Did you notice that sound was one of the options?

Now I’ve written about this concept before, but it bares repeating … using audio cues that identify your business or your brand can be a very powerful technique.

Why do you think that TV shows have theme songs?

Why do you think that brands like T-Mobile, the Intel and GEICO have catch phrases and signature tunes?

It is because the brain processes audio cues differently than written and visual cues … and businesses want you to remember their brand in any and every way imaginable.

So how can you create an audio signature for your business? Here are some suggestions:

• Get a signature tune and use it with all your audio productions:
  • Podcasts
  • Audio products
  • Internet radio show
  • Teleseminars
• Develop a catch phrase and use it in everything you do. For example, Verizon Wireless has “Can you hear me now?” and GEICO has “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on your car insurance.”
• Leverage your unique vocal style and play it up. Think William Shatner’s strange way of pausing in mid-sentence and emphasizing every other word, or Wayne Dyer’s smooth, calm, relaxed speech pattern.

Use your creative mind to come up with an audio signature that communicates your brand uniquely and your business will be recognized and remembered more powerfully.

Your Business’ Audio Signature is a post from Women's Business Gallery

When embarking on the marketing quest for your information products, you need to decide a few of things.

• Do you want to build a brand for your company as a whole?
• Do you want to build a brand for a specific product line?
• Do you want to build a brand for an individual product?

Which one you decide to do will determine how you go about your branding activities. And as nebulous as this may seem, it can have long-term effect on your business profitability.

There is a reason that big companies spend so much advertising dollars to build brand rather than to sell product.

Once you’ve made your decision, it is time to get your branding elements in place. You don’t need to have all of these … just select the few that will best support your branding goals.

• Mission, Vision and Values — your customers may never see these statements, but they will be the basis on which the rest of your brand and customer interaction is based
• Logo — a visual representation of your brand, make it simple and easily recognizable
• Tag line or slogan — this is a short phrase that sums up the mission of the brand, keep it simple, active and powerful
• Signature music or jingle — not as prominently used in Internet marketing, but can be quite effective if you create audio or video products
• Mascot — another technique not used much in Internet marketing, but could really help you stand out

Previous Posts on Branding

• Branded! How To Build Brand Identity
• What Is Branding and Why Should You Care?
• Let Them See Your Brand
• Let Them Hear Your Brand
• Let Them Experience Your Brand

Marketing Your Info Product 1 – Creating a Brand is a post from Women's Business Gallery

Basically, you take your basic message and boil it down to fit this formula:

The problem today is … (what problem you help solve).
I’d like to share three tips … (that solve that problem).

For example, I came up with this one:

The problem today is that authors are struggling to sell their books and build a platform in this down economy. I’d like to share three simple tips that will turbo-charge your book marketing and build an author’s platform for long-term success.

To make your interviews more effective in marketing your book and business, integrate the names of your books, products, services and brands into your message.

For example, I included the key words “turbo-charge your marketing” in my intro above because I have a blog and product called “Turbo-Charge Your Marketing.”

Another tip that I incorporated into my sample above was making it timely. Right now, people are very concerned about the economy and catch phrases such as “slow economy” and “down economy” perk up their ears.

Jill Lublin’s Simple Formula for Radio Interview Success is a post from Women's Business Gallery

Basically, if you identify who your ideal clients are — the clients you absolutely love working with — and then identify all those wonderful, unique benefits and solutions that you offer especially for them, you’ll attract more of your ideal clients into your business.

Of course, Lisa isn’t the only one talking about this. Remember Maria Marsala? I interviewed her for the Women’s Business Gallery a little over a year ago and she talked about it, too. It makes sense, if you’re going to grow a business that you love, why would you want to have clients that you don’t love as a part of it?

Anyway, here are some of the golden drops of juiciness that Lisa shared with us.

1. Laser in on your ideal clients.

• Which clients would you want to clone and why?
• Which clients get the most working with you?

Remember, your “no” might just be someone else’s “yes” — so don’t feel bad about turning away potential clients if they aren’t a good fit.

2. Highlight your “juicy” benefits.

• What pain do you heal?
• What need to you fill?
• What problem do you solve?
• How are your clients different after working with you?

3. Capitalize on what makes you unique.

• Why do you do what you do?
• What do people compliment you on?

4. Systematically translate your “juice” into all your marketing.
You should use your “juice” for every marketing piece and conversation you have. In fact, each and every product and service you provide will have their own “juice” as well.

Now I know that some of you might be feeling crestfallen at this point, thinking that you don’t have any juice. And you’d be totally WRONG! Everyone has something that makes them special. So, what make you so special?

What Makes You So Special? is a post from Women's Business Gallery

When you go to a Disney theme park, you are treated to clean facilities and clean cut, personable staff.

When you shop at Nordstrom’s you expect superior customer service.

These are all examples of intangible branding. They are examples of a brand expressing itself through characteristics that are qualifiable, not quantifiable.

As I mentioned in previous posts, your brand can have a look and it can have a sound. But when it comes right down to it, it is how your brand feels that usually ends up being the most important.

For example, when you think of these brands, what do you feel?

• Nascar
• Pepperridge Farms
• McDonald’s
• Disney
• Apple

You may not be familiar enough with all of them to have an associated feeling, but I’m sure at least one of those brands communicates with you on an almost subconscious level. When I think if Pepperridge Farms, I get a warm, homey feeling inside. Disney make’s me feel like a kid again. And Apple is just plain cool.

How do these brands accomplish this emotional feat? They do it by incorporating intangibles into their brand. Intangibles such as:

• quality of products
• quality of service
• innovation
• cleanliness
• attitudes

What intangibles can you fit into your brand? I know this can be difficult to do sometimes. I know I struggle with it for the Women’s Business Gallery because I’m still in the stage of defining what WBG is all about. But I know that at it’s core, WBG’s mission is to help women build businesses they love, that they are passionate about, that they would keep working on even if they weren’t earning money for it.

I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say about your experiences with branding in you business. So leave a comment and, as a a community we can help each other build phenomenal brands for our businesses!

Additional Reading On This Topic:

The Quality Of the Experience Is Your Brand
By Jim Kukral, MarketingProfs Daily Fix

Gartner’s Seven Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience
By Randy Saunders
(Note: This site has several posts that would be good reading for this topic.)

ROI of Customer Experience
By Jennifer Rice

Branding Through Experience: Go With Your G.U.T.

Your Brand is Defined by the Customer Experience, Not the Slogan
Posted by Doug Meacham

Let Them Experience Your Brand is a post from Women's Business Gallery

You can hear this week’s post in two ways: via streaming audio below, as well as downloadable mp3 that you can put on your iPod or other mp3 player.

Download mp3

Now on to this week’s topic.

When you hear this , what do you think about?
How about this:
And what about this?

If you said NBC, Vonage and the Harlem Globe Trotters, then you’ve been influenced by those company’s sound branding efforts.

Do you listen to any of the shows on Blog Talk Radio? How does each show begin? You guessed it! With a branded audio clip!

So, how can you use this technique to help brand your business? Here are three suggestions.

1) If you use teleseminars and other audio products in your business, get a signature tune and place it at the beginning and end of all your recorded audio. Marnie L. Pehrson of IdeaMarketers and Create A Wow uses this technique. Listen to any of her audios from CreateAWow.com, and you’ll be treated to her signature funky country guitar riff.

2) Develop a signature sound bite and use it whenever you have a speaking opportunity. Maybe it’s a way of communicating your core concept, like how Nancy Marmolejo uses the words “sizzle” and “SizzibilityTM.” Maybe it’s a catch phrase like Verizon Wireless’s “Can you hear me now?” or Wendy’s famous “Where’s the beef?”

3) Maybe you have a distinctive vocalization. Take Cindi Dawson of TeleseminarSuccessSystem.com – she’s got a contagious giggle that she cannot suppress that always makes me smile. And who can miss William Shatner’s strange way of pausing in mid-sentence and emphasizing every other word?

Be creative. An audio cue that communicates your brand doesn’t have to be fancy … just consistent. The audio cue basically tells the listener in an instant that this belongs to this particular brand.

Again, audio cues can be:

• music
• tone combinations
• a way of talking – accent, word choice, tone, pitch or rhythm
• a catch phrase

I hope this post was helpful and gave you some ideas for how you can use audio to brand your business.

Next week, we’ll talk about how to use intangible things such as quality, customer service and more, to communicate your brand.

Further Resources:

How to Create a Podcast Audio Logo (Part II)
By Anne Holland, President, Marketing Sherpa

Sound branding
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Building Brand Value Through the Strategic Use of Sound
by Noel Franus

Heard the Latest in Branding?
By Rebecca Lieb, The ClickZ Network

NOTE: This is not a verbatim transcript, but rather the script I used to create the audio, which is slightly different.

PS: Wondering what sound branding goes with the image I used in this post? Here ya go:
Center: “Where’s the beef?” — Wendy’s commercials in the 1980s
Top Left: “Doh!” … among others … Homer Simpson of The Simpsons
Top Right: “What you talkin’ ’bout Willis?” from Different Strokes
Bottom Left: “Inconceivable!” … The Princess Bride
Bottom Right: “Zoinks!” … among others … Scooby Doo

Let Them Hear Your Brand is a post from Women's Business Gallery

Did you get them right? Most likely you did, because the companies behind those symbols did an excellent job of branding using visual cues. Other visual cues include color combinations (like Windows) and font use (like T-Mobile).

When creating your brand, you’ll want to incorporate some visual cues that will help prospects and clients identify when something comes from you.

For example, Michele P.W. always uses the same background image on her websites — a green background with criss-crossing exclamation points. If you were to land on a sales page and not see her photo or name above the fold, you would still know the website was hers.

Visual cue decisions you can make include:

• What will your color palette be?
  What colors will all you websites, brochures, signs, etc. always use?

• What font or fonts will you always use?
  You don’t want to use more than two or three fonts, and ideally you’ll want one that is a serif font (with curls, like Times Roman) and one non-serif font (without curls, like Arial).

• What kinds of imagery will you use?
  Some brands always use a particular style of illustration — think the Charmin bears. Others always use a color tone to their images — think a corporate blue tone to all photos. Here on the Women’s Business Gallery, I always use a particular green frame around the image of women I interview.

Choose carefully and then stick to your decisions. Monitor the look and feel of all the things you do and keep the motif running through. A good example would be the products of Karen Cappello — all her packaging images look similar, despite using different colors and images. You’ll find the images to which I’m referring down the right side of this webpage.

When you do this, you start building consistency in your marketing. It may take you awhile to find just the right look and feel for you. Heck, I’m still working on this stuff for this website, as well! But every little bit you do, helps set you apart and make you stand out.

Let Them See Your Brand is a post from Women's Business Gallery

Big companies spend a lot of time, money and effort developing their brands. Some have done so well that many consumers use brand names as common nouns (”Kleenex” instead of facial tissue, “Hoover” instead of vacuum cleaner, etc.).

A brand is also more than I’ve discussed so far. In fact, it has a much deeper purpose than just to differentiate you in the market. It’s purpose is also to establish an emotional connection with your target market.

When I say, “Oreo,” what do you think of? My initial sensation is that of good times growing up and eating Oreos dunked in milk. That’s an emotional connection.

So what does this all have to do with you, the small business owner?

Branding can make the difference in your business, as well. It can attract more clients to your practice, get more people to buy your products and services, even cause a viral, word-of-mouth referral system to spring up without you even trying.

This month, I’m going to cover three ways you can make branding work for your small or solo business:

• With Visuals — using color, symbols and fonts to help create your brand.

• With Sound — using catch phrases, music and other audio cues to establish your brand.

• With Intangibles — using customer service, quality and other intangible attributes to develop your brand.

What Is Branding and Why Should You Care? is a post from Women's Business Gallery

One of the most common refrains I hear from people is, “I can’t create information products…I’m not an expert!”

Yet what is expertise?

Many organizations have tried to pin down the exact criteria that make an expert. They talk about university degrees earned and awards won and how much you’re quoted in the newspaper. But I think there’s a much simpler way to look at it.

Can you teach another person something they didn’t know? Is that something of value to the person?

That’s the only form of expertise you need to be worried about to create information products that enrich the world.

The Road of Knowledge

There will always be someone else — at least one more person, maybe several more — ahead of you on your road to knowledge. They will know more than you do. Don’t sweat it. Instead, realize that those people are your teachers and mentors.

There are also people behind you on the road to knowledge — and you are their teacher and mentor. They can learn from you. You don’t have to know every last thing there is to know about a topic to offer them helpful information.

Your fifth grade teacher didn’t know everything there was to know about mathematics, but he or she was still able to teach you math.

Did you ever say to your math teacher, “You know nothing about string theory! How can you teach me long division?” Of course not.

The knowledge he or she had was perfectly suited to your needs at the time. There was value in what your teacher could share with you despite the fact that it wasn’t the be all and end all of math.

In fact, if it had been the be all and end all, the information would have been useless to you. You weren’t ready for all that. You were ready for long division.

It’s the same with information products. There are students at different levels of study. For every level, there is a teacher needed.

Don’t stay quiet, thinking you have nothing to offer because someone else has more. There is room in the world for more than one teacher on any given topic. In fact, there has to be. Who has the time or energy to reach 6 billion people all on their own?

If you’re going to wait until you’re the acknowledged grand poobah and supreme expert in the universe, you will never create an information product. You’ll be waiting forever. And all the knowledge you do have will be lost to the world.

Who Are You Not To Shine?

Do you still question what you have to offer? Perhaps these words from Marianne Williamson’s book, A Return To Love, will help.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure… We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?… Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.

Remember those words anytime you find yourself thinking, “Who am I to write a book about this?” or “What makes me think I can create a tape set about that?”

Your playing small doesn’t serve the world! It doesn’t help the people behind you on the road. Don’t hide. Don’t wait. Share what you know.

© 2003 Juiced Consulting Turn your expertise into money-making information products like books, audio tapes and teleclasses! Juiced Consulting shows you how. For a free e-zine and other resources, visit www.juicedconsulting.com.

Are You An Expert At What You Do? is a post from Women's Business Gallery

Even if you’re a solo entrepreneur, you want your customers to identify you as the “go-to” person in your field. That’s what brand identity does: It helps differentiate you from the competition–it tells your customers, “This is who I am and what I stand for, and this is my approach to business.”

But how do you, the small business owner, go about building your brand? Do you have to spend big bucks on an image consulting firm or a public relations company? The short answer is: no. What you basically have to do is figure out exactly what your core product or service is, and then decide what direction to go in order to achieve the maximum profit potential from it.

According to expert Vickie Sullivan (www.sullivanspeaker.com), you need to:

1. Determine your business model (what do you do–what do you have to offer–what are your strengths?)

2. Identify revenue streams (what are the different ways you can make money from your expertise)

3. Establish your manifesto (”put your flag in the ground”: This is what I do and this is my approach)

4. Plan strategies for executing your business model

She calls this strategic planning “Marketing Intelligence” — plotting your course by looking at the marketplace to see which segment you should target to make the most money from what you do. After all, you deserve to make top dollar for your services, so it only makes sense to approach the customers who can afford to pay what you’re worth, right? This method emphasizes your approach rather than the tools you’ll use to implement your plan. In other words, identifying the highest paying segment of your market will help you determine what product or service to offer, and what marketing methods you should use to reach that segment.

When you think about it, this is a great way to figure out how to build brand identity. You’ll use only those marketing methods that target the kind of customers you want to sell to, and you can customize your “brand” using the tools best suited for attracting those particular people.

Marketing tools can include:

• The media (local, national, or international)

• A website

• Publications (books you’ve written, articles written about you)

• Promotional materials (company brochure, trade show giveaways, direct mail)

Regardless of the tools you use, your message, or signature style, will remain consistent–it’s your platform, or brand identity, expressed in your slogan, logo, elevator speech, sales pitch, etc. When you develop your style that says: “This is who I am and this is my approach,” you’ve established your brand identity.

Branded! How To Build Brand Identity is a post from Women's Business Gallery