Rebranding fever 2010

2010 is just around the corner and with it come all kinds of warm reflections time and great strategy advice about what we should be doing and what we should avoid.

December was full of rebranding projects. We helped 10 brands – most of which with over a decade of history – to start the New Year with rebranded identity and websites (links and case studies coming soon).
After thousands of answered question concerning their brand strategy, web architecture, site structure, layout, design, content, ranking, long-tail keyword clusters, tags and gadgets…in the end of the day the formula of industry perfection, profit explosion and business optimization is brilliantly simple and repeatable:

   80% quality traffic share
+ 80% customer’s mindshare
= 80% marketshare

Not only to survive, but to grow and thrive the highly challenging “downturn” economy, we need a systematic approach and focus to identify the current values and capitalize on new opportunities, far ahead of the competition.

So, what will work for 2010 is absolutely the same top 10 trends, which worked perfectly in the last 3 years:

Brand strategy – a clear and solid foundation for your sales. Leverage all channels and maximize your current resources and business growth activities with measurable, brand performance metrics.

Innovation – creative thinking, mindmapping, drawing, playing music – one hour a day, away from the stressfull  office meetings and negotiations.

World-class design. Good design means clarity, clearly differentiated value proposition, performance, function and service, sales and trust. Quality in products, customer experience and content is the king. Brand reputation through word-of-mouth – the queen. Satisfied customers – the key to repeat business.

Budget & time to cut operating costs – everything which helps to cut costs and improve performance. Focus on what you do best and outsource the rest. The core fundamentals – strategy, KPI’s and most profitable customers. Outsource areas that are not your business’ core competencies. Let the experts do the work. They are better, faster and more cost-effective.

Digital media as the main channel for reaching your customers. Web & mobile are now mainstream, faster, cheaper and easier to target your perfect customers with immediate, real-time and measurable results.  Forget print and postage delays and fees. Go wireless, invest in digital and grow organic.

Reach the top of the Search. 1.3 Billions of indviduals are searching for a specific need every day. If you are not found by your target audience on the first page of Google, you don’t exist. Being on the top leads to serious sales. Digital users research and digg before they buy. Leverage Web 2.0 tools to allow the customers to engage, share, follow and become fans of the brand. Get the best brand awareness, market research and real-time knowledge about your customers for free! Local or global – search engine optimization and top ranking are sophisticated, time consuming and change on an hourly basis, so better outsource them to an expert.

Build the Brand. Top companies make absolutely certain that brand is a central management principle, the platform on which your customers make their buying decision. Any time  they touch the brand via any channel, it must consistently and credibly communicate its promise and value.

Move to the SaaS cloud, digg the CRM Database. Make sure your have a detailed platform, deeply integrated with all brand channels and Web 2.0 interfaces.The new world of permanently online, social & knowledge hunting communities provides you with endless opportunities.

Leverage the good old analytics – we define and measure progress toward critical organizational goals,  offline and online metrics, established in the strategy. Try and improve – new layouts, design, titles, copy, meta… Only  results matter.

Wherever you are, enjoy your holidays! Cheers for a great 2010!

Caffeine ranking

Caffeine ranking

Yesterday was the first clear day in a month, clear and sunny enough to dream about snowy peaks, ski vacations, Christmas and presents… after the rain is gone, one can see clearly that we all are eager and busy to update our brand platforms, deeply immersed in Google Wave or Huddle’s tags-based collaboration. The localization of our branding platform in 4 new languages runs well, the last projects for 2009 are polished on a staging server.

Recently some clients of mine have been asking about Google changing the SEO game again, why all their linkbuilding efforts crashed, why strong on-page and off-page ranking factors are so messed and interwoven, why we optimized the websites of 3 direct competitors for top3, do we provide a top3 ranking guarantee – you got the idea.

Well, after the last month updates and Google Caffeine grabbing real-time results twice faster, chances are you are not top3 anymore, your competitors grab the most of the leads (don’t worry – they don’t). With only few organic results showing up above the fold of the browsers, recent changes at Google mean top3 rankings are more valuable than ever, and SEOs will have “few” more Christmas projects.

Crawling deeper, it means that we all need a brand new victory plan for 2010, a platform foundations upgrade, regardless whether to launch a new product, rebrand your company and emerge stronger.

So, get your brand moving again and grow on your global top5 ranking mission. Still I have to admit – there are some brand-building elements, where we have to forget about precise control and “the long-term healthy future” – it’s only the clear facts and the very moment of NOW which exists. The key metrics are still the same – Authority, fresh growing Content and relevant Anchor links. Website growth rate is getting very imporant, as well as organic brand growth.

How much of your time does it take, dear Mr. CBO? An hour to set up the platform, 3 hours to train the co-workers, an hour a day for writing, updates and monitoring, permanent linkbait and snippet links stacking /scultping. Brand-building is a process, not an event.

In the end of the day it gives us 3 sweet competitive advantages to outrank and outperform the competitors: top ranking, brand awareness in thousands of web channels and a brand-crisis proof shield.

So, don’t moan – act now! Fish where the fish are, in the muddy postcrisis waters. Only after that can we escape the “unable-to-stop” collective insanity, visiting dozens of global locations, collecting music, wisdom and tribal art, inspired and creative, full of fresh energy, as in the good old school days.

December is always full with tons of professional SEO webinars and seminars, so I’m looking forward to seeing you there or on our InterNations Christmas party!

BrandBuild to the top

Life strategy? One life, Live it.

When you ask your friends if they have created a life strategy for the next week, month, year, five or even ten years – over 90% will answer No! or should I?

Yes, we should. Some of us create to-do lists, (I prefer to make not-to-do lists), other are permanently writing “business-in-recession” strategies, but do we share our life strategies? Rarely. Are you interested to prepare a life strategy, If you knew how to?

We share those mumble-grumble social network status updates that “it was a great weekend, but now it’s Monday again and I have to wait 340 more days for my next vacation“… but there is no time to think and commit to paper?

Most of my friends from the past have only shorter life horizons because it is difficult to them to look far into the future and predict an outcome.
We didn’t learned why it’s important to create a life strategy at school. It was only “I want it all and I want it now”, or “I’ll be happy if I can afford a beer tomorrow” Carpe Diem, live in the moment – spontaneous, natural and keep rolling?

Well my friends, I don’t agree. Well-being is the way you want it to be. We should be open to all possibilities and not overlook new opportunities, but how you will know WHAT’s a new opportunity if you don’t know where you are going?

A life without a strategy is like a ship without a target and reason. Your canoe will definitely sail you somewhere, but where you end up may not be where you really want to go. Or the most important part is to live every moment as though the whole world were watching?

Life strategy is not about a boxed career, income, buying a house, getting married, having kids or being a self-reliance, financial self-sufficient entrepreneur, retired as multi-millionaire at 60. It’s about the big idea, HOW to achieve the desired level of freedom, relationships, income, business, emotional and spiritual intelligence, etc.

I’m happy that most of my current friends and contacts have a life strategy, they can share it with a Tim Ferris’ DreamLine or Richard Koch’s ActionPlan in 10 minutes  and that we can compare our progress, meet for monthly happiness plan brainstorms and and we can shorten the horizon to our goals together.

Do I have one, yes, I wrote one, called Clouds (abstract, but solid foundation of clear life-goals) when I was 15-17 and it’s continually tuned every day, with every new knowledge and experience, tweaked for perfect outcome. Clearly, developing and sharing a life strategy makes a lot of sense and can be useful to all of us, which want to find something to be happy about.

Why? Because we can feel unlimited where we stand, to know that anything that we desire can be ours, that we are eager and full of life, free and fun and easy. Let’s challange our perception of personal limits and don’t let our dreams stay dreams.

Here are 10 highlights from my mid-2009 life strategy update:

In the second half of 2009 I will:

• Move from doing most of the things to what I do best and let others do the rest. (I can’t be expert on 80 things, just on 20
• Leap-frog my top5 direct competitors in the next 6 months, building and top positioning global brands with higher quality at 70% of the price.
• Increase the quality and reduce the quantity of my relationships and friend-lists by at least 30% for 6 months.
• Decrease compromising my integrity for anything or anybody to 10%.
• Decrease the communication and social noice by 60% more in 3 months.
• Say NO politely but immediately 20% more often.
• Stop expending energy on peripheral issues that cannot yield a payoff no matter the outcome.
• I’ll use pure strenghts and truth instead of trying to make true that which I love or I am weak at.
• Use free will and energy to go ahead and uphill, day after day
• Stop wasting time talking about my plans to others. Give you only 2 minutes to say what you have to say quickly and simply – then we probably stop talk/ chat? Zipping the lip.

We have all the time on this planet, but without Destination, Route and Actions, we are going nowhere.  Success is our own damn fault. So work less, succeed more, enjoy more, be more strategy-focused, less tactic-focused,  and let me know what you think.

The Revolution starts on 1st of July. You are Vellycomed to join.

Brand name & Google ranking

Corn Brand wars (1340) proof

Choosing a name for your business, domain and brand is often the single, most critical decision you will ever make. Today it’s very easy to asses a solid, long-lasting, and highly profitable name. Can your brand name hook the brains in your niche? Yes, we all know that it should be intuitive, suggestive, benefit based, semantically short, easy spelled, memorable, sweet sounding, scalable and search-engine-friendly, so you will have a chance to hook them on mnemonics. Now what?

Before and after the launch of Google’s Chrome browser, more and more people love to skip irrelevant search engine results and attempt to reach websites directly by:
- Guessing and typing presumable URL domains
- Typing common brand names
- Using the search phrase suggestion tools in their browser
- Using search trends and social media “hot trends” tools
- Following links on web 2.0 status updates, social and RSS feeds

Sure, over 80% of the traffic still comes from the search engines (presuming the website is search-engine-friendly and optimized) and the first 3 SERP results still get 86% of the traffic for any given phrase, but this trend will change and we do see dozens of exceptions to this rule in our web reports already.

Google’s latest search engine ranking algorithm places Heavy emphasis on Branding, an enormous weight on branded search results. The top in most of our customer’s web analytics reports start with brand names, good brand names, burned, branded and tattooed into the customer’s mind, even in the marketplace.

SEO is not simple as the Florida update anymore. We notice more then 5 changes in Google ranking algorithm every single week. Smart brand’s CEOs and SEOs should incorporate the BRAND as the highest “trustful-content” factor and there are increasingly important signals from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in his recent talk:

“Brands are the solution, not the problem, brands are how you sort out the cesspool, brands are not getting away, it must have a genetic component” he said.

If you love researching and reverse engineering (as I do) you can track the recent changes with hot phrases to see Google’s changes. In most of the cases brands have 7 to 9 of the first page search results for some of the most valuable keywords.

The trend is clear:  Google is promoting brands for big money core keyphrases. Further more Google’s Chrome tracks your behavior and content interaction through Google Accounts/Friends, Google Analytics, Google AdSense, Google DoubleClick/  AdWords, Google Reader, iGoogle, Feedburner, Youtube and other Giant’s channels.

Lately I see hundreds of URLs and company names, which are even hard to spell. If a customer doesn’t  agree on a name/ domain/ identity change, we reject branding or SEO services, due to poor results. It’s not necessary to start your name with a strong-sounding consonants (like the sounds of “D” and “T” in DECART), or set a song-singing rhyme in a combination of suggestive words like in “BrandBuild”, but it helps to emphasis, remember, get huge market and web authority.

The web is a vast wilderness in which your brand message can run in obscurity, so don’t work IN your business every day, work ON your brand equity and awareness and we will see us each other on the top.

Web Marketing Consultant

Wow, thank you very much for the great interest and the 340 CVs in our last top talent recruitment HR folder, but I should be clear here – we will pick only professional web marketers, who can backup their claims with observable results on the web – case studies, high-quality content, solved problems, top-ranked websites or reputable service.

Glad that you want to start a new hobby, a new digital branding career, but if you start at ground zero, there is a great chance to fail. Despite your skills and background, you will be overwhelmed with paralyzing volumes of information and digital marketing courses. Even following our blueprint, your lack of digital marketing basics will eat your time and focus.

Sure, persistence, good communication and writing style are one of the most important skills, but consulting and building successful online businesses is not equal to blasting emails, answering phone-calls and organizing cocktails. How about video, presentation or web analytics skills?

It takes years before one knows how to build successful online businesses. We just don’t have the time to spend months learning how all this works and you have bills to pay, right? Same here. Building a solid brand, successful online business or global top rankings in Google takes months and years. We look for this experience in every team-member and partner.

If you still believe you are the one, even overqualified! one, or you are an overnight-web-success-exception to all above (yes, we got few ones), please give us a call. Thank you again and hope to see you at the top!

The first-mover advantage

First Mover Advantage

Branding is not a buzzword, but the foundation for sales and success in the recent economy situation. It doesn’t matter if you are a reputable dinosaur or a brand new startup – the initial occupant of a market niche always gains the first-mover advantage.

A better product will simply sell faster. Hence, it’s not only the product or service to be sold.

A brand is the collection of feelings, perceptions, quality, image, lifestyle, delivered guarantee and global status. If you can not convince the potential customers that your product is worth, no amount of advertising, packaging or PR will help you achieve your sales goals.Your brand and customer’s mind share is the most valuable competitive edge you have, because today there is nothing that your competitors can’t duplicate in a matter of days or weeks. Creating a strong brand identity will build that mind share. Someday when you have your rock-solid identity, customers even will think of your brand first when they think of the product category.

First-mover advantage

Web strategists often talk about the first-mover advantage or FMA. In terms of brand development, by “first-mover” they mean that it is possible for the first successful brand in a market to create, move and retain a clear positioning in the minds of target customers before the competition enters the market. The first entrant can gain control of resources that followers may not be able to match. However, being first into a market does not necessarily guarantee long-term success. Competitors, drawn to the high growth and profit potential demonstrated by the “market-mover” – will enter the same niche and copy the best elements of the leader’s brand.

In the recent economic situation, first-mover advantages can arise from
1. Innovative technological breakthrough and leadership (R&D), protect it through patents or keep them as trade secrets!
2. Preemption of scarce assets (select the most attractive niches, take strategic actions, establish positions in geographic or product space)
3. Switching costs and buyer choice under uncertainty (achieve consumer trial and define the attributes that are perceived as important within your category)

Enjoy many of the characteristics of the first-mover-advantage brand, such as:
- name/brand is synonymous with the category.
- customers entering the market are more prone to default to the major player, because it is the sole entity of their business
- continues to add plans and options to your customers.

- add some free oprions for members, improve and add to their successful business, but don’t become a victim of the First Mover Disadvantages like inertia and trend-blindness!

Digital Branding

As Howard Kosgrove says, “A brand is the one thing that you can own that nobody can take away from you. Everything else, they can steal. But your brand can go on and live. It creates a lasting value above and beyond all the other elements of your business.”

Today we have billions people online and no brand is going to appeal to all of them. That’s just great and help us target our prospects in a personal manner, they even create our brand on their own. If we have the right strategy, they position accept a good position in their mind. The value is called brand equity and it really can be quantified. Businesses that build their brand online have an advantage over brands in the physical world since the opportunity to start freehand new associations – if you are fresh and new, you have a clean slate.

As a brandmover, branding new unique products are my favorite projects, since a fresh start moves easier when all brand ingredients are mixed precisely:

name, identity, benefits, price, quality (which brings loyalty), long-term perspective (instead of short-term profitability), communications, positioning, distribution, media and online presence, recognition and the results of a successful branding and top positioning campaign: increased share of market, loyalty, brand awareness and reputation

How we do that?

1. We prepare a great brand message – focused promise, backed with support and relevant to our customer’s lifestyle
2. We spread and share it on our website, direct campaigns, web 2.0 networks, blogs, tuning our digital assets for the top
3. Relevance of the message and the top positions in Google make our prospect to decide which brand they will buy and which will discard.

Research confirms that, statistically, higher quality brands achieve a higher market share and higher profitability that their inferior competitors.
Focus to build a powerful perception of our brand’s quality and value is what we need. Strong brands have a clear, often unique position in the target market.

Financial and economical recession? Yes, indeed. That’s where branding, SEO for Google top positioning and repositioning helps your business to stay and sell at top performance.
See you at the top,
yours BrandMover

SEO analysis & the Enterprise

SEO Analysis for the Enterprise

If we do a quick comparison of the last 3 enterprise SEO analysis reports, they all share the same onpage/ offpage problems:

• Mature and huge brands with rarely noted websites, scattered on 3-4 “fresh” domains on foreign servers;
• FRAME-based! corporate websites with zero URL visibility or rewriting;
• Thousands of products, hidden in ZERO crawl-rate framed pages and MISSING /duplicated metadata;
• Missing lead capturing system or CRM – 30% of the “requests” were found in the spam folders;
• Extremely low traffic, measured in raw log files, full of unfiltered dummy robot and spam visits;
• Corporate focus and business sectors are presented NOwhere, industrial slang EVERYwhere;
• Hundreds of “keywords”, stiffed on the homepage, leading to 0.4 -0.7% keyword density;
• Poor navigation, structure, internal linking, MERE external linking;
• Bad server response codes, HUNDREDS of bad crappy neighbor websites on the same shared IP?!;
• Less than 60% indexed content by Google. Yahoo and Live are doing better!?
• ZERO ranking for the 5 top priority phrases in ALL search engines;
• Top5 ranking (by a “SEO expert”) for a few phrases, which NOone searched in the last 3 months;
• Poor URL mentions in the search engines, some non-relevant poor quality links in local FFA directories;
• DMOZ and Yahoo virgin, ZERO blog links or bookmarks, mere brand reputation and web2.0/social media backlinks;
• Alexa…

I will skip the next 17 pages…

The fun part is that in the end of the day we won the SEO tender NOT with a statistically proved triple conversion and double sales increase strategy, but with the “sense that the consultants know why we don’t like our website look-and-feel”

The moral? If the line of business don’t gets the SEO part, shoot the Usability, Customer experience or even the CRM part.
… and keep brandmoving. See ya at the top!

Branding trends & friends

It’s a nice snowy Sunday afternoon up in the mountain.
High time to recap the branding landscape in 2009.

Top performance through Digital brand management.
It’s a whole new layer in the business management workflow.
When we add Search & Social (marketing), Leads & Sales (CRM),
Mobile & Local (services), Micro & Global (sharing), Grids & Clouds (computing), the sky is the limit for creative innovation.
Hot chocolate with icecream, please.

Hosting ($4/month) or Top Brand Performance ($400/m)?

The choice is yours. Wherever you land on the planet today, you pay for what you get.

We are in the brand performance management business. It’s not cheap and it’s not for every business. But it’s worth. Some just look for dirty cheap “hosting”, they google for ‘free’, ‘cheap’ and ‘discounted’, next month they look for even more cheaper. Customers? No, thanks. Popular doesn’t mean valuable, it means inferiority complex and big headache.

Hosting providers such as BlueHost (and most others for that matter) have a particular target market in mind for the services they provide. If the type of website your company has fits their target market, then you will rarely have any problems with their service. Maybe. If you don’t host your brand with 740 blacklisted link farms and adult websites on the same IP. If you don’t rush the shared server’s CPU to manage or archive your database. If…

If the type of website you have doesn’t fit their target market then you will have problems. Lots of them, on a daily basis. BlueHost give people the opportunity to find out if your site fits their target market by offering to refund your money if you are not happy after the first month. You can get all your “money” back and move elsewhere, month after month. Year after year. Someday you will even find free hosting, full of big-breasted banners, which will please the eye of your customers, for free.

If several hundred commodity static websites can share one server without overloading the server’s CPU, then it is much cheaper for your website to host on a server that places several hundred sites, than it would be to host it on a dedicated server that only hosts a dozen or so sites in order to make available a much higher CPU usage that the static sites don’t need, but a dynamic website that gets and serves thousands visitors and customers per day, executing millions service, sales and support transactions in real-time and doesn’t cache pages – it definitely would need.

If you have a supercharged V12 engine, then you don’t buy a small car and expect the engine to fit, you’d buy a large car or SUV that has space for a large engine. You can’t reach the top with a Micra or Golf, or even VW Country. You drive a Land Rover. Or LandCruiser. Or PathFinder.

The same applies to websites and hosting as applies to engines and cars. You need to choose an advantage environment, which supplies the resources that your website AND BRAND requires and if you need more than minimal CPU for your website to run you need to buy more expensive hosting that puts fewer sites on each server so that the required CPU is available. And most of all you need rock-solid, fanatic, real-time support.

However, the server CPU performance is just one of thousands Brand Performance metrics, which you have to master and monitor. But it’s very important, as well as other mission-critical factors like:

• Brand Architecture and Strategy
• Business Process Reengineering and Change Management
• Web 2.0 strategy
• CRM, Website & Database Performance
• Business Intelligence dashboarding
• Search Engine Optimized and Friendly, usable website
• Google top5 presence
• Competitive Intelligence and web analytics metrics
• Conversion rate (CR), Customer value (RFM, LTV)

Performance management

Whoops, ten years ago we were happy with 100 visits and 10 bookmarks of our website daily. Shift happens.

It’s snowing today! Let’s grab the ski tomorrow. See ya at the top!
Yours BrandMover