Five Resolutions for Marketing Your Brand

Making New Year’s resolutions? Here are five to boost your brand recognition in 2012.

 1. Improve Our Social Media Engagement.  You can achieve this by creating more opportunities for your customers or followers or donors to engage. Invite them to follow your Twitter feed, then offer a discount coupon or special offer to those following you on Twitter.

2. Get Our Executive Team Engaged in Social Media Outreach. It’s so yesterday to have your intern blogging for you or posting the CEO’s twitter feed. Get with the program and encourage the Thought Leaders in your institution to engage with social media on behalf of your brand. This includes the C-Suite team and Board leadership. Send out email ticklers to remind them to post, with suggestions for topics. These can range from impressions of a conference they are attending to an inside view of a new product or service developed by your organization.

3. Ask Movers and Shakers to Tweet About Us. The tweet is the modern equivalent of getting an autograph, but more useful for your brand. One of my nonprofit clients recently gave a tour of their facilities to Justin Bieber, who subsequently tweeted about it. The impact was to increase their Twitter following by 10,000 in a single day, dramatically increasing their outreach. Figure out if any key personalities are already being connected to your institution and ensure that they will Tweet, post on Facebook or blog about you.  And yes, specifically ask them to do it!

4. Make Our Video Content Multi-Platform Friendly. If you haven’t already, it’s time to ensure your promotional or donor outreach videos can be viewed easily on multiple platforms, from desktop computers to mobile phones. H.264 is now the standard for web-delivered video. But if you are acquiring footage that could ever be needed for a larger screen (i.e. at a major meeting or conference), be sure to shoot in High Def, at 1080p (29.97 frame rate) for maximum flexibility and image quality. This larger acquisition size takes up more space, but storage is cheap. Whereas having your fabulous web fundraising video look horrible and pixelated at your annual conference could be an expensive mis-step.

5. Multi-cast Our Podcast Content. Now it’s easy to share branded videos not just through Facebook, iTunes and YouTube, but also through Zune Marketplace, Podcast Alley, MeFeedia, and more.  You can even reach the television-viewing audience by doing a direct to TiVO distribution. This allows you to bring more eyeballs to your content, and syndicate your branded content across multiple delivery platforms.

Merry Branding and a Happy New Year!