Social Media Marketing

4 Great Online Resources for Brand Management

Brand management isn’t as easy as everyone says it is. It requires tons of effort, a watchful eye, an impressive understanding of marketing and hours’ worth of work every day. This can get tedious, and it’s very easy to get burnt out – at least, if you don’t have any help, that is.

Luckily thanks to the Internet age there are tons of blogs and sites dedicated to helping you stay on top of your brand management game. These are only four incredible resources you can use, so start with these and always be on the hunt for more.

The HubSpot Blog

Want brand management, marketing and sales best practices right at your fingertips? What about helpful hints and pieces of advice to help your business run better? The HubSpot blog contains tons of curated content from industry writers who know what they’re talking about when it comes to business betterment topics.

Every day HubSpot posts numerous pieces of quality content that pertain to any number of subjects – from how to create a better social media brand image, to the top five reasons you need to be on LinkedIn, they’ve covered it. This makes it an incredible resource for brand management best practices.

Google Alerts

Brand management means knowing who’s talking about you, where and why. When you go to Google your name or business, sites like your social media accounts and main site hub should be first, but do you know what else ranks along with your name?

Google Alerts are an excellent way to keep on top of this essential information. Anytime content ranks that mentions you, Google sends you a notification so you can keep tabs on your brand image. This is how brand management professions stay ahead of bad press and also celebrate good reviews and testimonials.

Canva

Brand management isn’t just about staying on top of a brand, but also elevating the brand through content and other forms of marketing. If you want to delve into content marketing for your own brand in order to help boost its image, Canva is a great place to start.

Canva is a free-to-use online platform that allows for innovative image editing, including creating banners, visual resumes and infographics that can be used for marketing purposes. The quality of these images is impeccable, and Canva comes with tons of preloaded templates to help make your life easier.

Wishpond

This easy-to-use marketing platform includes tools that can be added to a website to offer features like intelligent forms, popups, and automation. These also include native integrations that helps sales, marketing, management, and promotion through both email and social channels.

Essentially Wishpond is your one stop shop for brand management through innovation and lead generation. Anyone who wants to market a product, a brand, a business or a service can do incredible things with only a few of Wishpond’s add-ons, let alone their complete arsenal of branding tools. Wishpond has also worked with famed brands, like Vervegirl and Diamond Candles.

Facebook; Using the Social Media Application to Engage Current + Future Clients

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Why Facebook

There’s tons of buzz about Twitter, Pinterest, and even using apps like Instagram to promote your business and engage current or future clients. Twitter is growing by the day, and many celebs have already unofficially made the move to it as the preferred way to blast their opinion, or current happenings.

The reason why we’re going to focus on Facebook in this article is that while changing every day; it is still one of the “go to” or iconic hotspots in the social media industry, the one that supposedly “almost everyone” is a member of. Also, with Facebook, business pages upload photos very easily, and video as well. If you choose to allow comments, your friends and customers talk about what they like, what they may buy, and the points of interest of your products.

Get in the Game

I recently spoke with someone who was hesitant to put his business on Facebook because he was looking at the TV channel “AMC”, who has a very prominent Facebook and social media presence.

While looking at the page, he saw a lot of negative feedback. There were fans and other people commenting on posts very negatively, things like, “We don’t give a crap about Mad Men, only Breaking Bad!” Or: “It really sucks that you guys have so many commercials now instead of content!” Let’s look at a few things. AMC, whether you love or hate them, has plenty of content. Trust us. They do. They put money into it, they shoot it, produce it, and it is above average. If a few folks make bad comments, it does not matter. They will be buried soon by other comments and frankly, life goes on with your startup or business.

This individual was afraid to put his business on Facebook because he didn’t have the time to field negative comments and the like such as “Used your business, didn’t do anything for me”. Well, revolutionary brands like Sony and Verizon have had people complaining about them, but they still need an online presence and generate tons of revenue. DO NOT worry about petty folks who comment all day and try to drag you down.

Whatever product or service you’re marketing, eventually as long as you do not have a home office in a dank dungeon and provide some form of reliable craft, these things really do iron themselves out. A lot of business owners are hesitant to get on Facebook because they picture it as just gossip; things they do not care about being updated in the news feed. Sometimes when you are using Facebook to engage clients, it is hard to track the results. Let’s say you run a pet grooming business.

Ideas for Utilizing Facebook

So every third or fourth day, you run pictures of cute pets, and different tips on how to groom them, even at home. You slowly add suggestive advertising, like the fact that your store is running a special or has a great new certified employee. The thing about Facebook is that yes, you have your business phone number on the page and some customers will call directly from that, but otherwise you are passively AND actively marketing at the same time.

That is, you may not know when your business picks up directly because of your Facebook activity; you may not know if a cute picture of pet or relevant post about grooming got them to call. But, since for now, Facebook is free to join, it is imperative to have a business page, add friends, post videos, and reach out in general.

Tips for Facebook

The purveying fear about joining Facebook as a business is some people won’t like your giveaways, sponsors, announcements, and everything that avenue entails. It really will be ok.. you almost have to face the fear of negative publicity, as much as it may remind you of celebrity train wrecks and the like. With Facebook, if you choose you can disable comments, when a storm comes with negativity, you can get back on track quickly. For something like a photography business, Facebook rules.

You can post video, pics, opinions, quickly and it shows up in end user’s news feeds. And that’s the most important quality of Facebook, when someone “Likes” something or posts a response, it shows up in others newsfeeds, directly to their smartphone. We will look at tweeting and others soon…but Facebook is not going anywhere. Keep your business page separate from your personal, and prosper. Well, we know Spock said something like that, but we really do mean it.