Branding is a very important part of every business. When you think of brands, there are likely a few that come to mind first such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Starbucks, Macy’s. Anyone can sell anything, but you really stand out in the market when you have a brand. It’s key to the growth and success of your business. Many small businesses choose the easy path when it comes to branding themselves. They pick a name and get someone to create a logo, or worse, do it themselves. Then they get some stationery and business cards. The visual representation of your brand and your brand colors are important, but you need to spend some time thinking about what you want to people to think about your business. You only get one first impression with customers, so you need to consider what it’s like to call your office, or when some sends an email through your contact form, does an actual human call them back? How quickly? How long does a prospect wait to get a proposal from your company? These are all things that leave a brand impression. Here are some tips that will help you to develop a unique small business brand.

How do you want to position your business in the marketplace? When you think about your brand presence, you should consider your industry, your personality, and your target customer. Chances are a stock photo chosen at random by the sales-person at a print-shop, will not quite capture the brand impression that you are trying to create. so hire a professional graphic designer to help you. Yes, it will cost you, but if you want to only do this one time, so spend the money to look just like the big boys. If you have keen negotiation skills, you can often find a talented designer who can put together a very reasonable package for you. There are also plenty of websites where you can find designers and view their portfolios such as Fiverr, 99Designs.com, guru.com, and upwork.com. Here are some questions to answer that will help your designer get a feel for your business.

• What is the mission of your business?
• What differentiates your brand from your competition?
• What is your company’s unique selling proposition?
• What do you want people to think of when they think of your business?
• How would you describe the branding of your closest competitors?
• What can you improve upon when looking at your competitors?

Different colors will cause varying physiological reactions.  Here’s a quick overview of the types of feelings and emotions that can be triggered by the presence of popular colors.

• Black: Represents authority, power, and dominance.
• Red: Think Passion. Emotionally intense, it can stimulate the heart to beat more quickly,
• Blue: It’s a calming color, peace, tranquility.
• Green: It represents nature; it’s the easiest color on the eyes, refreshing.
• Yellow: Yellow catches attention, but it can be overwhelming.
• Brown: It can represent genuineness which can be good for business, but it can also come off as mundane, sad and wistful.

If you think back to the companies we mentioned earlier, think of the red one and the green one. There are likely two that come to mind immediately. How does each brand make you feel? When choosing a color to represent your brand, be mindful of the psychology behind that color choice.

If your business is taking advantage of social media marketing, then it’s important to have consistent branding across all social platforms. For example, if you build a personal brand use the same headshot everywhere. You also want your profile to tell people how to hire you. It’s great that you are swim dad or an Eagles fan. (Yes, I’m from Philadelphia), but it will greatly help your business to promote what you do. Keep in mind my 4:1 Ratio of sharing other people’s helpful content before you promote your own. You’ll also want to tailor your content to fit the culture of each platform and how your potential customers use it. Don’t just post the exact same thing across every social network, that’s a great way to damage your brand.

Don’t be afraid hire someone to help you. When choosing a designer, use a contact that says it’s work for hire, make sure you can get at least 5-7 options, and then refine one down to become your logo. When you get your artwork, ask for the jpeg, pdf and high resolution png files. And get the exact color and fonts on a one-page style guide from them, so you’re not stuck, in case you ever need to move on from that designer. Remember, if you hire a designer, you’ve got to trust them to create something brilliant, but it’s your brand, and you need to make sure convey the impression that you want people to have.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.