As your company grows and gets busier, it’s easy to forget about marketing and branding your business. If you’ve got work, you must be doing something right. Right? You could be doing a great job, but these tips will take your marketing to the next level.
Badge of Many Colors
Imprint Plus’s Mighty Badge kits can help you create name tags that give your business a branded, professional look both in and out of the office. The kits, which include inserts, fasteners, plates, lens covers, and the Mighty Badge software, are completely DIY. With the Mighty Badge software, users can design the name plates for their company and print them out on the inserts using an inkjet or laser printer.
The badges snap together, so it’s easy to swap out the inserts in case the company’s logo changes or an employee gets promoted. The Mighty Badge comes in different shapes, sizes, and colors so that each business can find the style that best reflects its brand.
Wake Me Up Before You Logo
“A logo is a must-have for any business. It is a marketing tool that helps differentiation and recognition,” says Yali Saar, CEO of Tailor Brands. Tailor Brands is an online logo generator that lets you customize your own logo. Customers answer basic questions about their company and design preferences; then, Tailor Brands generates several logo options based on the responses. After picking their favorite, users customize colors and fonts before purchasing their logo. Tailor Brands offers a wide variety of packages for purchasing the image files, starting around $50.
Prefer to design your own logo? Try GraphicSprings. The company has many original graphics to choose from in various themes (including a construction category) and lets users customize colors, fonts, placement, and more. Packages start at $19.99. GraphicSprings also offers a collaborative, logo service with a GraphicSprings designer.
Both companies will allow users to trademark their logos, but advise consulting with a trademark attorney to do so to ensure proper procedures are followed.
Media Managed
It seems like everyone touts the importance of social media, but how do you know if you’re getting the most out of it? Social media managing sites let users link multiple social media accounts to the managing site’s dashboard; this provides a one-stop shop for users so that they can easily see what’s happening on each of the accounts, post updates, and respond to posts from followers. Buffer and Hootsuite, for example, help manage social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn. Tailwind is specifically designed to help manage Pinterest and Instagram accounts.
All three have free basic services, but charge monthly fees for packages that offer advanced features such as adding more users, linking more social profiles, and better analytics. One benefit to using a social media management system is advance scheduling: write a post at 8 a.m. and see it appear on the company page at dinnertime. The analytics are useful tools to monitor post clicks, engagement rates, and reach to show what kinds of posts work best.
Camp Together
You can have the best marketing of all the remodelers in your area, but if your team isn’t organized and running efficiently, then it will go to waste. That’s where Basecamp comes in. “Basecamp is designed to help small businesses as they start to grow, whether that’s more clients, more projects, or more people,” Josh Braun, head of business at Basecamp, says.
Basecamp has been in business for over 15 years and launched Basecamp 3 last November. Keep track of your different marketing initiatives—and everything else—using the online system, which allows teams to communicate via group chat or private messaging (called Ping), create to-do lists, schedule meetings, and upload important documents to Basecamp’s cloud-based storage server so that everyone has instance access to the same information.
Basecamp also has Clientside, an add-on feature that lets users send emails, updates, and documents without the user ever leaving Basecamp. Everything users send to clients via Basecamp appears in their personal email and clients reply as they would a normal email, but the correspondence is saved in Basecamp’s cloud storage. Basecamp is available online and as an app for smartphones and tablets. With everything accessible in one place for teams to communicate, it can only make marketing the business that much easier.
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