management – Page 2

How to Build Your Brand

We’ll start with the basics: What is a brand, anyway?

A brand is a representation of your relationship with your customers. It determines how they view and interact with your business. Put another way, your brand is like a promise.

Since the Internet has become a critical place for traffic and information, building an online relationship with your customers through a brand is imperative as you strive to make your business successful. To improve this relationship, you need to make sure your business is doing everything possible to build the brand and create a reputation.

So how do you use branding to build your business? How do you create a positive image so customers will feel a connection and sense of loyalty?

Think about your customers first

Before you can think about how your business will look online, determine what your customers want. Think about what will appeal to your customers when you start devising a business marketing strategy. For example, the types of colors that would attract them, the kinds of messages they like to hear, and the kinds of products they’re likely to buy. Once you have an idea of what your customers want in a brand, you can craft your image for them.

Think about what makes you unique

Before your customers can figure out why they’re going to choose your business over another one, you need to determine what makes it stand out among the rest. When you pinpoint your company’s strengths, you can use them to your advantage when creating your brand. On the Internet especially, your business needs to distinguish itself from all the rest, and promoting what makes you unique is the best way to market your business.

The logo

Logos are an excellent tool to help craft your image. Logos are symbols and they can generate an emotional response from your customers, if you build the right context around them. What emotional response do you want from your customers? A feeling of calm or confidence? Excitement? Strength? Think about how you feel about your business. How can you translate that into a logo?

The slogan

To your customers, your brand represents a message, or a set of values, that they can internalize when they purchase your product. A slogan can help your brand create this message. The one-line slogan that you choose will be how customers remember your business and identify with it through a single idea. Incidentally, you don’t have to have a slogan, and you don’t have to use the same slogan forever either. Most of the hamburger chains you know and love change their slogans for every campaign.

Get your brand out there

Once you have your desired image for your brand, you need to make your business widely known. This means putting your brand in front of your customers everywhere they’re likely to be. Forbes publishes a list of the world’s most valuable brands, and you probably know most, if not all of them. Consider where you’ve seen their advertisements, and then consider who they’re trying to reach. How can you apply that process to your own brand?

Consistency

Brands become familiar over time, and can even provide a sense of comfort. Once you build a brand, you build a relationship with your customers that rests on a foundation of reliability and consistency. So long as you maintain that consistency, you will be able to maintain your relationship with your customers and build a brand following online. And that, as you can see by the numbers on that Forbes list, can be worth millions.

What is Ghostwriting?

Have you ever wondered how celebrities—surrounded by paparazzi, traveling around the world on tours, and balancing family and relationships—can possibly send out hilarious tweets every five minutes?

In most cases, these celebrities can barely spare a minute for social media or website content. Instead, they hire “ghostwriters”—people who produce content under the celebrity’s name. Many celebrities, businesses, and authors use ghostwriters to regularly produce mass amounts of content in short periods of time. By constantly posting online articles, tweets, blog posts, and other texts on the Internet, major brands keep audiences continuously engaged with the content to bring in revenue for advertisers.

Ghostwriting is not exclusively for celebrities or social media, but it’s easy to conceptualize the author-ghostwriter relationship using the analogy of a celebrity-writer relationship. The author’s name is a brand, similar to a celebrity, company, or product. This brand needs a public image. This image, in turn, needs to be positive and interactive, and one that engages with the audience and keeps it returning to increase traffic for revenue. Because the Internet is a space that offers nonstop communication and access, the brand needs to constantly maintain this image online. This is nearly impossible for one person to accomplish alone. To help the brand keep that attention, popular names will hire workers to maintain this image under the brand’s name. In publishing, the brand name is considered the “author,” while the person who produces the content under the author’s name is the “ghostwriter.” Not all authors use ghostwriters, but it is a common practice in today’s fast-paced publishing world.

Anyone can hire a ghostwriter for whatever part of the writing process needs work. For example, authors with an excellent idea might not have the time to write a book on their own, or they might lack the skills needed to put their ideas into words. This is where ghostwriting comes in: authors will hire a ghostwriter to use their preexisting idea to write the content. Sometimes, ghostwriting can be a way for authors to overcome writer’s block. Ghostwriters can also bring fresh ideas to the piece beyond the author’s initial vision. Whatever the reason, there is a large market for freelance writing work.

The process is collaborative and involves regular communication between the author and the ghostwriter. The author informs the ghostwriter of the requirements for the piece. It is up to authors to decide how much information they decide to give. They can provide the writer with as much as multiple pages of detailed research notes, or as little as a generalized topic that the writer must then research and write about. The two parties then need to build this relationship and maintain regular communication to remain on the same page.

For the author, hiring a ghostwriter provides an opportunity to focus on other aspects of the publishing process. Authors have many other responsibilities, such as promotions, sales, and contract negotiation. Writing in itself takes up a large chunk of the time needed to publish and create a brand. This time could easily be delegated to a professional ghostwriter, allowing the author to produce high-quality work quickly and efficiently while keeping the author’s original voice.

The Role of the Copywriter

The importance of copywriters and how hiring one can enhance your business

For as long as the English language has been transcribed onto paper, there has been a constant need for content writing. We need written language to record events, converse over long distances, and, most importantly, share information. Unfortunately, with different points of view and various language systems, the flow of information can get misconstrued if not presented correctly.

To solve this problem, people have studied the art of language. There are those who can manipulate words to persuade—people who can string a sentence together to create a precise image or give perfect instructions. These experts understand how other humans interpret information, and they can tailor their writing to meet the needs of the audience. This is the role of the copywriter.

Copywriting is a profession typically associated with advertising and sales. The job of a copywriter is to take information and create a piece of writing that can convey it in an engaging, creative, and informative way. While a large percentage of copywriting jobs are in advertising, copywriters are not limited to this field; instead, there are a variety of jobs a copywriter can choose from:

Advertising

This is the field most commonly associated with copywriting, as there is a wide variety of writing opportunities in various media. Many copywriters create slogans and write print ads for companies or products. The writer’s ability to use concise words helps to create persuasive material that grabs an audience’s attention. By understanding how the audience absorbs information, copywriters can also create scripts for radio and TV commercials. Advertising, in general, is the ideal industry for a successful copywriter because of this unique opportunity to influence the public with language.

Business

Outside of advertising and public relations, there are other opportunities in business for copywriters. Many businesses need professional communication specialists to write company reports and draw up proposals for products and events so that they can be effectively communicated to management. Just as important, management must communicate with its employees, so copywriters will also write newsletters and informative in-house documents. Copywriters can increase workplace efficiency by making the paths of communication within the business clearer. This will ultimately help the business create a defined and understandable method of communication any time it needs to reach an understanding.

Internet

As with advertising and business communications work, copywriters can find job opportunities in the online industry, where they can interact with their audience. Through the use of blogs and social media, copywriters are required to communicate with their audience both quickly and accurately. They are also required to constantly monitor these online platforms in order to respond to their audience if contacted. This direct interaction is a huge advantage for copywriters. Because they are able to speak to the readers firsthand about their content, copywriters can get the public’s opinion about the message they are trying to convey. Writers are also required to regularly update these online platforms by creating content with the specific purpose of engaging with the audience while also meeting search engine optimization (SEO) requirements. Copywriters need to incorporate popular and searchable keywords and phrases to increase their likelihood of being found through an online search engine. Being able to cater to both the audience and the technology in a timely, consistent fashion is a challenge, but it presents more opportunities for copywriting work than ever before.