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.

A recent report published by the Pew Researchers Internet and American Life project has found that now nearly 20% of Americans who are online are using a status updating service such as Twitter. This is almost a doubling over the numbers that previous research has shown as recently as April 2009.

A website with rich content is like candy for search engines. Everyone with a website is (or should be) concerned with how well their site is placed in search engine results. The web is full of information, the majority of web surfers use search engines to find new websites, and 80-90% of them will not look past the first page of results.

It’s not a trick question, it is the primary thing your prospects and customers need to know about your business. Unfortunately, in the midst of all the effort we spend on communicating, advertising, lead-generating, educating, selling… somehow we can easily lose sight of addressing this simple question. Why? Maybe it’s because day-to-day we spend more time wrapping our heads around our own business, and not seeing it from our customer’s perspective. When we think of ourselves we tend to think in terms of benefits and features, not why those features and benefits matter. These things matter automatically to us – after all, it is what we do – but not so with our customers. They need to be told WHY they matter. They need to be shown the VALUE.