The Marketing Edge: A Sharper Way to Approach Building a Brand

By Amy Juers

Recognized as an industry expert in PR and marketing, author Amy Juers shares her intuitive insights in The Marketing Edge: A Sharper Way to Approach Building a Brand with practical tips on performing a SWOT analysis; crafting SMART goals; building buyer personas; defining your unique value proposition; using storytelling to your advantage; building a positive company culture; getting the most out of your website; performing market research and data mining; and combining the power of PR, marketing, and advertising.

 

As a 25-year veteran of the industry, Amy Juers believes the future of any organization depends on understanding your current position in the market while envisioning the heights you'd like your business to reach. To be successful, businesses must be willing to devote time and energy to the actions that lead to more clients, increased revenue, and business longevity such as: strategic planning, brand positioning, marketing and advertising, employee participation, website maximization, and strategic outsourcing.

 

Amy Juers has built an internationally known PR and marketing agency by serving the legal and accounting industries. Edge Marketing has received more than 25 awards and honors since 2006.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edge Marketing, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987346716

Book preview

Introduction

A Major Milestone

"Building presence and driving sales for our clients have always

been at the heart of what we do at Edge."

I didn’t start out with the intent on becoming an entrepreneur. In fact, when I was going for my master’s degree in business and management information systems from Metropolitan State University, I was constantly combing through the job postings in the newspaper. With my master’s degree in hand, I was ready to embark upon a career in technology and analytics.

I often wonder where I would’ve ended up had I continued to pursue work more related to my major. At the time, the proliferation of social media was on the horizon but hadn’t quite been introduced to the world. Maybe I would’ve worked my way up the food chain at Facebook to become head of New Technology. I’m sure Facebook founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg would’ve welcomed me with open arms.

Looking back, I know I made the right decision. I’m grateful to have had such an astounding career in marketing, which began with a job opening I applied for with Quorum, a litigation services company. As a business analyst, you would think marketing would never enter into my realm of responsibilities. But among my daily data analytics duties, I dabbled a bit in marketing, and eventually the job evolved into a full-time marketing position. Ultimately, I was promoted to a leadership role in which I spent five years at Quorum serving as its Director of Marketing.

During my tenure there, Quorum wanted to focus on PR, which led to hiring the PR firm, LegalVoice. Later, after Quorum was acquired by Kroll, I joined LegalVoice. In 2006, I acquired the firm and changed its name to Edge Marketing, Inc.

Edge recently celebrated its 25-year anniversary and we are honored to be highly regarded by our peers. Over the years, our firm has won more than 25 industry awards. In the last decade alone, the Edge team and I have facilitated more than 100 strategic marketing and public relations campaigns, including company launches and rebrands, product and service launches, and mergers and acquisitions.

One of our biggest accomplishments as an agency was launching The Edge Room™, a virtual press room for conferences that serves as an electronic portal. For the 2022 Legalweek conference, the largest legal technology and education conference in the world, exhibitors and sponsors uploaded more than 4,000 documents to The Edge Room™. The media can access the portal to find materials from different companies as well as thought leaders and technology experts in the legal industry.

With the advent of virtual events due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the return on investment is lower than with in-person events. The lack of in-person events has forced companies to change how they present themselves, their products, and their services in the marketplace. Because content is always king, for the last couple of years, Edge has started leveraging more educational content and paid digital campaigns for our clients.

We predict that market consolidation is not going to stop. Because of this, we have a very solid process and strategy to help clients merge their brands while still retaining the loyal following and brand recognition that made them successful.

In addition, data privacy and security are influential factors impacting business activities today. Technology has had to adapt to a remote workforce and the capacity to send, receive, and house information. Unfortunately, I have seen technology startups and service companies come into the legal industry expecting big wins right off the bat from a trade show, email campaign, or a PPC advertising campaign. When success doesn’t arrive overnight, they often get frustrated and leave the industry.

What they don’t know or have the patience to understand is that this is not the legal operations’ or legal practitioners’ fault for not immediately buying into a new technology or system; it is the industry’s nature, historically, to avoid risk and only make change happen once something is tried and true.

The pandemic brought back memories of the 2008 recession, which was a difficult time for most companies. I’m proud to say that Edge has remained stable through both the 2008 recession and the pandemic. Some of our clients’ businesses were impacted by these historic events, but they stayed with us and are still our clients today.

Our clients’ success is from our ability to pivot. We have adjusted our approach to incorporate more effective strategies that work for our clients. Initially, there was concern about budget and spend for marketing. But I’ve seen the numbers come through, and marketing budgets are still climbing. Now, as the world opens up and people return to the office, we are ready to adjust our approach again to stay ahead of the game.

This book, The Marketing Edge: A Sharper Way to Approach Building a Brand, comes at a time when I feel that my team and I have practically done it all; and through this book, I am sharing what has been learned along the way.

As my team and I continue to bask in the glow of a major milestone, our hearts are filled with gratitude as well as the zest to keep our clients’ brands at an exceptional level by applying our perfected systems and processes. Building presence and driving sales for our clients have always been at the heart of what we do at Edge.

What a memorable journey I have had with a truly amazing team. I am honored to be working alongside such an intelligent, hardworking, and driven group of professionals, and I can’t wait to see what the future brings.

Chapter 1

Strategic Planning: The Key to Brand Optimization

"Remember, your strategic plan is meant to spark change; yet

it should be open to change as well."

The future of your organization depends on staying in tune with where your business is now and where you would like to see your business go. For organization leadership, strategic planning is a necessity. The process should include the entire organization, and the discussion that results from this process can lead to significant and impactful changes.

Strategic planning analyzes your business and helps you set realistic goals and objectives. In the end, you will have a formal document that lays out the organization’s future goals and how to achieve them.

The Strategic Plan

As with most for-profit companies, your primary purposes for being in business is to secure clients, secure work, and make a profit. But in order to be successful and to attain your business goals, you must have a strategy in place to avoid the spray and pray activities that many businesses use as they figure out how to grow and sustain that growth.

Every existing business should have a strategic plan, and that plan should be reviewed and updated as a business’s needs change. Your strategic plan should stem from your organization’s mission and vision. It should state goals that foster growth and provide a long-term plan to achieve those goals. A strategic plan is an internal document, one that is not only meant to be shared with employees and leadership but should include input from both.

Some people confuse a strategic plan with a business plan; however, the two have quite different purposes. A business plan tends be drafted at the onset of a business and lays out how that business will operate on a day-to-day basis. The strategic plan, in contrast, is drafted by an existing business; it maps out specific initiatives and how to achieve them.

For example, if your organization’s business model is case management software for law firms, your strategic plan might include expanding your market by partnering with lawyer associations.

Parts of a Strategic Plan

Your strategic plan should answer questions, such as:

1. What are my business’s current capabilities, its vision, its mission, and objectives?

2. What short– and long-term goals do I have for my business and how do I achieve them?

3. Who in my organization is responsible for the things I need to achieve the goals for my organization and do they have what they need to help me reach those goals?

It should include the following: a mission statement, a vision statement, future goals, a well–thought-out approach, and an action plan.

The Mission Statement

What do you do and why does your business exist? This question is at the core of every mission statement.

Mission statements provide clarity and direction for you, your staff, and your organization. It helps your clients understand what you can do for them.

Your mission statement should be included at the beginning of your strategic plan. It will help guide your vision and strategy for your organization.

But mission statements are not always easy to craft. Even for experienced business owners, a mission statement can end up being too long, convoluted, and unclear as