There’s a global microbrand based in the Scottish Highlands, 50 miles from the nearest cinema, with no external investment and no employees. Last month it reached potential customers in 77 countries, and served users in China, Australia, India, Europe, South America and across the USA. It’s a global microbrand – Front Office Box.

Microbrands are going to be the next big thing – the fashionable topic for the blogosphere, for big thinkers in the media, and ultimately for us all.

It’s already happening with people like Gary Vaynerchuck, Chris Brogan and Copyblogger. They’ve built successful businesses based on their brand, and they’re global businesses.

In the past being global meant having marketing and distribution capabilities everywhere, like IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

Not anymore – the Internet gives us all the capability to be everywhere people want to find us 24×7, and it costs virtually nothing. All it takes is ideas and the energy to put them out there.

There’s a parallel change ongoing.

Companies are shrinking their resources in efforts to reduce fixed costs, preferring to hire in skills when needed rather than employ them. Subject matter experts who’d previously been tied to the corporate treadmill are starting their own businesses – consulting for hire.

Stay at home Moms are following the same path, preferring to compute rather than commute.

Creative college graduates are doing something similar. Designers and software developers prefer working for themselves to finding ways through company politics.

They are all building microbrands and the Internet helps them be global rather than local.

Location is no longer a limitation. All we need is ideas, tools and energy. With those we can become global whilst enjoying being local.

There’s a business based in the Scottish Highlands, 50 miles from the nearest cinema, with no external investment and no employees. Last month it reached potential customers in 77 countries, and served users in China, Australia, India, Europe, South America and across the USA. It’s a global microbrand.

How do we know about this business? -It’s ours!

How did we get to this status? – Ideas, energy and the right tools.

How can smaller Scottish businesses follow our example?

Check our Brand Management consulting and services.

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Brand Management and Inbound Marketing are concepts every small business can apply with these do it yourself tools.

Every Business Needs Brand Management

We all have a brand, and manage our market’s perception of it wherever we can. Our problem has always been reach – finding prospects and delivering our messages to them. Brand Management has been the preserve of the biggest businesses. The costs of PR and advertising agencies, and print and TV media, put the concept out of reach for most smaller businesses.

Publicising products became a lot simpler when web sites came along, but it was still expensive. Designers, html programmers, search engine optimisers all did very well out of the rush for businesses to have their own sites. Building a site was a one off project, and cost tens of thousands.

And the typical 5 page site didn’t do much of a job for brand management. It’s like a brochure, with little room for the buyer to select information. It tends to be fixed in time, and dates quickly. Perhaps more importantly it’s one way communication. There’s no conversation.

Every business should have a blog – for publishing.

That’s why we’ve seen an explosion in the number of blogs and microblogging – Twitter. These two technologies offer every small business the chance to work at their own brand management. Now, regardless of location, or budget, or special skills. small business owners can find and engage with new customers. And with their own stories, explain the value of their brand, announce their news and get feedback from the market.

Typical sites are sterile, fixed and limited. Blogs are constantly changing, infinitely variable and engaging. They’re full of opinion, not marketing speak. They enable conversation, in comments. They explain the context in which products and solutions work. They’re perfect for descriptions and discussion of particular issues. and ways they’re addressed

Search engines just love blogs, and buyers looking for products and services start with Search engines. If we want Search engines to help customers find us, we have to provide what they want. They need answers as closely matching the search query as possible. It’s all about long tail search queries – phrases comprising a primary keyword and context. For example nobody asks Google to search for “selling”. More likely they’ll ask for “selling enterprise software”

Blogs are the perfect vehicle for brand management with current insight easily building on what went before. We can explain our brand in a context our prospects relate to – content led selling, and we can do it ourselves. We don’t need to have a site built – just use on of the free ones. We can write our own content, keeping our messages current and relevant. We can link to other blogs. We can Infotain – combining information with entertainment in today’s fundamental sales strategy, Infotainment.

Every business needs a Twitter account – for engaging.

Twitter offers us the chance to find people interested in what we do, send them messages and listen to what they’re saying. We can use Twitter for real time announcements, attracting visitors to our blog. We can use it for PR and advertising.

Every business needs Thesis, Scribe and Indux.

Just how we do our brand management is a matter of personal choice – that’s all part of the brand. Professional, Relaxed, Risque – that’s up to us.

But there are a few services which can help us reduce costs and avoid the pitfalls. Every business, even those with in-house teams should consider:

• Thesis – the #1 Wordpress theme, fully optimised for search engine accessibility, and with lots of tools for the user to customise the look and feel. There is some technical knowledge required but nothing that can’t be learned in a couple of hours.
• Scribe – We’ll write our articles optimised to be read by people, quite correctly, but we also need to make sure the Search engines can read and understand the content. Scribe checks what we’ve written, evaluates it for SEO and makes recommendations on how to optimise it for Search.
• Indux- optimises our Twitter community, finding new contacts based on keyword search and following/unfollowing for us, making sure we stay within Mr. Twitter’s rules.

These services don’t do anything we can’t do in a dozen different ways, but they do make the whole effort simpler, exploiting what’s possible without missing a trick.

We’re affiliates for all three – see the banners in the sidebar – and can offer support and training to help you get there faster.

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Business growth can seem harder than breaking rocks in today’s economic climate. Everybody’s looking for ways to save money – nobody’s interested in spending. Maybe Rainmaking can make a difference?

Rainmaking

with inbound marketing techniques might be something we should all use to drive business growth. Costs are close to zero. We have more control over our messages and targets. There are numerous channels we can explore to find the most appropriate for our businesses. We can get into the long tail, avoiding big spenders and reaching niche markets.

But what does rainmaking with inbound marketing look like? How does it work? What does it achieve? How do we measure it? How does it help business growth?

Compare our results with your own efforts to reach potential customers. How are you doing it, and how well are you doing?

The Case Study

We’re trying this out for ourselves, seeing what works for growing our business, so we can help others grow theirs. We’ll publish updates on our case study so anybody interested can follow our progress. Hopefully they’ll contribute some ideas or experience of their own. Here’s our update.

First the background.

Front Office Box is a small business management solution in a very busy market dominated by a company which owns the pay per click dimension. For us Adwords isn’t an option.

We have a Ning network, a LinkedIn group, a Facebook Page, a Twitter account and our web site with integrated blog.

In terms of traffic we can immediately forget Ning, LinkedIn and Facebook. They don’t do anything for us, at all.

Our Strategy

We definitely do not chase traffic, only publishing tightly targeted articles in our blog and promoting them on Twitter. Our objective is getting messages in front of people who have a problem we can solve, and persuading them to register for an on-line account. Everything about the process and content is designed to filter out the tyre kickers. It’s much more about content led selling than Internet Marketing.

During February

we published 15 new articles in the blog, tweeted more than 50 interesting links on Twitter and answered 5 questions at Business Answers. Our friends at Implu found us interesting contacts on Twitter with their Indux service and ran a banner ad on the Social Implu page.

So how did we do?

• Twitter followers increased from 3,285 to 4,379 or up 33%
• Total visits to our website/blog up 9%
• Total page views up 9%
• Proportion of visits from the USA up from 42% to 50%
• Visits from a total of 77 countries
• Search results brought 45% of our traffic, to 130 different pages
• Links from our Twitter account brought 20% of our traffic
• Links posted on Twitter brought 3% of our traffic
• The banner ad brought 4% of traffic
• Most important – our new account registrations were up 50%

We Can Improve

We can improve the performance in each of our dimensions and we’ll work on those, particularly with SEO for our blog articles – Some perform well but there’s a lot of room for improvement on most. We’ll also spend more time answering questions in the forums.

Come back next month and see how we’re doing – but don’t wait until then if you have ideas to share. We’re all ears.

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We’ve reproduced this article from American Express On-Line, not because we believe what it says. We don’t. But we do know there are tiny gems of information all over the web which, if brought together in the right pattern, for the right business, will provide successful business models. We’ll collect, and comment on, as many of these articles as possible in an effort to help our clients understand more.

Sceptics (including us) can’t deny the move to on-line advertising and promotion by every type of business. Inexact science it probably is. Black hole money pit, it possibly is. The only game in town it definitely is.

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So Google’s in trouble, seemingly everywhere but like the swan swimming upstream it rolls serenely on, even when working like crazy under the surface.

Today we see Google execs threatened with prison for publishing illegal content. The company catching the EU’s ire, previously reserved for Microsoft. An enormous fuss made about privacy and Buzz. Meanwhile Facebook and Twitter growing like crazy. The phrase about crocodiles and asses comes to mind.

We’ve published about the battle for content and Google’s problem with sorting the quality stuff from the garbage and suggested it would lose its grip over search. As usual our forecast was both premature and misguided, it seems.

Today we stumbled across a post on the Adsense site. Apparently now Google, through Feedburner, is now publishing fresh content to our Twitter accounts, and doing so through its own URL shortener.

Does this mean anything for you? What does it mean for all the other aggregation and publishing sites/services? Why is Google doing this?

From our perspective this is really good news.

We don’t have to fool around with Twitter Feed, FriendFeed and Hootsuite anymore. That’s a bonus in it saves time.

Maybe more importantly we can put our stuff right where Google wants to find it, before any of the other Search engines even know its there.

Like em or loathe em Google remains king of content and looks as if it intends keeping the title.

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