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Develop Your Product and Build Your Brand in the New Economy

Guest post by: Michael Farrell

Article Overview: How does a Small Business on Main Street ensure they offer a product or service that the customer wants, asks Mike Farrell with aspenIbiz. Read this short post to learn how to identify your target market, meet their needs, and use social media to build your brand.

Develop Your Product and Build Your Brand in the New Economy

Who makes your favorite phone handset or your favorite car?

What coffee shop calls out your name when your beverage is ready?

What movie or TV show will you not miss?

All of these questions involve your reaction to a particular product, service, or brand; these are a collection of assumptions about needs, wants, quality, appeal, and reliability.

Your reaction has been made over time in response to repeated exposure to the product, service, or brand.

Here is the important take-away from this introduction, right now your leads and customers are thinking about your business ... your products, your services, and your brand. They are deciding if they want to make your business one of their favorites.

How does a Small Business on Main Street ensure they offer a product or service and build their brand to be a successful company?

Know what the customer wants. It starts with identifying the product or service you have to offer others. What are your core values and what really matters to you? Identify your passions. What are your talents. What do you do better than other people?

From the long list of talents and qualities, select the top few which are the ones you do best and enjoy doing the most.

Compose a mission statement for your business that incorporates the items on your list. Keep the mission statement to a few sentences that emphasize your key competencies, your important values, passions, skills, results that you will generate, and the value that you will generate for your leads and customers.

Now add a tag line that embraces your mission statement ... something like, Just Do It!

Create your image. A significant part of your image is to be sure the key parts of your product and service, and the benefits that can be derived, are presented. A key part of this message is to help successful leads or customers, use or experience your product and service, to be more successful. Net net, you want to help those that are successful be more successful.

A key part of developing your image is knowing your target audience ... this is where most small businesses fall down. Figure out what will appeal to that audience. Understand your competition; decide where you want to fit in; determine where you can differentiate your offering and stand-out.

Get exposure. Creating and building your unique brand is an organic and ongoing process. Branding happens in the mind of the prospect and customer. The promises behind the brand create its appeal. By getting the word out, you will bring in the customers.

Traditional media exposure such as advertising, promotion, trade shows, direct marketing, events, directories, and even search engine marketing costs money; and most startups don't have much money to invest in marketing and promotion. Social media is a great equalizer for the cash-strapped entrepreneur.

Here are some fundamental guidelines for building your brand online effectively using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, and other social media outlets.

Listen, don't just talk. Hear the conversation first and then participate.

Ask, don't tell. The goal is to develop an opportunity to interact and exchange ideas, needs, and solutions.

Be real and have a story. Create an avatar, which is a character that interacts in the context of the brand.

Be interesting and give. Be sure to add to the conversation by providing whatever knowledge you have.

Be interested and respond. Hear a person's need and then share expertise in a personal way that has no motivation other than to help.

Have a payoff and say thank-you. Reward your followers with something special and exclusive. Appreciate them for following your brand and letting you into their world.

In launching a business with limited funding, the potential for successfully establishing a brand is far too often based on the zeal of the entrepreneur's belief in the disruptiveness of the unique business idea rather than market intelligence. That usually does not work.

To succeed, you need to know what is the true perception of your brand, how many people hate it, how many it appeals to strongly enough that they would advocate for it, and how that acceptance stacks up against the competition. The most successful companies pick a competitive position from which they know their brands can win.

Today's social media tools are great for business building, provided that the small business owner and their employees know how to use them for the company's ultimate benefit.

Ultimately, when small businesses know how they are supposed to use today's social media tools, they can do so with focus and purpose, leading the small business confidently into the communication age.

I Hope You Enjoy the Posts and I Trust You Will Find Them Insightful! Let me Know What You Think.

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Article Tags: Internet Marketing, Main Street Business, Make Money Online, Mike Farrell aspenIbiz, Small Business, Social Media Marketing



Related Forum Posts
Re: Great start, but no finish - My advise is FOCUS on your business. Focusing is the main factor to succeed on business. If you have a great idea, then follow it only, don't look anywhere else. It is especially essential in an online business. Because there are a lot of mind blowing sales letters promising millions dolllars or overnight success, people find it difficult to concentrate on one business and they lose their energy. Concept is simple. 1- Have a good idea; 2- Build your business on it; 3- Monetize your business; 4- Promote it; 5- Build list of responsive customers; 6- Maintain You Business. Focusing and not fearing from competition (instead you can learn from competitiors) are main tips of billionaires ,BTW. Orxan
Re: How to do Link Building? - Be diligent. Build blogs.Pay attention to the contents.
And This is Handy Too! - [quote:31wl64vf]Develop Fingerprints! Place a small wad of cotton, saturated with tincture of iodine, in a glass tube; blow against suspected fingerprints, and they will appear. [/quote:31wl64vf] Must be of use to all you entrepreneurs out there!
Re: What Do You Outsource Mostly? - When building a New Product, I do find it helpful to outsource marketing (articles - blogging - major social network site etc) Otherwise, you may feel bogged down when you should be focused on the overall BIG PICTURE.
How do you know if you have a good idea? - [quote="orxan":3118uboz]My advise is FOCUS on your business. Focusing is the main factor to succeed on business. If you have a great idea, then follow it only, don't look anywhere else. It is especially essential in an online business. Because there are a lot of mind blowing sales letters promising millions dolllars or overnight success, people find it difficult to concentrate on one business and they lose their energy. Concept is simple. 1- Have a good idea; 2- Build your business on it; 3- Monetize your business; 4- Promote it; 5- Build list of responsive customers; 6- Maintain You Business. Focusing and not fearing from competition (instead you can learn from competitiors) are main tips of billionaires ,BTW. Orxan[/quote:3118uboz] Thanks orxan! But how do you know if you truly have a good idea or not? If we ask ourselves, we may be suffering from tunnel vision. On the other hand, friends/family may try to discourage us from pursuing a small business because of their own fears, while others will simply give us an empty "you can do it!" line.


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