ExerLiving.com

Define Your Business

In order to develop a marketing strategy that sets your company apart from the competition, you must ask yourself three questions. On the surface of the questions seems to be easy, but it’s like your answers craft businesses, which form the basis for all your future marketing efforts.

1. What is your business?
This may seem obvious, but the way you answer this question is either someone arouse the interest and prompt them to ask for more information, or let your listeners yawn and look at the clock. When one of our recent small-business marketing seminars for the Office supermarket, Staples, a gentleman answered this question by saying he was in a software company. We asked him to think about what he actually for a living and why people bought his product. Upon reflection, the man replied that he really in the business of helping people to analyze and keep track of information to simplify their decision-making processes. The man who first reply said little about his company during the second shown enough to the attention of potential customers.

2. What is special about your business?
You will not be able to target your ideal market, until you clearly understand what you have to offer. Take, for example, Starbucks, which is capable of a premium price for a cup of coffee because of its high quality beverage, and the clean, elegant surroundings of the shops. Starbucks knows its customer, and everything he does, by the way it brews its coffee on the color of the cup, that the decoration of shops, is aimed at those please customers.

3. How do you want your company to be remembered?
After each exchange with a prospect or customer, you want to leave an impression. Unfortunately, most small business owners are so busy tending their business leave little time that they order on their business. Consequently, they give little thought to the impression that they leave.

We call you the way in the memory are “mental real estate,” the image of your company leaves in the minds of customers and prospects. To understand how lasting mental real estate, think of your associations with the words, “plop, plop, fizz, fizz.” Undoubtedly, these include, Alka Seltzer, a fizzing sound and the picture of two white tablets foam in a glass of water. By practicing what we call, a video recorder or visibility, consistency and repetition, Alka Seltzer now owns a piece of our collective mental real estate. Of course, this would be contrary to your product or service even if the associations are negative. That is why it’s important to engineer your marketing strategy to build a lasting psychological piece of real estate that people feel comfortable.

The ultimate level of mental real estate property is reached when your brand name has become synonymous with a category, in the form of Xerox, Q-Tip, Kleenex and BandAid.