Dear readers:

What are some sure signs of spring? The colorful tulips and azaleas blooming around Washington, and the need for some deep cleaning.

This spring, my goal was to clean my online house, the DBMC website. I’ve had a website since about 1999. In nearly 20 years, it’s gone through several iterations. What started off as a five-page template site is now a robust WordPress site with 800 plus blog entries. However, the person who created the version I’d been using up to now did not set up the back end properly, and this was causing some security and speed problems. So I hired a designer/developer to do a “clean up” and refresh of my website. Check out my new, sparkling clean site at www.deborahbrody.com and let me know what you think.

Because of the website work, I haven’t been blogging for the past few weeks, except for a guest blog post about the importance of your brand messaging, which I have excerpted below.

During the past few weeks, I've created a brand messaging checkup, which is a free assessment about the effectiveness of your brand messaging, based on your website. Let me evaluate your messaging today!

Happy spring everyone!

Deborah

The following is a shortened adaptation from a guest blog post I wrote last month:

Many organizations spend lots of resources creating a beautiful visual brand identity, sometimes at the expense of their messaging. After all, people process visual information faster than written information, and respond emotionally to images and graphics. But, if you are only paying attention to your visual brand identity, and not to your messaging, you might as well have a pristine-looking house that’s hiding lots of junk in messy, overstuffed closets and drawers. In other words, it’s not enough to look good on the outside, you have to look good on the inside too.

In order to boost the messaging element of your brand (and clear out the messy closets in your house), here are three tips:

1. Look inside

Before you can tackle an organizing project, you have to assess what you have. Similarly, before you work on your brand messaging, you have to know what you do, what your strengths are, and what you stand for (your values).

2. Simplify and streamline

If you want to clean out a cluttered house, you’d start by getting rid of all the junk. Perhaps you’d donate some clothes that no longer fit or take a torn suitcase to the garbage dump. You have to do the same with your messaging. Perhaps you have too many messages. Or perhaps your messages no longer fit you today. All that’s messaging clutter you have to get rid of.

3. Be consistent

To create a strong brand, you have to be consistent. You have to use the same logo and colors on all your marketing materials. You should also be consistent in how you describe yourself, the tagline you use, and the value proposition you embrace.

There's a lyric in the song Savior, by Rise Against that goes like this:"What the color of her eyes were, and her scars or how she got them." Can you spot the error? It's one of the most common grammatical mistakes I hear in spoken communications: subject-verb agreement. Increasingly, it is common to see it in written work too. If your subject is singular, your verb also needs to be singular. A plural subject requires a plural verb. Many times the problem lies in being able to correctly identify the subject. In the song lyric above, the subject is color, not eyes, so the verb should be singular, and the lyric should be "what the color of her eyes was..."

Deborah Brody Marketing Communications services:

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