Your corporate brand isn’t where you know it needs to be to match up to your best-in-class competitors. What should you do about it this year?
That’s between you, your marketing department, and probably your corporate board. For inspiration, consider these strategies that have already borne fruit for companies like yours.
Set Up a Free Profile on Crunchbase
Start by setting up a free profile on Crunchbase, a high-authority business directory for companies, key employees, and investors. The Crunchbase profile for Freeway Insurance is a great example of the possibilities for consumer-facing businesses, but don’t sleep on the potential of individual Crunchbase profiles either. Your key employees deserve all the visibility they can get.
Make Every Iota of Digital Detail Correct and Up-to-Date
A lot of information about your company is floating around the Internet right now. How much of it is accurate and up-to-date?
All of it, if you have anything to say on the matter. On digital domains that you own or control, invest in a concerted effort to catalogue and correct corporate information that’s out of date or flat-out inaccurate. Reach out to third party domain owners with polite requests to update their own websites or social media profiles.
Apply for Contributorships at High-Visibility Online Publications
No, this isn’t a viable side gig. While top business publications like Forbes and Inc have vast networks of business contributors, those networks are separate and distinct from their traditional journalism activities. These publications pay their staff writers and editors; they don’t throw their corporate contributors a dime.
That shouldn’t stop you from applying for these opportunities, though. They offer you a rare opportunity to shape the conversation around your brand without keeping a PR firm on retainer (or paying a higher retainer than you already do) or taking a gamble on earned media. Perhaps more importantly for companies that live and die by the strength of their reputations and relationships, these contributorships are golden opportunities to burnish your thought leadership credentials. Write about what you know, do it well, and you’ll go far.
Join or Start a Facebook Group for Your Customers
Don’t know how to start a Facebook group? It’s painfully easy. And, if you follow through on growing, organizing, and managing the group effectively, it could be a huge boost to your marketing efforts.
The ideal Facebook group has real and immediate utility for your customers. Perhaps it’s a forum for end-users to troubleshoot common issues with your products or a place for serious buffs to devise new uses for your solutions. The sky’s the limit.
Join or Start a LinkedIn Group for Your Customers
Seeing double? Your customers aren’t. It may be true that your business utilizes Facebook and LinkedIn equally in its marketing efforts, but it’s more likely to be the case that one or the other is more important. B2B firms generally find LinkedIn more useful than Facebook, although the latter’s reach is such that there may be utility in pursuing customers on the Western world’s most popular social media network.
In any case, the same general principles apply on LinkedIn as on Facebook. Devote real thought to making your group as engaging and useful to prospects and customers as you can; the more value they’re able to extract from it, the more likely they’ll be to return again and again and again.
Publish at Least One Piece of Original Content on LinkedIn Each Week
LinkedIn has a robust array of publishing tools that don’t require an advanced degree to operate. Aside from Medium and WordPress, it’s arguably the most user-friendly publishing platform in widespread use. It’s also one of the most widely read, so take full advantage.
Cross-Post Your LinkedIn Content on Medium (And Publish Medium-Original Content Too)
Give your brand a bigger mouthpiece by cross-posting your longform LinkedIn content on your corporate Medium page. Although you’ll get some crossover, many of your Medium readers won’t ever venture over to your LinkedIn portal, and vice versa.
Devote resources to publishing Medium-only content, too. This is a great way to cultivate a base of readers that view you as a true thought leader in your industry, not just another talking head on LinkedIn. Medium’s underexploited visual publishing tools add sorely needed variety to text-heavy treatises, giving them more creative upside than LinkedIn posts.
Create a Subscription Newsletter and Make It as Easy as Possible for Website Visitors to Sign Up
Pop-ups are annoying, to be sure, but they’re also a necessary evil at times. To wit: serving a newsletter sign-up to all website visitors as soon as they land on your site is a no-brainer, even if many first-time visitors see it as a transient annoyance.
Make Your Corporate Blog a Community Affair
Your corporate blog isn’t only a venue for you to talk at your site visitors. It’s an opportunity to have a real conversation with your customers and prospects — and to set up a reciprocal channel of communication with your industry peers. Invite fellow thought leaders to contribute to your blog, and they may just do the same for you.
Produce One Blockbuster Piece of Content Per Quarter
This might be a 50-page white paper that dives deep into the weeds of an issue of deep importance to your customers, or a case study underscoring (over and over) the value of one of your solutions. Whatever it is, make sure it’s polished and professional-grade.
Put the “Social” Back in Social Media
Social media hasn’t always lived up to its promise. Do your part to turn the tide by investing in live engagement with your followers. On Twitter, that means hosting a tweetchat Q&A at least once per month. On Instagram, that means rocking a daily or weekly IG Live broadcast. On Facebook, same deal: The little-known Facebook Live tool is a fantastic way to stay in touch with far-flung followers.
A Better Brand Awaits. How Will You Get There?
Burnishing your corporate brand isn’t rocket science. But it does require a concerted effort. Which of the strategies outlined here will you pursue first — and which do you believe will ultimately take your positioning efforts to the heights you’ve always known they could achieve?
