19 Secrets of A Successful White Label Marketing Service
White label products and services (also known as private label) are those provided by one organization for offer under another organization's brand. You've seen white label products in your favorite grocery store (plain wrap), in clothing stores (re-branded versions of famous designer brands) and online (software, platforms & more).
For example Watershed is the private label version of Ustream's live, interactive video broadcasting platform that is used by organizations such as Duke University, Sun and Disney, allowing users to host live video events for their own online communities.
Many businesses are attracted to white label services. By signing a white label licensing deal, a business can market a new service as their own without having to build it -- or take on the risk -- themselves.
White Label Marketing: Key Benefits to the Licensee
- Develop and reinforce awareness and recall of your brand
- Generates brand loyalty
- Build and maintain an online community
- Capture audience data
- Increase traffic to your website
- Provide a unique and effective way of building a relationship with your audience
- Creates an association with popular mainstream events such as Sport.
White Label Marketing: 19 Elements of Successful Service
If you're a successful company with a product or service you feel might work well as a white label offering, here are some inside tips on how to white label like the best of them:
1. Typically offered by a platform that's already popular
2. Easy to explain in a pitch
3. Impressive technical specifications and/or usage stats
4. Clear business benefits
5. Fast client set up via a templates, guided help, or turnkey
6. Custom branding - show all areas where a brand can appear
7. Ease of use for the end user customer
8. Clients already using the platform / use cases / case studies
9. Affordable, easy to understand pricing structure
10. Multi-platform support (web, mobile, Facebook, etc)
11. Fully managed and hosted by platform provider
12. Dedicated account manager to maximize client results
13. English language customer service at no additional cost
14. Ability to communicate to users via email and account alerts
15. Technical support around the clock
16. Real time reporting with client account log in
17. Fully branded customization
18. Multi-lingual versions
19. Cost per user pricing model
Chris Christie's Sage Advice For Kids and Brands
New Jersey governor Chris Christie recently gave some sage advice to a sixth grader -- advice which amazingly applies to today's brands as well.
A kid named Zack Martini took the mic during a town hall meeting and told the governor he was running for student council and wanted some campaign advice. Christie offered 4 salient points:
1. Get bunch of friends to help you. The more people that are around you the more other people will think you're gonna win.
2. Ask people for their vote. Don’t tell them to vote for you. People like to be asked. It's powerful when you do that.
3. Create colorful posters. If you're not sure if the rules allow that, hang them up until they tell you to take them down.
4. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. If you do, they won’t be voting for you in seventh grade.
Now this is some common sense advice for a sixth grader. But when you think about Christie's thoughts and apply them to a business organization, the insights still apply.
1. Get bunch of friends to help you. The more people that are around you the more other people will think you're gonna win.
Brand Upshot
Hello! Isn't this what social media marketing is all about? Community. Sharing. Transparency. Friends and fans. Dialog. Is is any wonder that brands are racing to gather more Facebook likes and twitter followers? Sure, social marketing is much more than a popularity contest, but if having a bunch of influential friends can help a grade school kid win an election, it most be good for brands too.
2. Ask people for their vote. Don’t tell them to vote for you. People like to be asked. It's powerful when you do that.
Brand Upshot
Companies are not inherently social, but people are. Brands who listen, learn and engage in a dialog with their customers are more likable, believable, and admirable than other brands. And these 'heardable' brands are more likely to be talked about in a more favorable light, in a phenomenon where fans transform into brand advocates. Authentic and free marketing. You can't top that!
3. Create colorful posters. If you're not sure if the rules allow that, hang them up until they tell you to take them down.
Brand Upshot
Being found online and offline is a business imperative. Create great online experiences that stand out -- delivering the features and functionality that your website visitors demand. Create visually interesting commercials, posters, banner ads and the like that get your company noticed while providing insights and value to those viewing them.
4. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. If you do, they won’t be voting for you in seventh grade.
Brand Upshot
Authenticity builds trust. Integrity breeds loyalty. Companies face an important balancing act between empowerment, assistance and control when it comes to taking their brand in social spaces. The more honest and straightforward a brand can be, the more success it will likely have in the future. Yes, honest brands can win!
Data Riot Rocks Walmart, Sort Of
No worries. Nobody is looting merchandise from America's favorite superstore.
But Walmart is playing on a different data playing field than other retail brands, which could cause its competitors to panic and run for the hills.
You see, Walmart just acquired OneRiot, a mobile and social ad targeting startup. And they recently acquired social media startup, Kosmix, earlier this year.
Why in the world would a retailer buy its own social media and mobile ad platforms?
As Heardable's Gunther Sonnenfeld says, "The future is in data and data services, with a focus on business insight. HP's purchase of Autonomy is shows that they are bailing on their consumer business completely."
Some companies, it seems, are focusing an enormous amount of time and resources of late into becoming data powerhouses. Some, like HP, may be transforming their entire companies into data-centric businesses. Others, like Walmart, are becoming data spellunkers to better understand consumer behavior and to leverage insights gleaned to sell more products, more effectively than ever before.
Walmart is quoted to have said that "the finer points of Big Data, Fast Data, and machine learning technologies" is what's going to give them a data mining advantage, which in turn, may give them a competitive edge in business.
Are you listening K-Mart? Is Target reading this? Hello Costco!
What unfolds next should be fun to watch.
Don't have the money to aquire your own analytics company? Then today's your lucky day! You can subscribe to Heardable, have us help mine some tasty business intelligence from our real-time brand mesurement platform, and help your company get a leg up on your competitors.
A riot for good. Go big data!
Heardable Names Heritage Auctions the #1 Rare Coin Dealer Brand Online
Heardable Names Heritage Auctions the #1 Rare Coin Dealer Brand Online
Heritage outscores hundreds of competing numismatic dealers by following online branding best practices to win coveted ranking.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) September 16, 2011 - According to contextual brand analytics firm, Heardable, Heritage Auctions is the most effective rare coin dealer brand online. Heritage Auctions trounced over 100 competitors in a thorough examination of nearly 600 online attributes covering areas such as social media participation, brand sentiment, mobile readiness, content syndication and website optimization.
Heritage Auctions achieved a brand health score of 627 out of a possible 1,000 points, 88% higher than tenth ranked rare coin dealer, Albanese Rare Coins with score of 333, and 6% higher than The Reeded Edge, which finished second with a score of 589.
Established in 1976, Heritage Auctions is the number one numismatic dealer and auctioneer in the world. The Dallas, TX headquartered company is also the largest collectible auctioneer and the third largest auction house world, with 664,296 registered online bidder-members.
"Heardable shines the spotlight on the top brands like Heritage in an effort to recognize companies that are doing so many things right, thereby setting a high bar for excellence in their respective industries," said Jon Samsel, CEO of Heardable. "Our platform identified Heritage Auctions for their exemplary online marketing practices. Frankly, we were surprised by the huge gap between those numismatic brands who 'get it' and those who don't."
What is Heritage Auctions doing to lead their category?
Subscore Break Out
Sociable - 116 out of 200 points: Heritage Auctions has moderate participation in social media (16,470 Twitter followers, 3,951 Facebook likes, 9,529 YouTube views) but dominates its competitors.
Actionable - 85 out of 150: Heritage Auctions makes it relatively easy for users to contact and do business with them.
Measurable - 85 out of 100: Heritage Auctions uses analytics tools to track and optimize its online performance.
Portable - 175 out of 200: Heritage Auctions is highly optimized for mobile browsing on the most popular devices.
Searchable - 125 out of 200: Heritage Auctions is reasonably well optimized for search engines.
Shareable - 75 out 150: Heritage Auctions is sharing and embedding content, but has room for improvement.
Heritage Auctions is one of the few numismatic dealers using the power of Web 2.0. What they’re doing that most others aren’t:
-utilizing social media to form relationships with customers
-publishing videos to establish their business leadership
-tailoring their online brand to both current and emerging technologies
-measuring and optimizing online performance
Top 10 Rare Coin Dealers Online
rank/brand/score
1. Heritage Auctions - 627
2. The Reeded Edge - 589
3. Blanchard and Company, Inc. - 537
4. David Lawrence Rare Coins - 466
5. Pinnacle Rarities - 450
6. Harry Laibstain Rare Coins - 419
7. Park Avenue Numismatics - 393
8. Coast to Coast Coins and Currency - 391
9. National Coin Broker - 370
10. Albanese Rare Coins, Inc. - 333
About Heardable
Heardable helps organizations utilize contextual analytics to make smarter, faster business decisions in a way that impacts tomorrow's quarterly results. They are the leading online brand benchmarking and analysis platform that measures the brand health of business organizations across hundreds of categories. Capturing vast amounts of digital information makes it possible to do many things that previously could not be done -- such as spot business trends or unearth lost revenue opportunities. Data can be used to unlock new sources of economic value, provide fresh insights into business planning, even hold vendors accountable. With 1.3 million brands and over 650 million data variables already stored in our database, Heardable's 'big data' repository can be utilized by any business looking for ways to optimize their online performance, boost brand awareness, and increase revenue. Heardable, Inc. is a privately held company based in Los Angeles, CA.
Become A Social Enterprise in 5 Simple Steps
Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s CEO and Chairman, recently gave the keynote address at his firm's annual DreamForce conference in San Francisco. He called on business organizations to modernize their corporate policies to enable employees to become evangelists for the company. He challenged business leaders to listen and learn from their customers. And he advocated the use of new technologies to measure, monitor and improve their brand performance.
How to best do this?
Benioff's recommends leveraging social technologies and expert consultancies to:
1. Drive brand loyalty
2. Assist shoppers in their purchase journeys
3. Accelerate company revenue cycles
Benioff predicted that today's CEOs will fail if they do not listen to their employees and customers. He pointed out that social media was not just a B2C phenomenon, but a B2B one as well. He urged B2B organizations to become social enterprises -- and he said social media was now bigger than email -- so everyone should take this "channel" seriously.
Hearable's 5 step process for becomming a social enterprise:
1. Learn - Assess the competition, current plans, ID success factors
2. Listen - Talk to customers, employees and partners
3. Plan - Identify low cost/high impact social initiatives, set baseline metrics/goals
4. Assist - Communicate, project manage, buidl, guide & advise
5. Deploy - Launch, measure, modify, improve, high-five!
Need help creating a social roadmap?
Heardable can help. Give us a call at 1-888-520-0034 and you'll receive a free consultation talking about ways your company can become a social enterprise. It's not as daunting as it sounds!
About Jon
Being Heardable, the Heardable Blog, is curated by Heardable co-founder and digital marketing veteran, Jon Samsel. Jon is based in Los Angeles, and Singapore.