Things are looking a little different around LocalUp these days. We’ve got an amazing new logo, a great slogan, and the new website is shaping up nicely. This rebranding effort has been a huge time consuming project, but we are really happy with the results, and with 100% certainty I think we can all agree that it was worth it.
You might be asking why we’d undertake such a dramatic project, well the answer is easy, brands matter. The importance of your brand as a marketing tool and a sales tool can’t be understated. Consumers are fickle and given the choice of an established brand with a quality product or an untested brand, it really isn’t even a question, consumers just like you and me will default to the brand we are familiar with.
Coca-Cola, Nike, Apple, IBM these are some of the word’s most iconic brands. How did they become iconic and how can you develop an iconic brand? The strategy is simple, but there aren’t any shortcuts and it will take real effort.
The key to developing a great brand is to always keep in mind that a brand is absolutely secondary to having a great product. Wildly successful brands have wildly successful products, not just once, but for years and years. Your business exists to sell a product or service, not to market a brand. Consistently produce quality products and services and your brand will naturally become more valuable.
A brand has power because consumers establish an emotional relationship with it, a brand is able to elicit images and feelings in customers. So, along with providing a great product to your customers, focus on providing a great experience for them. By going the extra mile and treating each customer like a VIP they’ll form strong emotional ties to your brand that will pay dividends for years to come.
Develop a look and feel that’s right for your business, and then deliver great products time after time. Develop honest and special relationships with your customers, then and only then can you begin to realize the sales and marketing benefits of having a well respected brand.
As LocalUp site owners, what affect do you think your brand has on your business?
Small business owners start with dreams of the good life. Dreams of being your own boss, setting your own hours, and endless exotic vacations. The reality for many owners is more like a nightmare than a dream, constant worry, never ending tasks, and issue upon issue.
With a little planning though you’ll be able to realize your dreams and free yourself from the headaches of running a small business whether it’s a LocalUp site or something else entirely. It all boils down to establishing processes and standards so that your business runs smoothly when you aren’t there.
Establishing standards and procedures helps in several ways. First it forces you to think about how you are doing things. Consider how you reach new customers, how you ship products, how you work with suppliers, these are things that you might do everyday in the course of normal business and most likely developed organically as the business developed. By thinking through your processes step by step you have the opportunity to streamline and identify areas for improvement hopefully resulting in better efficiency.
Once you’ve got a solid understanding of how you do business you can start documenting everything. Writing things down give you a better understanding of your business and forces you to stick to a consistent way of doing a job. Your customers will thank you as their experience becomes standard and something they can expect. Solid documentation also helps because now you new employees can reference documentation for help rather than always coming to you for assistance.
With a little planning you can streamline the way you do business, please your customers by providing a consistent experience and provide a resource for your employees to reference when you are unavailable.
Are there any other benefits to establishing standards and procedures? Is there any downside?
Things might be looking a little different around LocalUp these days. We’ve been hard at work creating a marketing strategy and unified branding message that really tells people who we are and what we stand for at LocalUp. Stakeholders across the company were interviewed and we’re excited about the results.
We’ve simplified things a bit. We’ve gone with a strong bold typeface and the simple bold colors of a modern startup full of young talented people. The other prominent feature of our logo is the megaphone like slant reflecting LocalUp’s growth and local focus.
Our new tagline “Own Your Hometown” represents our focus local entrepreneurs, and our goal for each LocalUp powered site to dominate the local market.
We wanted to explain LocalUp in a single sentence, after hundreds of potential candidates, the headline “LocalUp helps you bring online food ordering to your hometown” rose to the top. Without a doubt, this perfectly sums up LocalUp and our mission.
Over the coming weeks and months you can look forward to some exciting initiatives that we will be launching. On other fronts, the website is in the shop getting redesigned, things should be back up in a couple months, but until then we will still be on the blog and Twitter (follow us) and Facebook (like us) and Google+ (circle us) keeping you up to date with all the happenings at LocalUp.
