As a brand audit company, we work with clients who want to improve their brand and marketing efficiency. Quite often — over 30% of the time, brands underperform because of the lack of customer closeness.

Small, especially local businesses that work face to face with customers can manage customer closeness better than brands that are slightly bigger, and where sales and marketing are mostly happening online.

Customer closeness is an important aspect to understand for modern brand managers and marketers. …

First things first: what is personal branding?

Personal branding is the process of creating a marketable online persona based on one’s own, skills, values, and unique characteristics to gain wide recognition and acceptance as an authority among people in target audiences. Personal branding is a tool typically used to accelerate a career, market products associated with a person, or gain social support from large groups of people.

The process of personal brand building involves:

• Defining a polished, marketable personality
• Regular content production, that includes photos, videos, or written content
• Public relation efforts, including featured interviews
• Earning references from reputable sources
• Proactive actions to build and grow an audience

The benefits of having a strong personal brand are significant:

• It can make you famous
• Attracting…

If you Google how to grow your B2B business, you will find tons of tips on how to manage social media, email marketing, networking, Linkedin ads, trade shows, free strategy calls, and countless other activities.

Too much, and all these promotional activities can get too complicated. Over 70% of our brand audit customers complain about being overwhelmed with promotions and marketing their business.

How digital marketing really works for new B2B businesses?

If your company just started out, limited resources will often leave no choice but to manage all digital marketing yourself.

You will likely end up spending lots of money on tools, software, Google Ads, Facebook ads, CRM…

The job of hotel marketers is fairly simple: bring the hotel to the attention of potential guests, and make it look like the most desirable option for their vacation or stay for whatever purposes.

There are several technical requirements to make the hotel marketing smooth online, these include rate parity, SEO, Google Ads, social media ads, influencers, distributing inventory to multiple OTAs, and other sales channels — but there are very well defined and tested workflows for all of these.

The job gets complicated when ads don’t work as expected, website and direct bookings are not converting well, and social…

Decoding what makes new companies successful

What makes a new business successful, and why most businesses fail? What separates the 10% of thriving businesses from the 90% that are destined to close in a few years? These are questions that most new business owners ask.

Having millions of market research data in our databases, we decided to connect the dots and decode what branding and business concept qualities successful companies have, and what are the common traits of businesses that fail.

What can we learn from this analysis?

The research is focused on revealing the following two insights:

• What sets of qualities winning businesses have?
• What sets of shortcomings losing businesses struggle with?

Where is the data coming from?

…

Building a personal brand has never been important as it is today. Consumers recognize an excellent brand. It is the reason you don’t need to Google what brands such as Apple, Nike do every time they are mentioned. As an independent consultant, you need to think the same way as these brands do. Personal branding is about being known for the service you deliver. It is about reputation and the image you create. For instance, does your name pop out in meetings, or are you on top of the mind of other target brands when they are looking for a…

Your potential customers are humans with specific needs. Be it a need for beauty, travel, fashion, business support, software or food — they know what they want and know how they want it. For this reason, they will be looking for viable solutions to their specific needs. The times of generic marketing nonsense are long gone.

As most industries are getting increasingly competitive day by day, we are bombarded with more and more marketing messages. …

“Branding is not a priority in business-to-business” — we hear it often from both business owners and their branding professionals. In most cases, those who are unrecognized and relatively unsuccessful compared to their competitors in their respective segment.

Top-performing B2B companies will tell you that branding is one of their most important access. They know this because they listen to their customers and measure how their brand and marketing communications impact their overall business performance.

Our company Brand Auditor delivers over 200 brand audits monthly, to clients from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Branding in a business-to-business environment serves the…