Branding is an art, a well calculated game of positioning.

It is important to utilize the questions below as means to keeping your business current and inline with where you need to be. It’s like chess where every move is well thought out, calculated and consequences for each move are considered.

Their are times that you need to go big and risk it all, other times where you need to be reserved and hold back. This is where you need something to fall back on … this is where developing a list of characteristics for your brand and holding yourself accountable, defines the path you walk and the steps you take.

Branding is no different, your company must position itself where your demographic lives. “You must become part of their world and work on developing a relationship like no other.”

1. What is your brand’s vision?

2. What are the good attributes of your brand (or company, or product, or service)?

3. What are the practical benefits associated with your brand?

4. What are the bad aspects of your brand, and how can you fix them?

5. What emotions are behind customer purchases of your products/services?

6. How is your brand positioned against the competition?

7. What demographic is your brand appealing to?

8. Which personality characteristics of this demographic do you embrace?

9. Do all elements of your branding strategy integrate with one another?

10. Are these elements delivered consistently?

11. Does your branding effort take into account different cultural aspects?

12. Are you investing in your ongoing branding efforts through both time and money?

Once again, Google has tightened the screws on Quality Score and marketers across the world are feeling the effects. It is not entirely a bad thing that google is forcing us to be smarter and more relevant with our marketing strategies, but it does become inconvenient when small business owners or entrepreneurs have no knowledge on how to fix the problem.

Fixing the problem needs to be your priority and you must play by the rules Google has put in place.

Your first step is to re-evaluate your landing pages. Start by looking at your keywords, your page titles, page descriptions and all of the body copy on the landing pages you are sending traffic to. Your message must be clear, consistent and match what you are saying in your Adwords display ads and keywords.

Your next step is to segment your campaigns and focus on small niche groups of keywords that are highly targeted to the landing page. This will get you a higher quality score and will keep your account active.

Last and most important … Focus your keyword selections on long tail keywords that are targeted on your product or service. Think like your customer and use phrases they would use when seeking what you have to offer. Stay away from one word keywords that are general and broad as these are guaranteed to drive your cost up and will get you low quality scores.

Do not worry about driving millions of visitors to your site because only 20% will be targeted if all you want is traffic. Your focus needs to be on relevance and reaching the audience that is most likely seeking you or your products and services.

1. Give to get. Offer value (a consult, white paper, a free guide, free class, etc.) in exchange for their contact information.

2. Display the form ‘above the fold’ (no scrolling down required).

3. Keep the form short, ideally fewer than five fields. (do not make all fields mandatory).

4. Connect the form to your database (so you aren’t losing leads or manually entering data).

5. Segment the leads in your database and follow up with them automatically. (use auto-responders to connect with your leads on a deeper level and focused on the niche they showed interest in).

If a visitor has been interested enough in your headline to continue reading, the next thing they will read is your opening paragraph where you have to give the same benefits with a little more detail.

You can’t explain everything with your first paragraph. So find the most important idea you want to put across, explain what it is and perhaps begin to elaborate on it.

For example, this article’s lead is:

“Your content will get noticed, get read and get customers if you use your headlines and first paragraphs to let readers know what is in it for them. Here we’ll introduce you to some techniques you can use to make that happen.”

It starts with a benefit:

“… get noticed, get read and get customers …”

… and then comes a summary of how to achieve that:

“… if you use your headline and first paragraph to tell readers what is in it for them”

Then the second sentence repeats the benefit with some detail about how this will be achieved:

“… we’ll introduce you to some techniques you can use to make that happen”.

Hopefully we’ve achieved what this first paragraph promised and in the future no visitors to your site will leave without you having done everything you can to get them to read on and reach your marketing. – source: WordTracker.

Also, if a page is linked to, from elsewhere on your own site or others then your headline is likely to be used for the link. When reading headlines, potential readers are looking for what a page might do for them. They are looking for benefits and if your headline does not deliver, they are gone.

Here are a few guidelines for headline writing:

• Promise benefits – tell readers what the content will do for them.
• Don’t be clever or obscure and don’t make the reader think too much.
• Don’t be ironic because most readers won’t know you are being ironic.
• Don’t force readers to read the story in order to understand the headline.
• Try asking a question about a problem and entice with the solution.

If you want readers to read on you must SPELL OUT the benefits before describing and explaining the features.

Features are the characteristics of what you’re selling.  Benefits are the things that those features will do for you.

For example, people don’t buy light bulbs for features like being long lasting, bright and cheap. People buy light bulbs for benefits like saving money or the planet and helping them do things in what would otherwise be darkness.

As well researched and expert as you are in your field, it can be hard to put yourself in the position of your targeted visitors who, when they come, will spare just a few seconds to find a reason to read the content.

When constructing an argument or presenting a product, it seems logical to first present the building blocks of your case before giving the end result. The end results should be something that will make your readers’ lives better.

source:  PPCBlog

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