How to Make Your Company Look Fabulous in 2009

When building a successful empire, branding is everything. So many businesses are brilliant at network marketing, talking the talk, walking the walk, and making sales. These qualities are good-and they work-but many companies don’t realize the huge mistakes that make them look inferior. Here are a few tips that will make any business look huge:

1. Hire a copywriter. Forget the grammar and spelling mistakes, I’m talking about something much deeper. How is your copy written? Are you attracting the right kind of customer with it? Do you sound like an industry leader or do you sound like an idiot? Good copy is extremely rare. Take advantage of this.
2. Hire a photographer. Does your website contain mug shots of your executives and employees? Nothing says amateur like a point-and-shoot camera. Invest in a photo studio that tailors to your needs, a photographer that brings out the best out of you, and a stylist that makes you look fantastic. This applies to men as well as women-you should be wearing some sort of makeup in your photos.
3. Hire a talented web designer. Having an ugly website is one of the biggest turn offs for anybody. Invest in a collection of high quality stock art and consistently use it within your website and the rest of your marketing materials. Remember, websites that are entirely done in Flash are rarely usable and look very template-like.
4. Screw the “About Us” page and the “Services” page. Replace it with ultra-relevant content tailored to industry researched keywords and phrases. Include biographies, white papers, resources, tools, tips, and tricks. Make your website worth going to. Include case studies, a list of your clients, testimonials, and the advantages/disadvantages of utilizing your company’s services vs. your competition. Make this your sales engine.
5. Turn your “Contact” page into a lead module. Throughout your website, you should have opportunities to collect information about a possible lead. You may want to use a CRM tool such as Salesforce to capture leads and integrate them into your sales lifecycle. Be sure to also collect behind-the-scenes information, like IP address, country, city, state, referring website, search terms, etc. The point here is to look smart in front of your customers. Know more than they think you know about them.

You should do an evaluation of some kind once per year to investigate how other people perceive you. It may be a good idea to have a third party assist with this so you can ensure transparency. Remember, perception is everything.