Marketing Intelligently
In part 2 of our ‘In pursuit of BI’ series we focus on creating a buzz around your business concept.
This article does not cover the Four (or is it 5) W’s of marketing. Instead we focus on the building blocks of developing your small business brand.
Seth Godin has a wonderful book on how you can formulate a key element in marketing your company. This is through using your USP (Unique Selling Proposition), also used as a differentiator. A USP is what that makes you distinctively different and matchless in comparison to your competitors. Seth Godin’s The Purple Cow can help you develop or improve your USP. The book inspires you to find and show off your Unique Selling Proposition.
Your company’s USP could be a product or service or the way in which you deliver it to your customers. A great example was the dry cleaner who integrated a drive-thru. A customer would literally drive up to the window of the dry-cleaner to drop off or pickup their dry-cleaning. No other dry-cleaner had a drop off or pickup drive-thru window, and this provided a USP which differentiated them to their competitors. This helped to create a buzz for the business and ultimately more business. Another important element of the USP is that is must add value to the customer. In this example it saved customers a great deal of time.
Let’s face it, marketing a business is an expensive exercise but also a necessary evil. Regular advertising on tv, radio and other media does not come cheap. You therefore need to find another way to get your customers talking about your product or service. A USP in itself will create an opportunity for extensive word-of-mouth promotion as well as free publicity. People like to talk about special and unique experiences and so does the media. We’ve seen this with the launch of our own ‘Payroll with a Voice’ CD. It helped us get noticed as well at least 1 interview on different media platforms every month for a year, for free.
Satisfying and exciting your customers is still the best marketing message you can deliver. Delivering the promise you make is the cornerstone of your branding and marketing. Developing a USP or differentiator is an intelligent way to help you get in front of an audience.
Use the famous Google search bar to look for examples and exercises that will help you develop one for your company. Another tip to know is that as soon as you’ve launched your USP, start developing another one as it will be copied. Once it is copied it is no longer unique now is it.
In The Great Formula, Mark Joyner says marketing is made up of the following steps:
Step 1: Create The Irresistible Offer (TIO)
Step 2: Present it to a Thirsty Crowd.
Step 3: Sell them a Second Glass.
The rest of the marketing activities can be boring and expensive without something exciting to talk about. Make sure you get on developing your USP or launching and showing it off if you already have one. Normally there is shyness around launching a USP purely because the market might not understand the product or service as it might be the 1st time they come into contact with it. My response here is that you continue to take it to market and not worry about whether it is perfect or not. Good enough will work, as long as it doesn’t fall apart. You will perfect it as you get feedback from the market.
Stay tuned for Part 3 of this series in which we will look closer at building systems and processes for your business.
Cheers
KK Diaz for Rekopane Dot Biz