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Five Ways To Make Your Brand Stand Out

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Make your brand stand out|Five Ways To Make Your Brand Stand OutIn today’s world dominated by the Internet and social media, brand image plays a big part in the outreach and success of your business. With so much competition in the market, first impressions are often lasting impressions. So whether it’s your brand logo or website or message, it needs to be smart, eye-catching and on-point. This blog shows you five ways to help make your brand stand out.

1. A Good-Looking Website

Every business/ company today must have a website (if you don’t, get cracking on it!) that gives potential customers all the information required. Of course, depending on the nature of the business, the website can be informational, technical, educational or entertaining. But if you want your brand to stand out, make sure you are on the world wide web!

If you aren’t familiar with web design or don’t know the technicalities of building a site that stands out, hire a web design agency to make your website. Their creative input also be of great benefit.

2. A Logo That Stands Out

What do companies like Amazon, Nike, Apple and Dominos have in common? A logo that is instantly recognized worldwide. Your brand’s logo is of prime importance if you want your business to be noticed. First and foremost it must be striking, but more importantly it has to be relevant to your niche/ brand. Putting images of flowers on a logo for a tech company will make no sense, and won’t be coherent. A picture speaks a thousand words, it is said, and that’s exactly what your logo should do!

3. Strong Social Media Presence

Social media accounts are like the appendages of a website and a business. Today, almost everyone has an account on Facebook/ Twitter/ Instagram/ Pinterest etc and if your business isn’t on social media, you are seriously missing out on exposure and thousands of potential customers/ clients.

Also, besides attracting new customers, social media helps you to stay connected to your existing customers, keeping them updated and informed about new developments in your business as well as keeping your brand constantly in their radar.

4. A Blog

Having a website is great for your business, but having a blog section in the website is fantastic. Today, every top notch business has a related blog on their website, which gives additional information and knowledge about the niche/ area of business through researched articles. You could choose to have an in-house writer/s or you could outsource the blog posts to freelancers. Whatever you choose, keep your blog updated and post articles regularly. Share them on your business’s social media pages. Keep your customers in the loop and interested at all times.

5. Advertising Options

Gone are the days of simple print advertisements in magazines or on hoardings. Nowadays, with so many multimedia options available, there are a range of ways you can advertise your business and be seen. Apart from print, television and radio, you can also place ads on websites or blogs and get other bloggers to write about your business and link to your website.

How to Make Your Retail Store a Success

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Retail store|How to Make Your Retail Store a SuccessLaunching and creating a store that sells clothes and other accessories is fantastic. It provides you with the chance to help customers find clothing that makes them feel happy and good about themselves, and it helps you earn a living too.

Whether you sell clothes that others have designed, or you make and sell your own clothing lines, setting up a store is one of the best ways to market what you have got to offer.

However, with so much competition out there, it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. Taking time to create a store that is appealing and attractive to customers will ensure you get a decent footfall to your store (if you have a physical location). The same applies if you have an online presence either through your own website or selling platform. It has to be attractive and enticing, or people will not want to visit your store if it is not appealing to them.

Pay attention to the small details

In a physical store, this can be anything from the signage you use to the fixtures and fittings that you will use, including Retail & Display Mannequins that show your products off. Don’t underestimate how products can affect the design of your shop, and don’t underestimate how much lighting and color schemes can affect your customers. It can influence how long people browse for and, most importantly, whether they purchase or not.

Focus on your customers

Customers can make or break a store, so ensure your customers are at the heart of your business. Ensure that every customer has a good experience. Consistency and quality are very important in customer care and satisfaction. Unhappy customers can lose you business very quickly, so keep your customers happy. Monitor your customer care and service, and always ask existing customers for feedback. Any feedback you get will help you see where you are doing well and also where they may be any underlying problems or issues.

Stay competitive

You have a good product, so you will always get customers, right? Well, no, having a good product is one thing, but staying ahead of the competition is another. Very soon, there will be others emerging in your market, so you need to stay ahead of the game. You need to be introducing new stock that keeps your store fresh, and you need to be doing at least one product launch a year. A good product launch will keep your customers happy and keep them coming back for more time and time again.

Don’t be greedy

Making money is of course, nice, but people should always come over and before profit. It is much better to build a store that you will get repeat custom from overtime, than to be greedy and build a store that is here one minute and gone the next, or one that sells products at highly inflated prices. Opening a store is a marathon, not a sprint, so work hard to build relationships over time to help you make a living.

Strategies to Improve Your Brand Reputation

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Brand Reputation|Strategies to Improve Your Brand ReputationEvery brand needs to think about its reputation and how the world sees them. Businesses that have been able to develop a positive reputation will always appeal to modern-day consumers as they know that they will be reliable and trustworthy. In contrast, there will always be an element of risk when using an unknown brand or one which does not have the best reputation. Therefore it pays to work on improving your reputation as best you can, but what are a few effective strategies for improving your brand’s reputation? There are lots of effective ways to improve your brand reputation, and combining a few of these should have a significant impact on the success of your company.

Offer a Personalized Experience

In today’s day and age, people appreciate when a business can provide a personalized shopping experience based on their previous habits. Collecting data and using this to offer recommended products or repeat orders is a smart way to improve your brand reputation as well as encourage customers to spend more.

Go Above and Beyond With Customer Service

The way in which a business handles customer service has, perhaps, the biggest impact on brand reputation. You need to be friendly yet professional, always willing to go the extra mile and solve any issues swiftly. Crucially, when there is an issue (these are inevitable), you need to be honest, admit mistakes and take action to remedy the situation. In fact, if you were to apologize and offer free products and/or a discount, then it could even work in your favor.

Go Green

The world is becoming incredibly eco-aware. Consumers are even making decisions based on a company’s green credentials, so this can certainly be an effective way to improve your brand reputation. Additionally, often this can help you to reduce your costs too along with the environmental benefits, so it is a win-win situation.

Vehicle Donation

Businesses that do good in the world will also be looked on favorably, especially when supporting the local community. This is why Rawhide car donation to Rawhide Youth Services is a smart move as you can greatly improve the lives of at-risk youths in the State of Wisconsin with proceeds directly financing programs that will redirect the lives of those in need of support while painting your organization in a positive light.

Customer Reviews

When people are deciding whether or not to use a business for the first time, often one of the first steps that they will take will be to look for customer reviews. This is why you should try to obtain as many as possible and also use social listening tools to see what people are saying about your brand online – if you notice trends, you can then take action to improve particular areas that could be damaging your reputation.

Improving your brand’s reputation is not easy and will always take some time, but these are all effective strategies, and combining a few of these should help you see a positive impact before too long.

Legal Tips for Small Business Owners

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Small Business Owners|Legal Tips for Small Business OwnersAs the owner of a small business, it is essential that you consider the law in running your business as you will obviously want to make sure that you are operating above board and know how to protect your small business. A small business can struggle if they encounter any kind of legal issue, which is why it is so important to be aware of a few tips which could come in useful when it comes to abiding by the law and protecting your business. Read on to find out the best legal tips for small businesses and how they could help.

Choose the Right Business Structure

First, you need to make sure that you choose the right business structure and one which will protect your personal assets at risk if you encounter a legal issue. You will be able to protect your personal assets by forming a limited liability partnership or limited company, so it is important to spend some time researching what would be best for you.

Create Contracts for All Agreements

Many business owners make the mistake of not creating contracts for agreements, but this could prove to be costly down the line. This is why contracts need to be drawn up for every single agreement, which also helps to clarify what is expected and should stop any misunderstandings from occurring.

Create Terms and Conditions

Similarly, you need to create Ts&Cs in order to protect the business and to outline what is expected when a consumer enters an agreement with your business. Without this, you are putting yourself at risk of uncertainty and misunderstandings, so you need to establish the rules in order to protect yourself.

Protect Your Intellectual Property

You do not want other companies benefiting from your intelligence and creativity, which is why you need to use trademarks, patents, and copyrights to protect your intellectual property. Additionally, when you create a new idea, product, service, or anything else, then you should always do a patent and trademark search to avoid stealing intellectual property.

Find Reliable Lawyers

It is also important to do your research, find the best corporate lawyers in your area, and consider different potential issues. As an example, you will want to find an expert eminent domain attorney in the event of authorized companies trying to take your private property for public use, and they will be able to fight on your behalf to stop this from happening or secure the best possible amount.

Stay Current With Changing Laws and Regulations

Finally, you need to make sure that you keep up to date with changing laws and regulations as these can change and often. HR will help a business stay compliant and make necessary changes relating to employment law, which will stop you from encountering any issues.

Hopefully, these legal tips will be of use and help you to protect your business. In particular, small businesses need to be wary of the legal issues that can arise from running a business and make sure that they have the best protection in place.

3 of the Most Common Legal Issues Still Suffered by Businesses

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StrategyDriven Managing Your Business Article |Legal Issues|3 of the Most Common Legal Issues Still Suffered by BusinessesRunning a business with employees, especially one with premises automatically grants you a duty of care to your staff. As an employer, you expect a certain level of professionalism from all of your staff members as much as they expect it from you and for their safety to be in your best interests.

But even the best employers and businesses run into legal issues from time to time, whether right or wrong, and even in 2021 businesses still face some of the same legal issues that have been around for a long time:

  • IP Theft
  • Health and Safety Issues
  • Discrimination or Harassment

Many businesses, especially successful ones, are often accused of stealing something from another entity such as a logo, a product idea, or even a name while employees claiming accidents at work have never been higher. Discrimination and harassment is still an issue for employers and great care should be taken to protect everyone involved.

Know Your Property

A developed piece of material work such as a patent, trademark, copyrighted work, or even a trade secret such as a manufacturing process (think Coca Cola) is known as intellectual property. That is a property that isn’t grounded in the physical world such as a car or a house but one that has been creatively generated.

Claims concerning IP happen all the time and many bigger cases include those against songwriters, patent holders, and manufacturers. Pop superstar Madonna famously lost a case against a Belgian songwriter over her hit song ‘Frozen’ while Nintendo narrowly won a case over a patent concerning how a user input device (controller) handles shared data streams.

You can initially protect your IP by identifying it, securing it, and labeling it as such with the use of official company logos, which are themselves IP. But the range of issues concerning IP is very broad and is governed by a complex set of rules so the best advice would be to contact a business law attorney should you find yourself worried about infringement or if a claim has been made against you.

Duty of Care

Business establishments of all kinds are deemed reasonably responsible for the wellbeing of everyone directly associated with them. You may have heard of people claiming accidents at work because of negligent safety measures and receiving large payouts. This happens all the time and for the most part, these could have been avoided.

Protection from claims of this nature is essential to a business as while some may be genuine, there is a culture of falsely claiming injury towards organizations which has led to some businesses becoming overly cautious, such as McDonald’s and their rigorous labeling of hot products. The cost of a successful claim against you could potentially run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, which for most companies would be unsustainable and could lead to loss of jobs, decreased productivity, or closure.

The best thing to secure against these kinds of claims is to actually develop strict health and safety procedures. Ensure all your staff are fitted with any safety gear they need and have been trained to use them, label and mark safety concerned areas of a building, and reasonably discipline staff members who don’t follow safety guidelines. Do all that you can do to adequately profess that any claim against your health and safety standards is due to the claimant and not yourself.

Everyone is Equal

The last few years have seen very high profile cases against celebrities such as Harvey Weinstein but what of claims of discrimination or harassment against companies. Well, it does happen. Recently, Viacom, the parent company of CBS, has had to suspend two executives over claims that they created a hostile work environment for women and people of color.
It boggles the mind to think that this kind of behavior still happens in this day and age, especially from grown and professional men, but the sad fact is that year on year, the US Equal Employment Opportunites Commission (EEOC) hears over 100,000 cases of discrimination in the workplace.

It would be a very sad day indeed for any business owner to hear that staff members are being discriminated against, for any reason, so you should go out of your way to educate all staff about issues of discrimination whether it’s racial, gender, religion or disability related. Proactively enforcing a “Not Safe for Work” campaign can help since everyone is going to have different beliefs and conflicting personalities, but they should be left at home and aren’t welcome in the workplace.