In a saturated and noisy market, many businesses make the critical mistake of treating their brand as an afterthought — outsourcing creative piecemeal or relying on amateur marketing efforts that lack strategy, depth, and long-term thinking. While outsourcing might seem convenient and amateur efforts may feel cost-effective, they come with hidden costs: inconsistent messaging, forgettable design, and missed opportunities to truly differentiate.

This article explores the fundamental differences between amateur marketing, fragmented outsourcing, and the integrated, brand-driven approach of Grafico, a full-service creative and marketing partner dedicated to helping businesses not just show up — but stand out.

The Risks of Amateur Marketing & Fragmented Outsourcing

For many growing businesses, marketing begins as a necessity rather than a strategy. They tap generalists, friends, or freelancers to produce ads, social posts, or basic design work. While this can work in the short term, it often leads to disjointed messaging, visual inconsistencies, and reactive rather than proactive campaigns.

Key pitfalls include:

• Lack of Brand Cohesion: Without a unifying strategy, every piece of communication feels disconnected.

  more

Increasing sales and building stronger bonds with your customers. Are you the only game in town that offers the financial services that are available at your stores? Probably not. There are probably plenty of competitors in your stores’ neighborhoods.

Do you sell your services for less than everyone else? Also probably not. Most services available in the alternative financial sector are either fixed by regulation or market forces.

Do you offer services that your competitors do not? Again, the answer is probably “no” for the vast majority.

How Do You Stand Out from The Competition?

It’s called “Customer Experience.” And Customer Loyalty programs are a proven way to improve the Customer Experience. According to an article in Entrepreneur magazine, Starbucks’ customer-retention program played a key role in its 26 percent rise in profit and 11 percent increase in revenue during a fiscal quarter in 2013. To keep up with major online retailers like Amazon.com and eBay, Best Buy increased reward points from four percent to five percent last year to motivate customers to keep coming back. This strategy, along with additional changes, has helped that company’s stock more than double since early 2013.

Will prospects walk on by or walk right in? A New Look for Windows Can Drive Store Traffic Suppose you were offered a free billboard on a heavily traveled thoroughfare. Would you ignore the marketing opportunity?

Of course you wouldn’t! But far too many overlook the power of the retail storefront for promoting their business. When you own a retail store, your storefront windows are the first chance you have to make an impression on your customers. They can draw shoppers in — or drive them away.

While you cannot communicate everything about your business on your storefront, a well-designed window display can shout to onlookers that something is happening inside and why it is good for the consumer. And since consumer surveys of financial service centers customers indicate that half of all new customers first learned about a business by its storefront signage, these windows play an incredibly effective role in attracting new business.

In retailing, window displays connect with customers and prospects. Think of the crowds that throng to New York City during the holidays to partake of opulent window dressings at retailers. Certain retailers have whole departments devoted to visual merchandising. Bergdorf Goodman windows are a must see for the fashion conscious. Barneys, with a more irreverent approach, is also an ongoing draw.

Do you have a brand? I don’t mean a name or a logo, but a brand. Your brand is about the customer experience with your business, the way you differentiate your store or chain of stores from other financial service centers, the personality of your business. Everybody has a brand. It’s how they use it that makes it a successful brand or just another also ran. One way to strategically use your brand is to create trust with your customers with it. Why is this important? Because you perform mission critical transactions with your customers. They trust that you provide them with the cash they need to manage their lives, they entrust you with considerable amounts of personal information and they trust that when they hand over their money to pay a bill or wire funds that they will get where they need to be in a timely fashion.

Also in today’s economy consumers are becoming more and more skeptical with their financial institutions. According to the 2011 Edelman Trust in U.S. Financial Services Survey, of the top factors listed by 75% or more of consumers surveyed, financial institutions came up short of expectations. For example, 91% of those surveyed indicated that Honest Communication was an important factor in the reputation of their FI, but only 67% of those consumers perceived that their bank lived up to that aspect of their relationship. Similarly, 84% said Open and Transparent Practices were important, but nearly 1 in 3 said their bank or credit Union fell short. 75% said fair and competitive prices were important, but only a little over half felt that they were provided. In these areas where financial institutions are suffering from an enormous trust deficit, financial service centers seem to excel. This may provide a rare opportunity for FSCs to not only secure their relationships with existing customers, but to reach up demographically into a whole new pool of dissatisfied bank customers.

Are you connected? I don’t mean as in who you know, but how you keep in touch with friends, family and most importantly how your business stays in touch with its customers.

Social Media, SMS / Text Messages, Websites, e-mail and so on are in the forefront of many discussions on the topic. It’s interesting to note that many of these are marketing tools were not even around as recently as ten year ago. So how do you keep up and how do you know what’s applicable to your business?

Before you get started, there are some basic tenets that must be followed to help you to achieve success.

Whenever neighborhood financial service centers consider marketing strategies for their businesses, the first things that tend to come to mind are the store signage, interior posters and teller signs, buck slips to be distributed to customers, advertisements in broadcast media or outdoor venues, social networking for word-of-mouth and the like. Seldom do many operators consider the marketing power that lies within their employees. One simple area that is easy to overlook is the appearance of your front line employees.

If you were investing your hard earned dollars into purchasing advertising space, you would not place a tattered, out of date image that made you look bad into that medium, would you? Not likely. You would want that ad to make the best statement about your business that it possibly could in order to attract new customers, create a positive image for your company and maximize your return on the investment.