Have an ethos:

Decide on your core values and what sets you apart from competition, your values should be based on research of your target market - you should know what your customers want and ensure you deliver it each and every time.

Once you have an ethos ensure that you and your staff reinforce it with everything you do and say, prove to your customers that you can be trusted to stick to your ethos and that they can always rely on your company to provide this particular quality of products and/or service.

Create a logo:

Your logo design is not your brand, it is just another very important method that should be utilised to underline and reinforce your brand, it is a symbol that enables you to be recognised instantly by those that are familiar with your brand.

The logo design should be used consistently on a variety of media, and should be suitable for all forms of marketing, website, stationary, promotional items, signage, it should always look same so that it can become synonymous with your brand and instantly recognisable.

Outsourcing allows companies to focus their resources and control their head count. This form of operations allows company to hand over full responsibility for outsourcing function within clearly defined management guidelines and then monitor performance. When you break down costs of a full marketing department internally, versus cost of outsourcing with an external partner, business case begins to tip in favor of not allowing “Context” to conceal “Core.” The following elements would be common to build out a high-quality and stable relationship in a typical small organization with gross sales revenues of $20 million.

Annual Salaries for a full marketing department and programs can cost approximate $1,350,000 annually vs. $1,050,000 to outsource same or better activity.

Consider example of a high performance marketing partner that offers you results, flexibility, and reduction in staff and overhead. Companies can typically have equal if not better results, while maintaining product and service quality for a fraction of cost by turning to an expert in sales and marketing. And what is cost of a bad hire? The commonly referenced cost of a bad hire is 2.5 times annual salary. In most small to mid-sized organizations, marketing can be outsourced while they focus on core.

Cost is clearly most popular reason for outsourcing. However, strategic reasons such as improving company focus on core business and improving quality are next. Why companies decide to let “Context” take over and drive business can usually be attributed to lack of information. Many businesses and marketing specialists believe that by keeping everything internal sales growth is more efficient. It’s hard to find sales and marketing experts that have years of experience and are all aligned with top line growth objectives. Companies who are not using marketing as part of their “Core” focus usually do not have teams of marketing experts to handle needs of their marketing. As a result, “Context” begins to take over leaving less and less room for “Core.” So, is it worth “controlling” all of your marketing functions? Is this an area of your business that is core to your success? Probably not. It is important for a company to focus on things that add value and make it competitive. If you build software, stick to doing those things that help you to build better software, and outsource all those things that can be outsourced. The more focus you place in “context” areas, harder it becomes for you to do your “Core” well. When you take into account cost of what it really takes to do it right, business case cannot be ignored.

George Schildge is president and CEO of Matrix Marketing Group Inc., a full-service marketing firm that specialize in helping small to mid-sized business-to-business firms grow profitably and build their business through effective growth planning and marketing. He can be reached at press@matrixmarketinggroup.com or www.matrixmarketinggroup.com or (303) 325-8888.