Most often than not, businesses owners perceive their company logo design as an item on the check list to get done when starting out on their new venture or launching a new company. Usually considerable care, time and effort are invested in coming up with the perfect business name, which is great! The right name is the foundation stone of a great brand. If you are on this path of starting a new business, then this article would definitely make you pause and think.

Next, they need to get a logo to go with the name. If the business owner has some experience with computers or graphics software or sometimes, even MS Word, they may be tempted to hash out a design themselves. In some cases, a friend, relative or friend of a friend may have some experience with graphic design, and the business owner may simply give them the opportunity to come up with something “awesome”. In yet other cases, the business owner may be tempted to visit a crowdsourcing website and let 100s of “designers” bid for their business by submitting a lof of logo design concepts. All these stem from the desire to spend as little as possible on the logo design.

Learn more about successful logo designs...

Branding is much more than just a thoughtful logo or slogan and it's more than just a unique color scheme. Below are the initial steps that need to be taken in order to start your successful brand image.

Step 1: Examine the Competition

One of the keys to creating a successful brand image is to separate yourself from your competition. You will need to know how consumers see your competition. You need to recognize how your competitors differentiate themselves from others. Also, you should know your competitor's strengths and weaknesses. Your business can benefit from knowing this information by learning from their weaknesses, and learning how to differentiate your company from the competition.

Step 2: Identify Your Strengths

Now that you know your competition's weaknesses you can begin to focus on your company's strengths. Perform a target market analysis, learn from it, and use it to your advantage. This is a useful tool to confirm your company's strengths are in fact important to your target market. Once you've realized your strengths, and what strengths are important to customers, you can think about ways to successfully market these to the public and involve them in your branding campaign.

Step 3: Know Your Customer

Learn more about the customer. Know their purchasing behavior. How often do they buy? Do they buy only during sales or promotions? Do they buy an array of products or services or just a select few? These are questions you should ask to better market to your customers. Also, know your customer's lifestyles, needs, mindsets, and attitudes. Knowing and working with these personality traits are also key to marketing success.

Step 4: Be Your Brand

Make sure your company truly represents what your brand identifies you with. For example, if one of the traits your brand identifies your company with is politeness, be polite. This means every employee from the receptionist all the way up to the CEO needs to live your brand.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Internet marketing is all about hard results, not generic concepts of branding. Still, there are ways to go about branding your product or service on the net without spending a fortune.

But is branding a legitimate marketing strategy?

Branding refers to the vague notion of creating an identity for a product, service or name with consumers. The classic example, of course, is Coca Cola. Being first on the scene, the company has been able to create such a strong name brand that most people use the word “coke” instead of soda when ordering. This is true even when they prefer Pepsi. In the world of marketing, we all bow before the marketing team that accomplished this branding. The Internet, however, is a different beast. That same marketing team would be crushed if they went after a similar strategy on the net.

The Internet is so large that branding is an expensive and difficult goal unless you are the first major presence in a niche. Sites like EBay and Amazon were the first major money players in their fields, giving them a huge advantage over subsequent competitors. Unless you are coming to a field with a lot of money and no current dominant site, your branding efforts are going to meet with failure or limited success at best. If you want to stick with it, the only cost effective and ultimately successful strategy is to pursue a width search engine optimization campaign.

Search engine optimization is simply an effort to get pages on your site ranked high in search results on the three big search engines – Google, Yahoo and MSN. To establish your brand, the best Internet marketing strategy is to identify every single phrase your prospects use to find services or products in your business area. You then build optimized pages for every single phrase and get them ranked.

This strategy has two benefits. First, it will produce free traffic to your site. If you build 200 pages and each gets 50 visitors a day, your site will receive 10,000 visitors a day. The second benefit is your brand becomes established. Regardless of what the prospect searches for, they keep seeing your site. This creates both recognition and credibility with the prospect as they tend to equate high rankings with quality. As they visit your site over and over, they will also become readily familiar with your unique selling position as presented on the site.

If you want to establish a brand, avoid wasting your money on banners and such unless you are in a niche that isn’t dominated by any single site. Instead, use the width search engine optimization tactic to establish your site and pick up free traffic.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Branding is a unique thing that can create business longevity for you. I am not saying that that is going to happen initially, those that have bad business practices, after a year or two, or even six months, they will soon become like that, they will wonder where their next sale is going to be. So hopefully they could even turn it around, if you are like that you are branding yourself that way, you can turn it around. It is probably harder to turn it around than if you had initially done that, but things could turn around through the same branding practices.

Other branding methods, you can brand yourself in the search engines. With some of these search engines the name like, pay per click king, you can have articles and sites up under those keywords, even pay per click ads and things of that sort, so when people look that up, they will see you. They find you there under that keyword name. Anything that you can think of, even with your offline marketing, even when you do newspaper ads, magazine ads, anything else offline, media, radio ads, tv ads, you can always put your branding in there, sign off throughout the process of doing that, you can refer to yourself as the pay per click king, then that becomes your branding.

So continue learning on this ever growing path for you to be successful in business, whether you already are successful you can become more successful than you already are. Never think you know everything, we do not know everything. we have been a student of marketing for many years and we will be a student of marketing for as long as we can, until we stop working. That is our branding, that is what we do and so we are always learning. Never think you know everything, always learn. The simple marketing formula is targeted traffic pointed towards a targeted sales page or landing page equals money or commissions. That is the online marketing formula in the simplest form.

Most people routinely mess up the left side and that is what we teach. Everybody wants the right side, the money, but they do not want to do the left side. If a person was going to go to college and be an accountant, it use to be that you could be an accountant just for four years of college. But it has gotten so competitive now you need at least a six year degree in accounting to be even competitive in the accounting industry. And so they spend six years learning their trade so they can actually make money in accounting. You do not have to spend that long online to learn this information, especially if you find the right mentors that will put you on the fast track.

You should always find the cream of the crop, this is what we do. We can go into any industry we want and get to the top of that industry because we find the cream of the crop in that industry and pay them whatever they want so that we can learn from them. It usually takes us six months in that industry to do that, and that is after paying people for their time to tell us the things that they know. Sometimes you pay for courses and the courses were garbage, but we never complained about it, we just said that is a person that we do not need to learn from. We just keep going forward until we found the cream of the crop.

The money that we spent on that is pennies compared to what we learned from the cream of the crop and continued to make large sums of money in that industry. That is what you need to do, find the cream of the crop. When you find the cream of the crop, pay that person whatever they want and learn everything you can from that person. Do not suck them dry overnight, then they might not teach you anything else. Let them teach you, let them do it over time and just learn everything you can from them. Most likely the information that they teach you, you will have to read, listen to, watch, whatever method they use to teach you, over and over again to get it correctly.

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrators

Your online marketing efforts can bring, literally, millions of people to your door simply by adding your personal touch with a Personal Branding Marketing campaign.

Now how do you go about doing it?

1. Video Because Moving Images Sell.  YouTube has given us, as internet marketers, a level playing field by providing us their FREE platform to host our videos.

2. A Relationship Building Website . You can create a website or hire a web designer to create one for you.  On your website you will acquaint visitors about what it is you have to offer them. They will either like your energy and return for more information or they will keep searching for someone whom they relate to.  The whole purpose of your website however, is to create a relationship with your visitors.

3. Get Personal. People like to buy from people so it is important when someone goes to your website, and opts-in for more information,  you send them a “personalized” thank you email and then follow up with a personal phone call.  You separate yourself from all the other marketers when you practice this.

Traditional Marketing efforts, on the other hand, are more arduous and almost always very costly to say the least!  Advertising space in magazines, newspapers, brochures, T.V., etc could cost you well into the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the ROI is still just a hope and a prayer away.

Traditional Marketing is very generic in its approach as the reach is extremely broad.  The personal touch is not present when you are sending your message out to millions of people in the hopes they see a value in your offerings.

Take a close look at how your business can profit by implementing Personal Branding campaigns.

And remember Tuxedo Branding is here to help you!!

Good Luck; Good Branding
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

Okay assuming your product is a mind-blowing fabulous one and you’ve gotten your tag line down to reflect and reinforce what your company product or service line is and does, it all comes down to image.

This means your logo.

A logo isn’t just a picture. It can be a word or name too. This is known as a word mark. Again, this is the visual representation of your company. This is the symbolic icon that will forever conjure up your...to continue reading to learn the 7 Keys click here.

Although the Internet is a ubiquitous Corporate communications and sales channel many companies are still not utilizing much of its power. That could be because of loyalties to comfortable old channels or that there aren’t enough Internet marketing experts to take their brands into the digital realm.

Regardless of the hold-ups in leveraging internal or external Internet communications options, consumer and B2B channels are growing their share of the market. Resistance is futile and with this change in how consumers and B2B buyers are reached, is a change in the symbolism, voice, and style of promoting brands. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Internet can’t play a supporting role for your offline or TV advertising. For many campaigns, the Internet is just another conduit for sales videos and corporate brochures. Some are satisfied with this, however the Internet’s own power to communicate and generate business shouldn’t be underestimated.

The Internet, whether through public websites, search engines, Internet radio broadcasts, and e-mail is very targeted. It is shown to reach the right target at the right time with the right message. It doesn’t matter what approach to your online advertising and promotion you choose, it will find the right target market - if you know how to look. You need to be there any way you can. It’s too important to let it slide.

Internet branding ( aka web branding) are terms in increasing usage because branding can be adapted to be effective on the Internet. That’s different from broadcasting your TV video ad or showing your marketing brochure on your website. With Internet branding, you’re taking into consideration that viewers have searched around and seen many other products similar to yours. They may have reviewed many more product or service features than they would think about while watching television or casually reading a magazine.

Your customer’s context then is different. The splashy video display generally isn’t there and that's good because few people are interested in seeing it. They’re pressured for time and want to find what they’re looking for. If you understand their quest for knowledge, you can better shape your value proposition and even your sales pitch.

Good Luck; Good Branding,
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

If you are starting a new business, there are many things you can do without.

You don't necessarily need the prettiest office furniture, a location in the best possible neighborhood, a twelve-line phone system or framed inspirational prints for your walls. Smart new business owners know when and why to cut corners and to post cost-savings for a startup. They also know that some purchases are completely necessary.

One essential investment for every company is the design of an effective logo. The logo is at the core of every successful company's branding efforts. It is the company's symbol and will adorn everything from free giveaway coffee mugs to the cover of critical reports. It will appear on websites, in advertisements, on business cards, letterheads and anything else related to the company.

The logo is the most important part of any branding effort. When one mentions Coca Cola, your mind immediately provides you with a visual cue-the white script, perhaps on a red can. One need only see the bright and bold logo of Federal Express with its "hidden arrow" to recognize a delivery truck and to understand its business.

If you want to distinguish your company and separate it from the pack, you will need a logo. By wisely choosing a well-designed logo, you can immediately begin to publicize and market the business in earnest. You can also begin to cultivate the idea of your company's "personality" with clients and prospects alike.

Those who fail to secure a good logo do so at their own peril. In many ways, the logo becomes the face of your company. You want to convey the right message and the right outlook from first contact. Operating without a logo can render a company virtually invisible. The human mind's attraction to color and shape provides one with a unique opportunity to capture attention and to leave a lasting mark on the psyche of observers with a logo.

Some cost-conscious business owners may try to function without a logo. Those who go this route lose money in the long run. By not creating an easily identifiable "brand" (and even a first year marketing student will recognize just how essential that is), the business owner will hamstring his efforts and decrease profit potential by a margin far exceeding the price of a professionally designed logo.

If you are starting a new business, or have been limping along in your current endeavor without a logo, it is time to create a business identity with what will become your ongoing symbol. Find a logo design pro who can combine real world experience with a solid understanding of logo design principles to create the perfect logo that will someday be successfully and inextricably tied to your business.

You may not be able to afford a brand new leather sectional or fifty magazine subscriptions for your lobby. Adding a fully appointed executive washroom may not be in the budget. There are places to cut corners and ways to save money. However, skipping the development of a perfect logo is not among them. A good logo is a must for every business that should not be overlooked.

Good Luck and Good Branding,
Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator

When it comes to your business there are three different levels of marketing strategy that result in three different sets of results.

1)      Advertising – This role is primarily designed to elicit short-term results on a specific campaign or site performance goal.

2)      Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – This role is designed for long-term growth by getting search engines to recognize your site and view you as trustworthy and deserving of a high ranking.

3)      Branding – This role is also designed for long-term growth, but may have more to do with customer confidence in your product and less to do with driving new traffic to your site.

Let's focus on the third item; "branding". The strategy of branding is to create and develop a confidence in your product and or service in the minds of your customers. It is the branding that creates customer loyalty and that's what has them returning to you.

In fact it is possible to develop a strong brand and customers' will return even if that means paying more with your site. If you develop sound brand strategies a customer will have no problem returning to use your services or buy your product. Customers will pay the extra if for no other reason than they are confident you can and will deliver on your promises. These customers have seen your track record and they are satisfied you will do what you say you will do.

That's the power of a strong brand. But branding is becoming harder to do, but it’s not impossible.

Web site owners who have taken the time to really understand the core of their business begin to gain a clearer picture of how they can take the uniqueness of the business and leverage that special something into a means of branding their company.

This is important because there are businesses that stop at advertising. Other businesses will add an impressive array of SEO strategies that will eventually get them noticed. While both of these are important strategies the miss the mark in defining the difference between businesses that sells a product and THE source for a product or service.

The end goal is to have customers view you as the only reputable seller of whatever product you specialize in.

There are far too many businesses that are content to simply sell a product without ever really making a name for themselves.

Don't be like them. Stand for something. Define what that is and allow it to propel you and your brand. Now go on and take the steps to make a name for yourself?

Tuxedo Branding Blog Administrator