7 Steps to Building Your New Brand Online

From late 2007 to 2010 I started and ran The Speaker Company, a new brand for the Denon & Marantz group of home audio products. The challenge was to build a brand as quickly as possible for this direct to consumer company, in a coporate structure that was primarily a two-tier sales organization.

With a very small marketing budget and few resources, we set about to get brand recognization and sales in a crowded field, consumer audio speakers, during the begining of the recession.

Many companies face the same problems with new brands whether inside a larger company or a under-funded start-up.

Below is an outline of the approach we took to build a solid brand presence for The Speaker Company.

1. Start with Adwords – It’s quick, easy to budget, easy to measure. We used a modest budget to kick-start sales.
2. Content creation – This is the hub of most on and off line success, no matter what problem your company solves. People want an answer to a problem. Supply it. We hired a great writer, supplied the voice we wanted, and made our case.
3. Share your answers to the problems in as many places as possible. Yes Facebook and Twitter, but more importantly in appropriate forums. Be part of discussions. We spent many hours in forums and other industry related sites.
4. Identify and engage with key influential people; bloggers and forum experts. Give product/service away for review purposes. This works wonders but don’t expect it to happen overnight. Most people are cautious of new brands. We had dozens of reviews in influential forums and quickly gained recognition from key blogs and forum posters.
5. Continue to develop “creative & sharable” content to help boost SEO. Continue this on an ongoing basis. Start a blog that addresses not only your product/service, but other issues related to your customers lifestyle and problem set. Post at least twice a week or more. We also hired a social/SEO company to help us develop relevant content that greatly boosted SEO. (in 8 months we ranked for 100’s of top level keywords)
6. Affiliate Marketing – If appropriate for your product or service, launch an affiliate program, it’s a cost per sale model, is highly measurable and does wonders for branding for a very low cost. This eventually made up 20% of our sales.
7. Customer Service -Last but not least give “off the charts” customer service. Keep customers insanely happy, especially the ones that complain, they will tell their friends.

There of course is more to it than what I outlined above, and there are many deeper details to each of the bullet points. But overall this was it. In the end the company built a reputation for building and selling quality speakers at half the price. After 2 and a half years, The Speaker Company was closed for reasons unrelated to sales or brand awareness, but the success we had lived on for Boston Acoustics which garnered a 21% boost in organic traffic with the 301 redirect transfers we put in place.  

Want to find out more on how to build your brand online? Visit the contact page and click on the call me button.