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Archives for February 2016

February 6, 2016 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Pick a Niche

DoThisNotThatMarketing.com Pick a Niche

Marketing to Everyone is Bad Strategy

Are you marketing to everyone? Maybe, at least if you’re new to marketing. The logic goes like this: there are lots of people who could use my stuff (product or service). I need to make money so I don’t want to miss ANY of them. If I market to everyone, more people will see my stuff and maybe buy. While marketing to everyone sounds like it might pay off, for almost all small businesses it really ends up being a waste of money. The most successful companies pick a niche, zeroing in on a very specific market.

When you market your business to everyone, is anyone listening? If you don’t have a specific customer or segment in mind, how do you know what they want? How do you know what will speak to them? By marketing to everyone, you have not identified a particular customer in mind. You haven’t sought to meet their particular needs because, instead, you are focused on making everyone happy. Your customers are a generalized mass of humanity with no relationship with your business because you have attempted to target everyone.

Here’s the truth: even huge brands pick specific types of customers to market to. They position themselves to appeal to a certain demographics and psychographics and craft their marketing messages to communicate their value to that specific market.

Instead of marketing to everyone, here’s what you should do: Identify the specific sort of people your product or service would help. Even if you think your product or service is for everyone, you need to pick somewhere to start. Who would benefit most from your product or service? What kind of people would get the most value from your product or service?

Research your customers’ buying habits. Where do they live? What do their lives look like? Are they busy raising a family, working in the city, vacationing in Myrtle Beach? What do they really want? Asking questions about your customers’ buying personalities will enable you to speak directly to them. You will need to create a marketing campaign based on each buying persona, but you won’t necessarily have to market to each one.

Be sure to communicate with your different target markets separately. Perhaps you are a Real Estate agent that sells both residential and commercial properties. By setting up your website with separate areas for commercial and residential properties, you are able to target both of those markets and speak to those audiences accordingly.

Marketing to everyone costs more money. You have no defined area to market to and end up marketing everywhere, thereby diluting your relationship with your customers. Parenting magazine doesn’t waste it’s time marketing to people without children because those people aren’t likely to purchase their magazine. When you focus on a particular target market, you can spend more money and time on people who are more likely to purchase your products.

Stop worrying about marketing to everyone. Instead, get started on target marketing. You’ll create a stronger bond with your customers, convert more leads into sales, and spend get more marketing buying power. By marketing to customers who actually need your product, you will create a stronger relationship with them and they will come back for more and likely create some word of mouth marketing for your business as well.

Do you need help honing in on your target market or picking your niche? Feel free to email me with your questions.

Filed Under: Small Business Marketing Tagged With: DoThisNotThatMarketing.com, Ron Tester, Target Marketing

February 3, 2016 by RonTester Leave a Comment

How to Develop a Brand for Your Small Business

DoThisNotThatMarketing.com Branding

Decide How You Want to Be Known in the World and Build Your Brand Accordingly

An effective brand will give your product or service an edge in today’s competitive market. What is branding? Why should you create a brand? A brand expresses everything your product or service represents and separates you from your competition. A brand is your customer’s perception of your product or service, good or bad. Not just your brand name or your logo, branding extends to your website, how your phones are answered, and the way that customers interact with you on social media or in person. Creating a strong brand involves a well thought-out marketing strategy.

With a strong brand, your product or service is quickly recognized and helps you stand out from your competition. Customers can make informed decisions based on your brand. For instance, customers know that they will be able to take their children to a Disney movie without any further investigation into the movie because Disney has created a strong brand recognition of family oriented movies. A consumer seeking a chicken sandwich for lunch recognizes that Chik-Fil-A has created a brand in their quality, price, and their recipe for the chicken sandwich, right down to the pickle. Conversely, DHL failed to create a strong brand for themselves in a market already dominated by two strong brands, UPS and FedEx. DHL is very strong in some markets, but as of this writing does not compete with UPS or FedEx in the US market.

So how do you go about developing your brand? My first recommendation would be to start by reading this blog post. My second recommendation would be to read what Maria Ross has to say. She’s the go-to person for small business branding.

When developing your brand, it’s important that you first decide how you want to be known in the world. What do you stand for? What do you stand against? What do you want your customers to think about you, say about you, share about you? How do you want them to feel?

Find out what your customers think of your product or service and what they want, need, and expect to receive from it. Don’t assume you know what they think. Conduct research to create a branding strategy. How do you do that? Ask them. Creating a branding strategy identifies how you want your product or service to be identified.

Creating a logo that conveys your product personality is one step in that process. There are a variety of places you can go. I’ve had logos designed by The Valdez, but you can also find good work on 99 Designs. Another key to branding your product is creating a tagline for your company and a slogan for your product. Sometimes in the beginning stages of a company, the tagline and slogan are one and the same.

Once you’ve created your brand, you need to get it into the hands of your customers. Once it’s done, be sure to put your logo on everything connected to your business; from emails to mailing labels and letterheads to your website. The more people see your branding the easier it will be to create a strong brand awareness for your product.

Once you’ve done that, you need to be sure that you’re consistent with your brand. Consistency goes a long way to establishing a strong brand and imprinting it on your customers’ and potential customers’ minds. UPS created a strong, consistent brand from their brown trucks to their employees brown uniforms. A strong brand creates confidence in your customers and allows them to know what to expect of your product or service.

I see some companies that are always fiddling with their brand. A new logo, a slight variation, a new identity. At first this is pretty common as a business is “finding itself.” Once you’ve figured out who you are, what you stand for and what your branding should be, please think long and hard about changing your brand. It can be unsettling for your customers (and your community/market) and changes can make people wonder about the stability of your company.

Strong branding gives your product an edge in the game to win customers. Be sure to take time to research and invest in your branding strategy. Branding doesn’t happen over night. Building a brand takes time and is a crucial part of marketing your business towards greater success.

One word of caution: branding is important but it’s not sufficient by itself to bring you the business you want. Unless you have the money to invest in branding like Coca Cola or IBM, a better strategy would be to use your brand to augment your regular sales and marketing activities.

What’s your brand say about you? What would you like it to? Please comment below or email me if I can help you in any way.

Filed Under: Small Business Marketing Tagged With: Branding, DoThisNotThatMarketing.com, Ron Tester

February 2, 2016 by RonTester Leave a Comment

Self-Education

Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.-

Filed Under: Small Business Marketing

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