How to Strengthening Your Brand

Posted on by P. A. Harper
Strengthen Your Brand

This article will help you strengthen your brand by inspiring trust, loyalty, and action from your potential customers and current customers.

Understand What Your Audience Needs From Your Brand

It’s surprising how many business owners don’t know their customers or bother to try and find out how to serve them better. The most essential information you need to know about your customers is what they need and want. Your product, or service, must fulfill a need or want in a way that no one else is. Ask what your company’s strengths are.

Do research. Find out who your competitors are and what they are doing. What are their weaknesses and strengths? Learn how you can deliver what’s missing. Then, ensure your customers know about the benefits of using your company’s products and what sets you apart from other companies.

The second most important information about your customer is how to reach them. Find out what the defining characteristics and habits are by researching user demographics. And reach those people where they live.

Fine Tuning Your Brand’s Message Will Strengthen your Brand

Learning how to build an authentic personal message through the power of storytelling is how to strengthen your brand.

Share with customers how you stand behind your company values. Live what you preach. Behind the seans stories make information easier to remember and can be entertaining.

Tell your personal story, how it shaped your life and inspired you to create your company, a service, or a product. Talk about the challenges you encounter on the journey, and how you provide a real-life solution for people.

Share a human interest stories about how your company helps people.

Try to tie in historical relevant stories that speak to your brand’s values.

A/B testing is a valuable tool you can use to find out what your customers respond best to.

Once you have their attention, make sure you close by using a call to action to guide the customers to take action.

Focus on Improving Your Brand’s Strong Points

Focus on growing your business by being your best, not just being good. Give your clients more than they expect; it will build loyalty and keep them returning. Here are a few ideas to get started:

Help your employees participate in your company’s efforts to strengthen your brand by giving them incentives to improve their jobs and lives. Reward employee efforts by giving them the tools to provide the best customer service you can. Encourage developmental learning among employees in areas where they may need some help. Reward them directly as a team for their efforts by making monthly goals with cash incentives. Teach them when the company does well, they benefit from it. Having satisfied employees who take pride in their work is a valuable asset that many employers overlook.

To find out what end users think of your products and services:

  1. Ask your employees and customers directly what the company’s weaknesses and strengths are.
  2. Ask what solutions or improvements they feel would work best or be appreciated.
  3. Use test experiments to see what works best.

Keep Your Band Message Consistent

Communicating the same message across all your company’s marketing channels is very important. If you don’t, you will confuse your customers.

Repetition helps customers and potential customers remember your company. Make sure your efforts reinforce one another, so customers choose your company when they are ready to purchase.

Follow up on old information on other sites gets updated or is removed. Outdated information can hurt your reputation, cost you, and customers.

Strengthen Your Brand with Partnerships And Strategic Alliances

Try to find a mentor at at company with a well known brand you admire.

Have your company participate in a charitable program or do volunteer work.

Build partnerships with companies who have a similar target audience or work in a related industry to expand your reach to a secondary market. The key is to find a partner who can provide something that you cannot while you are doing the same for them, and have your efforts bringing new customers to both of you. Suggest a cross-promotion. Work together to see if it is the right fit for both parties.

Don’t forget to build a partnership with your customers. Customer recognition through reviews and social media is powerful and will add credibility to your brand. You can often get customers to help you spread the word by providing excellent customer service and asking them to. I send follow-up emails to let them know their reviews help other potential customers make purchasing decisions and help your business thrive. 

Fly: A Flash Fiction Story

Posted on by P. A. Harper
Photo by John Talbot

I feel like I am dreaming. It is a hot summer, and I open all the windows to cool o the apartment. I enter my bedroom, and nine giant flies are resting on my bed. They are each about a foot long, and their bodies are black as oil with silvery highlights. They have long barbed legs that taper at their joints, making me think of crabs. Their wings are luminously opalescent with green, pink, orange, and violet streaked. There is a buzzing noise coming from the random movement of their wings, vibrating the whole room. My skin feels funny from the vibration, almost like it is moving.

They are at once beautiful and scary. I’m not quite sure if they are dangerous, so I go out of the room and get a broom to shoo them away. The buzzing stops, and it is dead calm. I hurry, feeling my stomach tighten as I peek around the door frame into the room.

I see a beautiful fragrant flower there on the bed with them. The whole room smells amazing, making me remember when my mother would bake ginger cookies. Then all of a sudden, I realize that the flower and memory is a gift from them. I feel silly for having thought they were scary. I say thank you, and they leave out my open window.

Your Brain on Books

Posted on by P. A. Harper
Antique Illustration of the brain.

I can’t remember a time in my life when books were not a large part of it. My mother read to me and my sister from a very early age. I started reading on my own when I was four years old. On average I read about 3 to 8 books a month. I mostly read fiction because I love stories and how they can transport you to experience other lives and worlds. Reading is one on my favorite pastimes, and it is also a great way to relax your mind by giving it a break from stress.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, by researchers in Spain who documented that the body does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions of the brain are stimulated.

This study confirmed what I had suspected for a very long time; our imaginations are very powerful tools we can use to shape our perspective, emotions and social understandings. Reading really can make you a better person, and reading good writing can also make you a better writer.

Reference
Reading Fiction is Good For Your BRAIN!: By Dr. Dan Pezzulo posted 03-02-2015
How Reading Improves Your Writing: by Jennifer Wilber 09-09-2021

DYSLEXIA AND WRITING BY HAND: IS IT HELPFUL?

Posted on by P. A. Harper

Domtar posted an article on the benefits of writing by hand. It’s seems odd to me that they would say it helps dyslexics. Sure, I can understand writing cursive is better than printing, but handwriting is something you don’t have to do in this age. As someone who lives with the challenges of dyslexia, I can tell you firsthand that typing and text to speech are the easiest ways to write for dyslexics.

I don’t view dyslexia as a disability. People with dyslexia are wired differently and are not as proficient at some tasks as others. However, we can also do something better than people who are not dyslexic. There are benefits from writing by hand, but I’m not sure it helps people who are dyslexic the same way it does others. There isn’t enough data on the subject.

Most dyslexics are nonverbal learners, we think in picture, 3-dimensional, multi-sensory images, and as a result we have a much quicker thought process. You know the saying about a picture and a thousand words; this is how we can process ideas much quicker. When I have to slow down the way I think, I tend to lose information I want to communicate. It’s like having a great Idea and not being able to write it down immediately, as it slips away.