Welcome to our branding and marketing blog
This is the best place to learn how we think as creative and strategic communicators. You’ll find various observations and best practices about branding, design, client relations, and communications, in general. We try to keep things instructive and advisory. However, we can’t guarantee that there won’t be a rant or rave once in a while. So, please cut us some slack.
FEATURED BLOG POST
15 marketing reality checks (Don’t let #9 hurt your feelings.)
by Step2 Branding & Design
Over the years, we’ve been offering helpful tips and best practices advice through our branding blog. Here, we’ve collected a number of the more salient points and are presenting them as a marketing reality check. A good number of these apply to new or small businesses.
Branding and marketing blog posts
Does it really come down to budget?
Running a successful business relies heavily on managing resources and using them wisely. But certain marketing essentials require investments and should be treated as such. In fact, many of them are prerequisites to profitability.
“I know a guy…”
Networking is not just about making connections and creating awareness of your business. It’s also about forming an alliance of credible professionals to help you fill organizational gaps and be able to confidently refer others.
What’s in a name, anyway?
If your business is like ours, you don’t have a bottomless marketing budget to build awareness of a name that lacks clarity. We have to be more calculated and deliberate.
Keep the change
Evolving technology keeps all of us on our collective toes, makes us more aware of our competitors and presents more opportunities to distinguish ourselves than ever before. Moreover, it adversely impacts those who fail to embrace it.
Are you growing your circle of influence?
Your circle of influence should not be confined to your immediate sales prospects. That’s not what marketing in the 21st Century is about.
Unclutter your marketing view
To succeed in marketing, we need to avoid the distractions and focus on the fundamentals. We need to pull ourselves out of the bubble in which we live to see ourselves the way others see us. It’s this uncluttered view that helps bring the clarity and objectivity that lead us to a sound strategy.