Branding used to be the playfield of the big boys only — the Coca-Colas and the Budweisers of the world. Small marketers don’t have the resources to spend money on building a brand. The late, great Gary Halbert steadfastly said that every marketing piece you do needs to have a direct call to action — it needs to generate sales!

And he’s right of course. But branding is much more than blowing big wads of cash on just throwing your name out in front of a bunch of people. In the information marketing world branding applies to your product packaging. It applies to your email communications. It applies to your offline communications as well.

People like to buy from people that they know and trust. People they’re comfortable with. If you’re marketing information products and you change the look and feel of every product you come out with inside a specific niche, than you’re continually creating an environment where your customers have to familiarize themselves with you again and again.

You want your customers to recognize something new you’ve come out with as yours just by the look and feel. You want to have already crossed that first hurdle of building trust by having built a brand that people already recognize.

Your product packaging should be consistent with the look of your website. It should be similar to the look of any previous products you’ve introduced to that niche previously.

Just remember that it’s not all about product packaging. See Mistake #37 for a specific example of how messing with branding in an email communication impacted one marketer.

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