OK, close your eyes. No, really.... close your eyes and picture a recent customer with whom you interacted. Put yourself in their shoes for a minute, to see your brand and customer experience the way they do.

You can open your eyes now because you are going to jot down some notes. There’s no right or wrong answer here, we’re just brainstorming.

Pull out your notebook or word document and write down any and all of the ways your customer interacts with your business. There are some ideas in the chart below to get you started.

Next, you’re going to score on a scale of 1 to 5 how well you think your brand is represented in that interaction. (1 would be not very much and 5 would be very strong.)

Finally, score on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) the potential impact of that interaction on your business.

For example, if your Web site is fairly generic, it would get a low brand representation score; and, if you know there are customers who find products like yours by searching the Internet, the impact score would be high. This would help you figure out that you might want to invest some time and money in improving your brand’s representation on the Internet.

Take a look at the scores in the table. Anywhere that brand representation is low is an opportunity for you to invest some time and money (doing the things that come next in this series) to improve your brand impact on customer engagement.

Where to begin? On those things that have the highest impact on your business. If you aren’t sure what your first steps should be, your SBDC Advisor has helped many companies through this process and can help you, too.