DOES YOUR BRAND NEED BOOT CAMP?

Online content and marketing strategies are continuously evolving and changing. In today’s competitive environment, remaining still can cause your brand to get swept away in the current. Just treading water isn’t a viable strategy, either. Stagnancy and complacency in business are productivity killers. Is your brand strategy feeling a bit stale lately? Then you may need a brand boot camp.

1. Positioning
Understanding and capitalizing on what makes your brand unique can breathe new life into your marketing strategies. Unless you have an incredibly, remarkably, earth-shatteringly different product or service never seen before, you have to position your brand.

What does this look like? Well, for starters, you want to differentiate your product or service from your main competitors. Why should a customer choose your offering over the other company’s offering?

On the flipside, you want to see what your competitors have that you don’t. Do they have something that you need? One of the easiest ways to gain new customers and increase your audience base is to target your main competitor’s following. But, your brand will need to be more appealing than the targeted competitor.

2. Reach
How are you currently reaching your ideal customers? If you’ve noticed that new follower acquisition has stagnated, it’s time to fish in deeper, different waters. To find new places to reach people, you want to fully understand the different mediums where your brand messaging is most effectively conveyed to viewers. Look around for a popular, new platform where you could start communicating your message. Where are your competitors finding new viewers?

3. Experience

One of the most effective ways to increase your customer base and conversions is through improved customer experience. It’s crucial that you ensure a positive experience throughout the buyer’s journey. Remember, you want it to be pleasant, efficient, and offer real, valuable utility to the user. Customer experience though is not something that can be quickly or easily manipulated.  Providing valuable, useful services and products will help increase and also maintain your brand’s positive reputation.

It’s not enough to send your brand to boot camp and develop improvements for your company if you aren’t sure of your goals. Make sure you have a plan and a strategy involved when you give your brand a makeover. What experience do you want to give your customers? What end goal are each of your new developments supporting? When you have a set of clear, concrete objectives, your plans will be much easier to implement, and it will keep your team focused on the end goal.

Don’t let stagnancy and complacency sink your brand. With better positioning, improvements to the customer experience, and increased reach, you’ll breathe new life into your company with brand boot camp.

IF YOU CAN'T CONTROL IT, STOP WORRYING ABOUT IT

You have a flight to catch, a crucial flight to catch at an ungodly hour in the morning. If you miss the flight, horrible things will happen, and understandably so. Perhaps you’ll lose out on a significant contract, or worse; get fired. While your worry about the outcome of missing the flight is rational, what isn’t logical is worrying yourself sick about missing the flight.

How so?

Well, have you taken reasonable precautions to ensure you’ll catch your flight on time? Do you know where your tickets, necessary paperwork, and identification is? Is everything packed and ready to go? Do you have a ride to get there, or do you have your vehicle where none of the tires are flat, and the ignition starts to get you there? Will you leave early enough?

If you answered ‘yes’ to everything, then all of your other worrying is nonessential. If you’ve taken care of everything on your end of the deal, any other mitigating factors are out of your control.

Can you control traffic or traffic accidents? No. Worrying about things that you have no power over will not stop them from happening. All you can do is make the right choices and decisions to reasonably prevent disasters and mishaps on your end, and also rationally and calmly handle problems when and if they do arise.

Sometimes, we think that excessively worrying about the improbable will prevent it from happening. Of course, magic doesn’t exist and worrying will not shield you from life’s accidents.

And what if you are in the creative industry?

Do worry and anxiety help or hinder the creative process? According to research, fear, anxiety, and pessimism are huge stumbling blocks for creatives. Worry takes up far too much mental headspace, leaving no room for problem solving or for brainstorming new ideas. While you can’t control every horrible outcome, you can control how much you dwell on them and how much power you give them over your life.

If you want to have more optimism and energy, let go of harmful worry and rumination today. Take responsibility for what you can control, and forget about that which you cannot. You’ll boost your energy and creative output, and be seen as a trustworthy, capable leader in your industry.