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Building a Strong Brand Identity: Tips and Tricks

In today’s crowded marketplace, a strong brand identity is more important than ever. It’s what sets you apart from the competition and creates a lasting impression on your target audience. But how do you go about building a brand identity that’s both memorable and meaningful?

Here are some tips and tricks to get you started:

  1. Know Yourself, Know Your Audience
  • Self-Discovery: Before diving in, take a step back and define your brand’s core values, mission, and what makes you unique. What problems are you solving? What story do you want to tell?
  • Target Audience: Who are you trying to reach? Understanding your ideal customer’s demographics, needs, and aspirations is crucial for crafting a message that resonates.
  1. Craft Your Brand Personality

Think of your brand as a person. What kind of personality would it have? Friendly and approachable? Trustworthy and reliable? Bold and innovative? Infuse your brand voice and communication style with this personality to create a connection with your audience.

  1. Design a Cohesive Look and Feel
  • Visual Identity: Develop a logo, colour palette, and typography that are consistent and visually appealing. These elements should all reflect your brand personality and resonate with your target audience.
  • Consistency is Key: Ensure consistency across all your platforms, from your website and social media to your packaging and marketing materials. This creates a sense of trust and familiarity.
  1. Embrace the Power of Storytelling

People connect with stories. Share your brand story, highlighting your mission, values, and the inspiration behind your brand. This helps build trust and emotional connections with your audience.

  1. Be Present and Engaged

These days, building a brand goes beyond traditional marketing. Actively engage with your audience on social media, respond to comments and messages, and participate in relevant online communities.

Bonus Tips:

  • Employee Support: Empower your employees to become brand ambassadors. When your team genuinely believes in your brand, it shows!
  • Stay Flexible: The market is constantly evolving. Be willing to adapt your brand identity over time to stay relevant and competitive.
  • Monitor and Analyse: Track your brand mentions and sentiment online. This feedback helps you understand how your brand is perceived and allows you to make adjustments as needed.

Building a strong brand identity is an ongoing process, but with these tips and tricks, you can create a brand that stands out, resonates with your audience, and helps you achieve your business goals. Don’t forget, if you get stuck, our expert team is always here to help!

For a free virtual marketing ideas session with marketing experts, call us on 01962 600 147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk

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5 Marketing Mistakes You’re Probably Making (And How to Fix Them)

Marketing is the lifeblood of any business. It’s how you connect with customers, build your brand, and ultimately drive sales. However, it’s easy to fall into common traps. Here are five marketing mistakes you might be making and how to fix them.

Mistake #1: Not Knowing Your Audience

  • The Mistake: One of the biggest mistakes in marketing is not having a clear understanding of your target audience. Without this crucial knowledge, your campaigns can fall flat and fail to engage or resonate with potential customers.
  • Fix It: Do your homework! Get to know your audience through market research. Create detailed buyer personas that include demographic info, interests, pain points, and buying behaviour. Use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and surveys to gather data. Tailor your marketing messages and strategies to fit the needs and preferences of your target audience.

Mistake #2: Inconsistency Across Channels

  • The Mistake: Your brand voice and message vary wildly across social media, email marketing, and your website. This creates confusion for your audience.
  • Fix It: Develop a brand style guide. This document ensures consistent use of logos, fonts, colours, and voice across all marketing materials. Consistency in your branding helps build recognition and trust with your audience. Train your team to follow the style guide and regularly review your content to keep a cohesive brand image.

Mistake #3: Focusing Solely on Sales

  • The Mistake: Being too pushy with sales in your marketing efforts. Constantly pushing products and services can turn off your audience and hurt your brand’s reputation.
  • Fix It: Provide value through your marketing. Create content that educates, entertains, or solves problems for your audience. Use storytelling to build an emotional connection with your customers. Engage with your audience on social media by responding to comments and messages, and join in on conversations relevant to your industry. By building relationships and trust, you’ll create loyal customers who are more likely to buy from you.

Mistake #4: Focusing on Features, Not Benefits

  • The Mistake: You highlight product features without explaining how they solve customer problems. Your audience may not understand the value of your products or services.
  • Fix It: Lead with the “why.” Explain how your product or service improves your customer’s life. Focus on the benefits they’ll experience by using your offering.

Mistake #5: Overlooking Mobile Optimisation

  • The Mistake: Forgetting about mobile users by not optimising your website and content for mobile devices. With more and more people using smartphones, this can mean missing out on a lot of potential customers.
  • Fix It: Mobile-friendly website. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly with responsive design. Test your site on various devices to ensure it loads quickly and functions properly. Optimise your content for mobile by using shorter paragraphs, larger fonts, and easily clickable buttons. Also, consider mobile-specific marketing strategies like SMS campaigns and mobile ads to reach your audience wherever they are.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone, it’s easy to make marketing mistakes without all the know-how. That’s why, many businesses choose to outsource their marketing, rather than try to tackle it on their own.

For a free virtual marketing ideas session with marketing experts, call us on 01962 600 147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk

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Myth Busting: Debunking Common Marketing Misconceptions

Many people have misconceptions about marketing, so we’re here to debunk some of the most common myths:

1) Myth: Marketing is only for large businesses

Reality: Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can really benefit from effective marketing strategies. In fact, marketing can be more critical for smaller businesses as they often need to compete with larger companies for market share.

2) Myth: Social media is free marketing

Reality: While setting up social media accounts is free, doing it well requires time, effort, and sometimes money for advertising and content creation. Plus, understanding and using analytics is key to making social media work for you.

3) Myth: Good products sell themselves

Reality: Even the best products need marketing to reach potential customers. Without awareness and a strong message about why your product is worth buying, a good product might go unnoticed.

4) Myth: Marketing is an expense, not an investment

Reality: Effective marketing can bring a solid return on investment (ROI). By attracting new customers and retaining existing ones, marketing boosts revenue and supports business growth.

5) Myth: Marketing can guarantee immediate results

Reality: Marketing often requires some patience. Building brand awareness and trust takes time, and it can take weeks or months to see significant results from your marketing campaigns.

6) Myth: The more marketing, the better

Reality: Quality over quantity is key in marketing. Targeted and strategic efforts are more effective than just flooding the market with messages. It’s all about reaching the right people with the right message.

7) Myth: Marketing is only about acquiring new customers

Reality: Retaining existing customers is just as important, if not more so. Loyal customers can provide repeat business and act as brand ambassadors, spreading positive word-of-mouth.

Our expert team is able to offer full support for your marketing needs, providing valuable insights and suggestions to get results.

For a free virtual marketing ideas session with marketing experts, call us on 01962 600 147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk

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Best Length For a Blog Post

Producing blogs is a great way to share expertise, drive traffic to your website and build engagement. If this sounds like something you want for your business, the next question people typically ask is, “what is the best length for a blog post?”

 

Getting the answer to this right is important because it has implications for SEO, engagement and more.

Before starting to write a blog, you must consider the collection factors that will influence how well your blog performs. Your audience, the structure of the post, the topic and the promotional channel are all elements that will determine the ‘perfect’ length for your blog.

You are probably now saying, “that is all great, but how many words should I write?” If so, let’s dive in deeper and determine what the best length for a blog post really is.

 

Is there a perfect length for a blog post?

You probably already knew this, but the truth is, the best length for a blog post completely varies depending on the content you are producing. Sounds like a cop out, right? But a word count does not define how meaningful (and effective) a piece of text is.

 

For example, if the topic is frequently asked about and searched for by many users online, a substantial (we’ll get on to what this actually looks like in a second) blog is ideal. Whereas, if it is a quick promotion of a service or a product you are advertising, it is best to keep it short and simple.

 

“Give us a number!” we hear you shout….

 

Blog word counts and what they are best for:

  • 50-300 words: These are short and snappy posts that tend to get more of the comments. Shorter posts are great conversation starters. They are straight-forward, and although they might not get many shares online, they are easy to read and create on a regular basis. 50-300 words are most effective for selling a product or a service and getting a reader to take a specific ‘Call to Action’ (CTA) i.e. downloading an e-book or signing up to an email list.
  • 300-600 words: These posts are the most common blogging length. They are still quick, easy to read and to the point. This length is a popular middle-ground for social media shares and engagement.
  • 750 words: This length is typically used for professional journalism, especially for newsletters. The length is great for shares on social media.
  • 1000-1600 words: This length is the most popular for blogging platforms and mostly used to address audience questions and solve someone’s problem. According to Medium, a collaborative writing platform, the ideal length for a blog is 1,600 words (or takes 7 minutes to read). A 1,600-word blog can be the perfect length as it gives the writer enough leeway to explain the chosen topic in detail, whilst also keeping the reader engaged. There is an opportunity to get lots of engagement on these posts and a high number of shares on social media. The most significant factor for this length is making sure the topic is interesting and solves a frequently experienced problem.
  • 1,600-2,500 words: The highest-ranking articles on Google are typically around this length. These posts can rank well on search engines. They help a website’s SEO by increasing the time spent on page. They can also encourage a new reader to join your mailing list to receive future insightful content. If the chosen topic is interesting to your audience and addresses a topic that readers are continuously searching around, the blog has a good shot at being a hit.

 

What is more important that blog length?

Relevance to your audience! It is irrelevant how many words your blog is, if it doesn’t address a relevant issue or topic to your target audience. We could write the most wonderfully researched 2,500 word blog on cultivating roses in a small garden, but if we are looking to engage with and build an audience of small business owners, the blog just won’t cut it.

 

So, what is the best length for your next blog post?

Well that depends on what outcome you are trying to achieve. Shorter content (at least 300 words) is the ideal blog post length if you are looking to create regular content on a wide range of topics that encourages visitors to take some form of call to action. It also makes it more practical to create on a regular and consistent basis.

 

Whereas, if you want to create a piece of content that will significantly improve your SEO and position you as an expert on that particular topic, you should consider devoting additional time to creating quality, long-form content of 1,600+ words. Less frequent posts, with deeper, more detailed content, can help you win at the SEO game.

 

All that being said, whilst we understand that having a word count target can be helpful, the bottom-line is, write what you are passionate about. Don’t focus on the length of your posts too much. It is better to produce high quality text with fewer words, rather than ‘rambling’ on for the sake of a higher word count. And with that in mind, I’ll shut up now!


To arrange a free virtual marketing ideas session with our friendly marketing team, call 01962 600 147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk

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Marketing: 5 ways to make the most of working from home

We all have them – those tasks that you never quite have the time to complete because they’re always getting pushed down the to-do list. That is until now…

If lockdown has freed up some of your time, now is the perfect opportunity to give your business a marketing spring clean and make constructive use of the new ‘normal’. Here’s how.

Take your business digital

You may have embraced working from home – but have you made it work for you? Organisations big and small have been adapting their usual offering, with many going virtual to ensure they can still provide a level of service to customers. Some have taken smaller measures and are embracing what social media can do to connect them with new and existing customers, for example, while others have completely flipped their services to fit the digital space.

Here at TLC, many of our campaigns are managed and implemented digitally already, but we’ve also recently gone a step further by switching the delivery of our Marketing Ideas Sessions over to Zoom video calls. You can book your free slot with us here!

Review your marketing strategy

Creating content, executing campaigns and making your way through your marketing plan is all well and good – but only if it’s generating results. Ideally, you should be reviewing your marketing strategy on a regular basis in order to identify what could be tweaked to encourage more bang for your marketing buck.

Some key areas to review are:

  • Email marketing
  • Social media
  • Paid advertising
  • Conversion rates
  • Google Analytics

So that you can continue to monitor performance consistently, set up reports to monitor conversions (sales, enquiries etc.) in line with individual campaigns. Google Data Studio can help.

Audit your website

In a world where Google’s increasingly stringent requirements can make it difficult to keep up with rules and guidelines, you want to make sure you’re doing all you can to maximise the benefits of your website. An audit will allow you to identify if your website is optimised to achieve your business goals and what areas could be improved upon.

HubSpot’s Website Grader is a great free tool that can help you with your initial assessment and will grade your site on various criteria, including:

  • Website performance – page speed, browser caching, image sizes etc.
  • Mobile optimisation – font sizes, responsiveness and tap targets
  • SEO metrics – meta data, permission to index etc.
  • Security – HTTPS and javascript libraries

Another useful tool is Google Search Console, which helps you to:

  • Confirm that Google can find your site
  • Fix indexing problems
  • Review search traffic
  • Troubleshoot errors
  • Identify backlink sources

Upskill your team

If you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of businesses to sign up to the government’s newly-introduced Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme – or your employees simply find they have more time on their hands during lockdown – consider ways in which you can upskill your team and boost their knowledge.

There are plenty of eLearning courses available for industries of all shapes and sizes, varying from free 20-minute how-to videos to longer, recognised qualifications. Taking the time now to get your employees up-to-scratch will pay dividends in the long-term.

Get involved with local initiatives

Very few companies prioritise community work but demonstrating the conscientious side of your business is actually a simple and effective way to strengthen your brand. Those that do so are more likely to win customer loyalty and even attract talent.

Whether you fundraise for local food banks or the NHS, or even get involved with a volunteer scheme to deliver medication and essentials to vulnerable members of the community, your actions will have a lasting positive impact for months to come.

By using your time wisely, you can ensure your business stays connected and relevant for when life returns to normal. If you’re looking for some help and advice on how to get on top of your marketing whilst working from home, give the TLC team a call on 01962 600147 or email info@tlc-business.co.uk.

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#StayHome – How Team TLC have gone remote

It’s business as (un)usual for Team TLC. Like many other businesses, we packed up our laptops and made the move from the office to our living rooms last month.

For a team that’s used to collaborating face-to-face on a constant basis, working from home has been a tough but useful adjustment. As a result, we’ve been holding a daily Zoom call each morning to catch up and put a smile on everyone’s faces.

Since the move, we’ve been setting up our new workspaces and enjoying the extra time spent with our pampered pets. They’re proving to be a popular topic in the team WhatsApp and make great quality control managers as they keep a watchful eye over our work!

We’re here to help

While we settle into the new norm, we’ve been making some changes to our service offering to ensure we can continue to help our fellow SMEs with marketing support during this challenging time. As a result, we’ve switched to virtual Marketing Ideas Sessions with regular slots available to book for free over the coming weeks.

If you have any questions or would like to speak to a member of the team, our phone lines and emails remain open. Get in touch with us on 01962 600147 or info@tlc-business.co.uk.

From all of us, stay safe and keep well.
Team TLC

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Caroline designs some delicious biscuits

Smile! Our graphic designer, Caroline, has been at it again with her gorgeous biscuit designs – which made for a lovely surprise for the TLC team this morning.

 

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TLC climbed Mount Snowdon!

Last Friday, the TLC team visited Snowdonia National Park for a challenging climb up Mount Snowdon. The team had a very early start leaving from the office at 5am Friday morning and arrived at the starting point of the ascent for the PYG track at approximately 11am. Lots of sun cream and water was needed to keep us hydrated and protected from the very hot and sunny weather, which made the climb extra challenging at times. After approximately 3.5miles of ascent, the team made it to the summit at approximately 2pm where we took a break to enjoy some lunch and admire the views. We then set off for the descent at approximately 3pm via the Miners Track and made it back to our coach at 5pm to return back to the office! Here are some pictures from the day!

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Client launch celebrations

 
  

Last week, the team were invited to Newbury for an event to celebrate the launch of WashCo. The company has been formed following the merger of three of the commercial laundry industry’s most successful names – Armstrong, HughesPro and our client, SLS. We’re looking forward to working with them as part of their exciting plans for the future!

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What is content marketing and how does it benefit lead generation?

A formal definition of content marketing might go something like this – a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing catchy, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a defined target audience and help generate profitable leads. Put simply, it is creating and distributing fun, engaging, powerful and moving content that captures your audience’s attention and compels them to do something. Content marketing should be an ongoing process within your overall marketing strategy; however in the B2B market, very few businesses are executing it to its full potential and are missing a cost-effective marketing trick!

 

What is the ‘content’ in content marketing?

Content marketing revolves around the production of original or curated mixed-media, then distributing it through your different marketing channels, such as website, email or social media. Some typical examples of the type of content you could produce are:

• Blogs
• Case studies
• Video
• Social media posts
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Infographics
• GIFs
• Quizzes/Surveys
• Competitions
• White Papers
• Resources, for example glossary of terms, calculators, price lists, generators etc
• Apps

 

Content marketing benefits for lead generation
Other than SEO, PPC and other online advertising methods, blogging is considered the most effective tool for B2C and B2B marketers for generating leads through online channels. Did you know that according to statistics by WebDAM, B2B marketers who blog consistently generate 67% more leads than marketers who don’t? So if you don’t have a blog or news page, you might want to consider getting one! However, the content you are putting out needs to be relevant and engaging for your specific audience in order to see results. Different types of content will generate different outcomes based on their purpose. You might create content to increase brand exposure or your social media following. Perhaps you are looking to inform your audience or existing customers about new projects or industry insights. Your choice of content should be specific to your goals and distributed through carefully selected channels tailored towards your audience.

 

Create a content plan
In order to produce consistent and good quality content, we suggest creating a content plan as part of your marketing strategy. A content plan will highlight any activities in relation to your content and give you a schedule to work towards to help keep on top of things! We’ve got some helpful tips to create your plan.

1. Whether you’re new to content marketing, or are looking to improve your existing content, firstly we’d recommend looking at your competitors to see what types of content they are producing, if any, and if it is effective or not, to get some ideas for your own. Useful things to look out for are use of links to their website or to external articles, use of hash-tags, and the engagement they receive including likes, comments and shares. Just remember that whilst It is helpful to get inspiration from your competitors, it can be difficult to come up with original ideas that have never been done before, so make sure you avoid copying content and that yours is unique, your own and reflective of your business.

2. Firstly, you need to choose the types of content you wish to create and your goals, for example, social media posts can be great for brand exposure and increasing your audience reach, whereas case studies and white papers can be used to target industry or solution-specific prospects through a lead-gen email campaign.

3. Establish how much content you can create and how often, given your resources and time. A social media post can be created in several minutes, whereas a white paper can take hours to produce.

4. Lastly, you will need to decide how you will be distributing the content. The majority of content will be hosted on your website, but you can then decide if you will share it on social media, include a feature and a link in your e-newsletter or create a targeted email campaign to prospects or for existing clients.

5. Implement all of the above into a content calendar and schedule posts where applicable using social media managing software such as Hootsuite or Sprout, so that you remain consistent, avoid duplication and can plan weekly or monthly themes and topics that fall in-line with your business model.

 

Content marketing benefits for SEO
The more up-to-date your website is, the more beneficial it is for your user and SEO; therefore, adding new content to your website, such as regular blogs, video, resources, graphics, case studies or white papers can help improve your search engine rankings. Video is increasingly relevant and in demand by users; therefore, having embedded video on your site is a big plus. Content is also a good medium through which to target new keywords, expanding your presence in the search engines, so your audience can find you more readily.

 

How can we help?
At TLC Business, we can take care of all of your content marketing requirements. Need help with social media management, creating engaging blogs and white papers or producing infographics or resources for your audience? Get in touch today by emailing us on info@tlc-business.co.uk or calling 01962 600 147.

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