Top 10 Branding Articles in 2014

Have you ever wondered which Persona Branding and Design articles are the most popular with readers?

We’re always interested to see which of our posts resonate most with you. Even though we do lots of research and planning, there are no guarantees which topics will get the most attention.

Today we’re giving you an exclusive peek into our top ten most popular posts of 2014, some of which you might have missed.

I know you’ll find at least one that will be very useful to your business.

Enjoy!

 

  Top 10 Branding Articles 2014

  

 

1: Top 20 Branding Trends for 2015

As 2014 draws to an end, now is the time to review, revamp, and update your branding strategies for the year to come. Successful branding is the key to driving business growth and profitability – and in 2015, it will be more important than ever to have a strong, thriving brand.

 

2: 30 Ways to Differentiate Your Brand

Building a strong brand is the undisputed key to success in today’s business world, and robust differentiation is an absolute must to build a powerful and compelling brand. There are many ways you can differentiate your brand. The skill lies is developing and applying the most effective brand differentiation strategy in a way that appropriately reflects your brand’s personality, values, promise, way of doing things and key characteristics.

 

3: Rebranding: How to Make It Through a Rebrand and Emerge Stronger

Brands are not static, unchanging identities – the most successful brands live and breathe, evolving along with changing shifts in market tastes, trends and demands. Rebranding or brand revitalisation, when properly planned and implemented, can be a powerfully effective strategy for rescuing or reinventing a failing brand, jump-starting a stagnant brand, expanding your markets, or initiating substantial business growth. A rebrand may be subtle or evolutionary in nature, or it may involve radically transforming a product, service, or entire brand.

 

4: Brand Audit: Tips for Determining Your Brand’s Health – Can It Be Improved?

Have your sales hit a slump? Are hot new brands drawing your customers away? If your brand seems to have lost its shine, it may be time for a brand audit or brand health check. Brand audits are effectively a health check for your brand. These comprehensive, honest evaluations look at the overall effectiveness of a brand and its current position in the market compared with the competition, as well as pinpointing inconsistencies and weakness, and identifying potential areas for improvement.

 

5: Packaging Design: How It Can Make or Break Your Brand

Research shows that you have less than 9 seconds to engage your customer and close the sale. In a fast-paced and highly competitive world, packaging design has become one of the most crucial elements for communicating your brand and standing out from the competition. Your brand might be the best in its category, but without packaging that grabs your target audience, customers won’t investigate your product to find out more or see what’s inside.

 

6: Brand Naming: Top Ten Methods for Brand Name Creation

Brand Naming is all about strategic rationale, not emotion and not politics. It’s your first impression so it’s critical you get it right. A good name is a compact easy-to-communicate piece of information. It grabs peoples’ attention and makes them want to know more and it carries a hugely significant portion of your brand recognition all on its own. 

 

7: Brand Personality: Is Your Brand’s Character Big Enough to Compete?

Creating a brand with an authentically strong character is central to your branding strategy success. Just as people can be larger than life, a brand’s personality can take on a life of its own. Creating a brand with an authentically strong character is central to your branding strategy success and effectively the decider between just another average price fighter or a truly magnetic and profitable brand.

 

8: Brand Promises: Are You Consistently Delivering Yours?

A brand promise is what your company or brand commits to delivering for everyone who interacts with you. A strong brand promise describes how people should feel when they interact with your brand, how your company delivers its products or services, and what sort of character your company embodies. Is your brand promise authentically ‘walking the walk’?

 

 

9. Branding Amazon: 3 Lessons to Learn For Your Brand Success

Amazon is one of the most recognizable companies in the world, occupying and serving more global regions than any other organization. While your company may not have the reach and capabilities of Amazon just yet, there are still several branding lessons you can take away from the mega-store’s strategies, positioning and brand management.

 

 Ceo Leaders Logos

 

10: CEO Brand Leadership: How Does Your Leadership Impact Your Brand?

The company leader is the single most powerful influencer on branding, the visionary and voice behind the brand, particularly in a small, medium or large businesses (SMEs). Phil Knight, Sir Richard Branson, Maxine Clark and Johnny Earle are all very different visionary leaders behind their brands but they have shared characteristics – the secrets to their incredible brands success.

 

 

Which is your favourite?

• Do you have a preferred article from Persona Branding and Design that didn’t make the top 10 list?

• Which of these top 10 posts did you find most useful?

 

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments! We love to hear from you!

 

 

Top 12 Successful Blog Writing Tips to Achieve Bigger Sales Opportunities

Following our Winning Best Blog Award Ireland 2012 of an SME end of last year we’ve had numerous enquiries on the how’s, do’s and don’ts of writing a compelling business blog consistently. I was also asked to write a similarly themed article for the Irish Tatler Business Annual 2013 so I thought you might find it useful if I shared with you some of the recently published tips.

 

The list compiled is by no means all encompassing but gives you a good reference point to get started or review your blogging activities to date.

 

Top 12 Most Successful Blog Writing Tips to Achieve Bigger and Better Sales 

 

:: 1. Know and define the target audience for your blog content, be they customers or prospects. One of the major reasons blogs fail is because the content is not relevant to its readers, or the target audience needs are not properly understood. This should be an important part of your brand marketing strategy.

 

:: 2. Create a writing calendar, know your content, marketing, social media and blogging goals. Plan 4-6 months ahead (broadly the year) and if you have notable industry events, seasonal relevance or cultural occasions during the year that are relevant to your target business audience make sure appropriate, brand congruent, topics feature around those times. You can always adapt and change if something topical happens in the market place but planning ensures you have a defined strategy on which it all hangs.

 

:: 3. Post consistently and frequently and keep your content congruently on topic by ensuring you post information that really meets your customers needs and solves their problems. Apply the 80:20 rule, 80% adding value and serving your customers and only 20% about you (your products, launches, case studies etc.). It gets awfully boring visiting a blog that is ‘me me’ orientated and offers no real value to the reader.

 

:: 4. Incorporate your blog into your company or organizations website. If you’re using your blog to support your inbound marketing, integrating its URL into your main website address is very important.

 

:: 5. Seamlessly integrate you branding into your blog both in terms of voice, language used, personality, character and values coupled with corporate brand style guides and visual appeal.

 

:: 6. Add relevant imagery, audio and video clips to make your blog more appealing and support the story being told. Good photos, video clips and sound tracks help attract and retain the readers’ attention.

 

 Blogging For Business Irish Tatler 2012

 

:: 7. Optimise your content for keyword search but don’t be tempted to keyword stuff. Ensure you write for the reader not the Google robots.

 

:: 8. Break up your content into bite size chunks and smaller paragraphs. Writing for online is very different to white paper reports or book writing. Use bulleting and bolding where appropriate. Reader attention span is much shorter online.

 

:: 9. Link your blog posts to appropriate products or services elsewhere on your website. Don’t assume your readers will find those gems. Make it easy for them.

 

:: 10. Research your content and facts but remember to respect other peoples’ intellectual property and copyright. It’s important to provide attribution or reference and links where appropriate.

 

:: 11. Proactively share your blog content across social media platforms as well as feeds, email and newsletters to increase your reach and draw your audience in.

 

:: 12. Track your blog to measure its effectiveness in terms of lead generation, traffic, sales and ROI.

 

Above all ‘Think Big! The sky is not the limit when there are footprints on the moon’. Make your blog a core part of your brand and business strategy and you will reap the rewards.

 

Feel free to get in touch or leave your comments below. We’d love to hear your feedback.

 

If you have any questions or need some brand direction for your blogging strategy then please don’t hesitate to get in touch E: [email protected] or T: +353 1 8322724

 

Wishing you growing success as your blog and your brand become No.1 in your target market.

 

*This is part of an article written by Lorraine Carter, listed as one of the Top 1,000 Women of Influence in Ireland, and published in Irish Tatler Business Annual 2013.

  

 Irish Tatler 2012 Annual Cover 

 

 

Winner Best Blog Award Ireland 2012, of an SME

The Blog Awards Ireland were held last month and much to our huge surprise and honour we Won the Best Blog of an SME, Ireland 2012.

 

 Winner Blog Awards Ireland

 

Having only belatedly discovered the level of entries and read the judging criteria applied we’re feeling even more thrilled and privileged to have been chosen. 

 

Unfortunately due to being overseas at the time we actually missed the awards night. However Sage, the sponsor, delighted us by recently presenting us with our award at their offices.  

 

Lorraine Carter Persona Design 

 Lorraine Carter of Persona Branding & Design presented with her Blog Awards Trophy

at Sage offices by Sage Digital and Marketing Manager, Avril McArdle

 

Thanks again to all the organisers, volunteers and sponsors of Blog Awards Ireland and congratulations to all the other category winners too. To take a look at some of those fantastic blogs check out the other category winners on the Blog Awards Ireland website. They are definitely worth reading.