.

So if you are shy or self-conscious about being the face of your business, get over it.

 

The most important element of branding is consistency. Your company’s brand needs to offer the same message, tone, even color schemes and fonts on every piece of collateral you offer — from websites to brochures to print advertising to signage.

Customers are easily confused. So when you blend your branding or offer anything less than consistent messaging, it’s going to deteriorate the overall effectiveness and reduce your overall reach. But when you offer consistent branding across every platform, it will be both inviting and nurturing for prospective customers, making it easier for them to make genuine connections with your business, your products, your services, and you.

Successful Branding

Look at the companies that have had the most successful branding. For example, Apple computers have had essentially the same logo, used the same color schemes and fonts, and offered the same messaging to customers since the 1980s with only minimal upgrades to adjust to modern tastes. But people still consistently connect with the brand because its both familiar and meaningful to them today.

Similarly, companies like Ford, Coca-Cola, Kitchen Aid, Dyson, and others have projected essentially unchanged branding for decades and still attract customers new and old. In every case, they have found something that worked and stuck with it in the long run to great results. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

Lytron Strategic

If your business has found a successful brand that customers are attracted to, Lytron Strategic can help keep it consistent across multiple platforms — in both the virtual realm in the real world. And if you are still developing your brand, we can help you find one that will stand the etest of time.

Consistency is the key to successful branding. Once you discover a brand that people can make genuine connections with, it pays to stick with it.

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.

 

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.

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.