Branding Marketing with Linda Pophal part 1

One of the things I enjoy doing is interviewing business owners and industry experts via TwitInterviews.com. The purpose of this website is to allow me to conduct a live interview online that automatically update Twitter. In one such interview, I spent time interviewing Linda Pophal about branding and marketing a business.

Below is the actual interview that transpired where she shared key information about branding and marketing your business.

Question 1: Please introduce yourself and the key areas of your expertise? How long have you been involved in this area?

I’m Linda Pophal, owner/CEO of Strategic Communications, LLC, a company that helps individuals and organizations apply strategy to solve their communication challenges, whether internal or external. I’ve been working in advertising/PR for more than 20 years both in a corporate environment (health care and energy industries) and as an independent consultant with small to mid-sized companies, and individuals entrepreneurs/consultants.

Question 2: What’s the difference between “marketing” and “advertising” and why should a business owner care?

Great question! Marketing is really the “umbrella” for a number of activies, including advertising, that will drive business results. Advertising is “technically” part of the “promotion” piece of marketing which also includes product, price and place (or access). A common mistake that businesses large and small make is to look to advertising, alone, to address their marketing challenges when there are really many other elements that go into product/service success. In fact, advertising prematurely can actually create more problems for your product/service if, for instance, your product’s attributes don’t meet customer needs or you don’t have sufficient supply/access to meet demand.

Question 3: What are the two most important questions that a business owner should ask themselves before proceeding with any communication initiative?

I always recommend the following two questions as the starting point for any communication situation:

1. Who is my target audience? (who, specifically am I trying to reach/influence)
2. What are my objectives (again, specifically, what do I want to achieve and at what level?)

Thorough answers to these questions will set the stage for developing strategies and tactics to generate results.

Question 4: Once the business owner has these answers, what should be the next steps regarding their communication initiative?

Once they have the answers to these questions, they can begin to think about key messages and tactics (or channels of communication) to connect with their target audience. Knowing as much as possible about who I want to reach helps me determine not only how to develop “key benefit” statements to influence their actions/behaviors, but also the best tactics to use in communicating with them – e.g. are they newspaper readers? what sections of the newspaper? are they involved in social media? which types? The better job you do at answering the first two questions, the more effective you’ll be in generating impactful key messages that connect with your specific target audiences. The challenge for any communicator/marketer is that there are so many things that we *could* do – our objective is to select those tactics that are likely to achieve the greatest results for the least cost (time/money).

Watch for part two tomorrow to complete the interview. You don’t want to miss it.