Command Arms Relaunches CAA Brand and New Website

CAA proudly announce the completion of a yearlong endeavor to modernize and reload the CAA brand image through all marketing materials and new website at www.CAAGEARUP.com. The new branding includes a stylized lion emblem denoting strength, leadership and power. The tag line “Gear Up” demonstrates to the customer that CAA produces a large variety of firearms accessories, including buttstocks, magazines, rails, grips and much, much more.

LTC. (Ret.) Mikey Hartman, brought his vast and unique 20-year experience of training over 500,000 soldiers and building the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Shooting Doctrine to CAA. The company, with members from the shooting sports, IDF elite reserved forces, counter terrorism, reconnaissance and commando units, all have two things in common: knowledge and passion. This diverse team continues to develop and produce advanced battle-tested firearm accessories to withstand the rigors of real life combat conditions and to give their customers a tactical and survival advantage.

“Our new brand represents CAA in the twenty-first century. We are modern, efficient, effective and high quality,” Mikey Hartman, CEO of CAA explained. “Our lion emblem honors our warrior heart and spirit. And like a lion, CAA is committed to producing only top of the line firearms accessories for soldiers, law enforcement and shooting enthusiasts.”

The new website offers customers a clean, modern visual with easy to find buttons and tabs. The new website also features a new URL in keeping with the move toward simplifying the company name from Command Arms Accessories to CAA. Incorporating the new tag line, the new URL is CAAGEARUP.com.

For more information on CAA, visit www.CAAGEARUP.COM.  Join the conversation on Facebook.

Is Good PR the Best SEO?

Newsflash: SEO has changed in a big way. Google has demolished a lot of the old SEO tricks that used to be useful for climbing the rankings. In the last two years alone there have been over 40 changes to the search engine algorithm. Even with all of these changes one thing has remained the same, if you want your site to top the Google results you need a lot of people talking about your business online.

When people are talking about your business they link to it on their blogs, give it good reviews on Yelp and Google+, tweet about it to their friends and share it on Facebook. To top it off, when your business is buzzworthy curious reporters write articles about it and link to it in their stories.

These things also happen to be all the same clues Google looks for when ranking your business in search results.

You may be asking yourself, “that sounds great, but how do I get people to do that?” The answer my friend is PR. Yep, good old fashioned PR is the best way to get people talking about your business and get Google to give you that search engine love you so desperately need.

When I say PR, I’m not talking about simply press releases. I’m talking about taking it to the digital streets with a communication’s strategy. You first need to identify who your target market is, what communication channels they pay attention to, whose opinions matter to them and what your target market cares about. Next you need to devise messaging and branding that will resonate with them. Now you need to deliver that message through communication channels and influencers that they pay attention too.

A digital PR strategy like this will replace a lot of on-page and off-page SEO efforts.

How? Here’s a few examples:

• A good PR strategy using carefully researched messaging that strikes at the core of what your target market cares about will by its very nature naturally include the keywords your target market is searching for.
• A good PR strategy will make sure your website is on message and is a useful place for reporters and customers to find the information they want.

• A good PR strategy will broadcast your message through the digital channels and influencers that are important to your target market. These may include social media sites like Facebook, Google +, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube or digital news pundits and bloggers. This outreach will create social signals, backlinks and site traffic that will increase your search rankings.

To sum it up, a well-researched digital PR campaign will cover all the areas that SEO covers and not only will it help you climb to the top of the first page of Google, but it will also build your brand, build relationships of trust with your target market and get people talking about your business.

What makes you so special? Finding your brand’s identity

Every business and every person has a brand whether they like it or not. The question is what is your brand identity and what does it say about you, your company and your organization? Your brand is the space or mental real estate your product occupies in the mind of your target market. What feelings, thoughts and images come to their mind when they think about your product? Is your mental real estate a relaxing and inviting country club or a rundown shack? We hope it’s the country club.

Here’s a list of questions to ask yourself to help determine your brand identity:

• What benefit do you offer that is better than what the competition offers? If you’re a gunmaker, are your firearms lighter, more accurate, smaller, more powerful, more luxurious or affordable than the competition? Figure out your core benefit and build that benefit into your customer’s mental real estate using targeted PR, advertising, packaging, logos and slogans.

 

• Is your brand trustworthy? It doesn’t matter if you sell the world’s best fishing lure if you are constantly mixing up the orders and sending your customer the wrong lure. Bad Yelp or Google reviews will let all your customer’s know that you aren’t to be trusted. People like brands they can trust like Toyota and Apple. Make sure that you are building trust and not breaking it.

 

• Are you creating a relationship with your customer? People don’t buy from nameless, cold, uncaring companies. People buy from warm, friendly people like them that they could kick back and grab a meal with. Do whatever you can to humanize your brand. Send thank you notes after purchases and make sure that if your customers call you they can get a hold of a real person on the phone. Talk to your customers and let them engage with you using social media and events.

 

• What is your brand’s voice? Is your brand smart, fun or both? Is it dependable and straight laced or carefree and hip? Your brand’s voice should be whatever your target market wants it to be. If your target market is 20-something millennials than you should opt for the fun and cool approach. However if your selling life insurance to baby boomers you better have a voice that’s dependable and levelheaded. Your brand’s voice will influence the tone you use when writing marketing copy, social media posts or press releases and the colors, packaging and logos you use for your products.

Branding in the Firearms Industry

For anyone in marketing, we’ve all heard the call-to-arms from upper management – “We need to create a new brand” or “We have to re-brand this product.” Perhaps the looming deadline of an industry trade show creates this impetus, or sales have dipped into the summer doldrums, but nonetheless, the idea of “creating a brand,” although heroic, is often no more than a marketers dream. In our industry, as in any other, we create products. Hopefully, these products are developed to fulfill a need in our marketplace. Perhaps the need is a smaller, more concealable handgun, or a pack that can be overstuffed and thrown in the back of a pick-up truck, or a rifle that can take the hot and sandy conditions of our current battle scenes, but whatever product is developed the seed of a brand has been born.

Ok, so what the heck is a “brand?” 

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a “name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other sellers.”

So, the first element in brand development is a product, and not a product just for product sake, but to provide a solution to a markets problem. Now, here’s where the marketing team often makes a mess of it. The messaging you as a marketer provide the public must be clear and implicit – cutesy tag lines or a laundry list of features don’t necessarily get the warm and fuzzy going in customers. Tell me why I want to buy this. Tell me why I can’t live without it. Fine, you have a 4 lb. trigger pull, ergonomic grip, out of the box accuracy – but doesn’t every other handgun lately?

Step two in brand development – make sure your message is clear, accurate and truly supports the product.

Ok, now we’ve got that, so let’s now make the purchasing action happen. It’s so easy to just list the old http://www.mywebsite.com and think the world will come in droves. If we acted on every website we saw on a daily basis, we wouldn’t get anything done! So, we discriminate, often to the tune of overlooking 99% of website addresses thrown at us. So what, why do I want to go there? Make me. And that is step three, make your customers want to go to your site, especially if you sell on your site or make it easy ( by a couple clicks) to make that purchase. How? Think promotion. And promotion doesn’t have to mean giving stuff away. Don’t we all have enough pens with company logos on them? Offer specific information only available on your site, email newsletters, future coupons or event subscriptions, donations to good causes, or membership to elite company clubs. Think creatively; think of what YOU would want.

And now, the final, and most important step in brand development; keep that customer coming back. Developing loyalty is sometimes the hardest part of branding, but without it, a brand becomes a whisper of a dead dream somewhere in the past. Keep information flowing outwards, listen to customers and respond. When there is a problem (and we all know they happen more often than not!) get proactive and solve it. A satisfied customer is your best salesman!

So, branding isn’t something created in a board room. It’s seeded at the start, from market research, to careful product development, to wise and effective marketing and serious customer service. Put together, your products will take on a life of their own. Your loyal customers will create new customers for you and on and on. A brand is not born in any one department within a company. It gets its start there and your it’s your customers that will creat your brand’s place in the market.

Building Loyalty