Releasing the Grip: Yep, Itʼs Okay to Change Your Marketing Message
Kate Swoboda is a Life Coach, speaker, and author of The Coaching Blueprint. She helps clients to lead unconventional and revolutionary lives through practicing courage.
Businesses grow and evolve. So do most solopreneurs. Not only is this okay, it may actually be beneficial to shift your branding and marketing strategy from time to time.
When I was interviewing Tara Sophia Mohr, she and I were laughing together when she shared that when people would ask how her business was going, sheʼd say: “The best thing about my business is that Iʼm no longer in the first year!”
When I was interviewing Jennifer Lee, she shared with me that sheʼd been coaching for more than six years, and had originally started under a different name than the name she uses now, and that in essence? She re-branded herself. Continue reading
How to Discover Your Unique Advantage in Business
As Chief Design Officer of Sweet Dreamz Design, Barbara Austin works with small business entrepreneurs to capture the heart and soul of their brand, using a sweet combination of integrity, creativity, and thoughtfulness to reach their target audience through great design. Photo credits: Adwriter (lemonade stand) and zigaszou76 (cupcakes).
Back in the lemonade-selling days of childhood, I assumed that selling a good product, or providing a good service, was the only thing necessary for a business to be successful.
It wasn’t until I opened a real business of my own that I realized thousands of others were doing the same thing I was, and that offering “good” just wasn’t going to cut it.
I had to learn to stand out from the crowd.
The funny thing is, I’ve always considered myself to be exceptionally unique. I don’t fit many stereotypes, and I regularly defy expectations. So you’d think that it would be easy for me to be unique as an entrepreneur, right?
Not so much. Chalk it up to my naive state of mind when I first launched my business, but it took me a while to figure that one out.
How did I do it? And how can you, too, discover your uniqueness when you know you’re a one-of-a-kind person, but you can’t seem to translate that into a business advantage? Continue reading
Five Reasons to Have a Professional Logo Design
This is a guest post by Dylan Mazeika, an online writer with a background in marketing and small business. He recommends if you are looking for a logo to check out the free logo design ideas at FreeLogoServices.com.
If your employees are the heart and soul of your business, then the logo is its face. The logo is what clients remember and potential customers look at first. A great logo will mirror a company’s creativeness and enthusiasm. A poor one will discourage prospects from becoming long term customers.
Here are five important reasons to have a professional logo design.
1. Logos Influence First Impressions.
Imagine you meet someone new, they greet you with a warm smile, and you can see by their expression they are genuinely happy to meet you. Now you meet someone else, except this person’s face is covered. You do not know the expression, their attractiveness, or how happy they are to see you. Continue reading
You Say Brandwashed Like It’s a Bad Thing: A Skeptic’s Look at Martin Lindstrom’s Latest Book
This Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me a copy of Martin Lindstrom’s book, Brandwashed, 
“I want to read it when you’re done.”
My family rarely shares my love of marketing books. And I loved Martin Lindstrom’s last book, Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
And I did, at first. Lindstrom starts by describing a year-long challenge he undertook to avoid branded products. No McDonalds. No Gillette shaving cream. Even branded fruits like Adirondack tomatoes were out of the question. He called it “brand rehab.”
Not surprisingly, brand rehab failed. Brandwashed documents why.
The Skinny on Brandwashed
Like Buyology, Brandwashed is chock full of research on our relationship with brands, from social experiments to surveys to fMRI brain scans. But unlike Buyology, Brandwashed borders on sensationalist. Continue reading
