The main difference between branding and advertising

The most challenging aspect of any marketing person is to make a prospective client understand the difference between branding and advertising. In a nut shell, branding is reputation building and advertising is selling your product or service, or if you like;

Branding is about you. and advertising is about what you sell.

Yet for lesser established brands to create a brand, is such a long term process and is very difficult to see a monetary reward for the hard work it entails. However if you are in it for the long term you must have a long term strategy. There is a new career out there for social media marketing people and bloggers; I have recently seen a blue chip company in London asking for content marketing staff paying over the average salary for this kind of recruitment.

Some business people will ignore online branding and as they are doing well with the clients they already have, and after all they didn’t get them on social media did they, so why is it at all important? Research states that 89% of people will look you up online before they meet you, so your online brand is out there, whether you like it or not.

I recently showed a restaurant manager his foursquare profile, and he was shocked to see what people have said about his establishment, and could have easily explained his recent drop in profit. Sure, nothing beats face to face selling, yet some may be shocked to know that 90% of my appointments are made online, before I have even met the prospect.

One aspect of branding is article writing for your web site and other websites. Google tells us that content is the new SEO and it will always favour content rich websites like blogs and forums over ordinary websites with a home, about us, contact etc. So, what should you write, where and how long?   These are the questions  I am asked a lot.

Cash flow is imperative for any small business or SME’s, so employing a content writer on £30,000 a year may not be frugal right now, thus I advise one blog a week 500-1500 words posted on a separate blog that feeds into your standard selling website and then posted on social media will take approximately two hours a week of your time, done for around 3 months and you should start to see some of your keywords searches  near the top on Google as long as your keyword is not ‘insurance’ or another highly competitive keyword. If you are in Insurance you’ve got to fight on the pay per click arena of Google, or aim at a topical yet medium-competition key phrase.

The key also is to write for people and be passionate about what should you write? One thing is for certain, don’t sell, but give away tricks and tips, oh sure you can go to India and get those nice people to write a blog with all the keywords in for $1 for 100 words but I will be like a 10 year old has written it, and sure maybe it can fool Google and get you high on the search engine, but:

Let’s see how many human customers that blog converts, and isn’t that the entire point??

As I always said the day a Google robot can feel emotion and buy something with real cash is the day I outsource all my blogs!!

To learn how to set up a separate blog and start writing content rich articles to bring in targeted traffic to your business contact netmediauk