1- The Name

When it comes to creating a great brand, it all starts with the name. Businesses with killer names typically achieve one of these five elements:

• Solution-oriented – A great name will clue you into what the product can do for you.
• Keywords – Like the above, a great name also ties in keywords to help brand name recall.
• Timelessness – This is a hard one. Basically, you need to try and create a name that isn’t going to go out of fashion but be relevant 5, 10 or even 20 years from now.
• Easy to understand – Create a name that is easy to understand and pronounce. And avoid translation problems.
• Symbolic – If you think about a name like Apple, it seems pretty simple at first blush. But behind it is the mythic story of Adam and Eve eating the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Steve Jobs seemed to be saying knowledge is a good thing.

2- Texture

From a physical product like a box of chocolates to software app like DropBox or business cards to websites,  when it comes to design you have to consider so many variables like size or resolution.

3- Fixture Your Brand Color

Choosing the right color for your brand is critical. It can impact things like reader time on a webpage to productivity levels of workers in a room. It can even impact customer loyalty.

For the brick-and-mortar companies this is especially important since they are trying to raise sales online. To boost sales companies need to create ecommerce experiences that are similar to what they would find in the store. This is where color can be very helpful.

4- Presence

This is perhaps the toughest one for a small business to manage since it is so expensive to maintain market presence.

5- Awareness

Tied into your presence is top-of-mind awareness. Do your customers know what you sell and where to get it? The higher your brand’s awareness, the better your sales results will be.

There are five stages to brand awareness.

• Most Aware – Customers know you, your brand and your product.Including the features and benefits. It’s because of their color, texture, typography, reputation and presence are all consistent.
• Product-Aware  – Your customers have a passing sense of what products you offer. This is your neutral Apple fan.Someone who is not convinced your products are a fit for him.
• Solution-Aware – Customers understand that they have a problem.But do not know that your particular company provides a product to solve that problem.
• Problem-Aware – In this case your target customer knows that he has a problem and needs to solve it.But doesn’t know if there is a product out there that can do it.
• Completely Unaware – At this stage your customer doesn’t know he has a problem or that there is a solution to it.

One of the most important…if not the most important…component to building a brand that can increase sales and lock in customer loyalty is the issue of position. Your brand must differentiate clearly between you and your competitors. Here’s how you establish that

• Consumer Expectations – What does the customer think he will get from your brand? This is harder for startups who’ve not established any expectations. And it’s best you manage your reputation early and often. Never let consumer expectations get out of your control.
• Competitor attributes – The way your brand is positioned is also influenced by the features and benefits your competitors offer their customers. This is why competitor intelligence is so important.

7- The Price

The final piece to the brand puzzle is pricing. This is such an element of value because most people will think a product that is priced high is of better quality than a product that is priced low. That’s calledprice sensitivity…and it impacts people in different situations.

For example, if you want to buy a new car and decide that you only want to spend $22,000 to $25,000, any price in that range will not bother you. The moment the price goes above that range, however, and you will flinch. The secret is to figuring out a price that will make you money without scaring your customers away.

While the main goal of your blog may be to express your thoughts, talk back to your customers or as a vehicle to promote your product or services, there is another critical element to blogging.

The Search Engine Optimization & e-Marketing.

Because of the frequency of active blogs (daily – or at least 4 times a week) the search engines have put high weight on blogs that are focused and tend to stay on topic.

But the most overloooked element of a blog is that once you’ve established a frequent pattern of posting and you have the Googlebot coming to your site every few days, you can then use that to link to other sites, sub-domains or any deep links that you need to get crawled.

The title of your blog should be thought of as a headline – grab the reader’s attention – but also be sure that your blog title is also what gets archived – that way your titles can become search queries as well.

While the main objective of a blog should be to get your message out, don’t forget to take a little time for SEO and you should see your efforts payoff in the search engine results pages.

What do you think of when I say Coca-Cola, Apple, IBM, Intel and Microsoft? Well, if you said they are all big companies, you’d be right.But the are also the BIG TOP RATED COMPANIES.

How Apple OR IBM made this ?

A brand creates associations and expectations, not because it is a brand, but because the brand encapsulates the expectations which the company has made in the past and which can make in the future.

Advertising and making cereative ads is very BIG REASON to be big company and KNOWN , As an example  Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, etc. spend millions of dollars doing this. However, that is what it takes to make it work – millions. If you have that sort of money to throw around on an unknown quantity such as image advertising go right ahead. But if you don’t have that much to spend on building your brand, your advertising expenditure will only be like a drop in the ocean in terms of the effect that it has on your brand recognition.

So e-Marketing has APPEARED for small companies that dont have big budget to advertise with , btw the big ones are using it now  .

 SO these are some tips to BRAND online & offline :-

1. Hire a branding company to bring your image and message under a brand ONLINE. ie Developing all branding tips  (website,  logo, e-marketing plans, SEO , SEM, backlinks, Daily articles, blog ,  etc………….) , ie Hire e-RAMO  .

2. Develop a mission statement that shows your reason for being and the value you provide to your customers.

3. Create and issue an online or direct mail newsletter.

4. Make a calendar of local and regional events in your country and make your company visible in the areas most related to your company and your potential clients’ interests.

5. Add informational website content a minimum of four times per month.

6. Update your website to be informational based so that search engines can find you, and clients can read in-depth material demonstrating your expertise.