When you think about one of your favorite brands, you almost instantly get a mental picture (and that gut feeling we talked about here) of that brand.  With the big hitters it’s easy; Target, Starbucks, WalMart have spent countless dollars on making sure that when you see a communication vehicle with their name on it – you know instantly who is trying to get your attention.

Some interesting research came out recently that validates the importance of a completely integrated marketing and advertising effort. Crown Peak conducted a study of holiday advertisers and discovered that 66% percent of online ads simply redirect users to the website home page, or a generic search result page rather than a landing page specifically tied to the ad content, message or call to action.

Branding, you may know what it is. Even scarier, you might think you know what it is, and you are wrong.

According to The Brand Gap, which I highly recommend reading, your brand is the gut feeling your customers have when they think about you. It’s not (only) your logo, corporate color scheme, the photography and copy you use in your brochures and website.  Your logo (or mark), and other assets are very important pieces of the puzzle when it comes to your branding strategy, but we will get into that more another time.

It can’t be denied that internet use is increasing moving towards social media. In fact, it has become the #1 activity on the internet outranking both porn (the previous #1 use of the internet) and search engine use. If you haven’t started thinking about your strategy for reaching your customers through this medium you need to start now. Even if yours is a smaller business, your customers are online using sites like Twitter and Facebook and you could be there engaging with them. In a recent survey 48% of marketing professionals said that social media would be the most influential channel and where they plan on putting the most investment in the coming year. And Twitter users are some of the most responsive of all with one study showing that they are nearly twice as likely to click on ads, visit company profiles and write reviews online.