February | 2017

Know Your Customer

Feb 28 2017

If you read anything about marketing, you know the basic philosophy of all marketing is market segmentation.

What’s market segmentation? It’s the way you analyse your market to understand how different groups of potential customers “tick”. Why is it important? So that you can focus your attention on the group or groups of potential customers who are most attracted to your offerings, and find them in the places they gather, whether virtually or physically.

Let’s take an example. Say you sell luxury fashion items. Who is your market? You might say men and women who like to stay fashionable.

Okay that’s great but that’s still a large slice of the wider market – are you sure all of them would be attracted to your offering? If you segmented that market you might be able to come up with at least two segments – men who like to stay fashionable and women who stay fashionable. If you then looked at the characteristics of the first, men who like to stay fashionable, you might find that say as a group their majority age group is between 18 and 25 and they don’t spend their money on fashionable fashion but rather trendy tech. Whereas the group of women are between the ages of 17 and 38, buy fashion, and often buy for fashion their partners. So who’s your better target market?

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How To Build Your Brand

Feb 21 2017

Your brand is not your logo – it is so much more than that!

Your brand is what makes you stand out from the competition. Your customers are loyal to your brand because it represents what your business means to them. Your brand is part promise, part standard, and all about your success.

If you haven’t done any work on your brand and think you don’t have one – think again! If you haven’t carefully created a brand, your customers have made one up for you. They see the way you behave, they watch your customer service, they look at your fonts and look, your marketing and your business standards, and what they perceived has become your brand. If you want to be in control of how you are seen and what your business means to customers, then you need to work on your visible brand now.

If you want to develop your brand there are 6 steps:-

Clarify your vision, mission and values
Decide how that vision should be seen publicly
Create a brand language and message
Design graphics and logos that are sympathetic to your message
Ensure your brand promise is backed up by your product or service
Develop a marketing strategy

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Are You An Entrepreneur, Or Are You Really A Hard-working Employee?

Feb 14 2017

Most of my readers are entrepreneurs and small business owners, so they would be surprised at the premise in the title of this week’s article.

Are you an entrepreneur – a small business owner – or are you actually a hard-working employee – for yourself?

A lot of my readers won’t want to hear this, but you must.

Successful entrepreneurs are driven. But then successful hard-working employees are also driven. But what drives them are two different things. A hard-working employee is driven to be good at their job. They take pride in a job well done. They work hard to make sure it is done well. When their entrepreneur bosses push these successful employees the reaction is often anger and frustration.

Successful employees deeply believe that they are doing their best and working hard. They are – but in their jobs. In their job description, within the parameters, working hard at the procedure or in the technology, putting in the hours…as an employee.

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Project Confidence To Win Business

Feb 07 2017

Small business owners are sometimes unsure of yourselves.

That’s not unnatural, after all sometimes you feel like you’re too small, or perhaps you’re not sure what’s on-trend and wonder if you’re keeping up. However it’s well researched that confident people are found to be more attractive than hesitant people or people who lack confidence. Confidence breeds confidence in you.

So small business owners need to believe in themselves and project confidence in order to win business. Sure, over-confidence can not only be a turn off, it may set you up to fail if you can’t meet the expectations that you set up.

The secret is to find that balance of showing confidence in a measured way. How do you do this?

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Archive - February 2017

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Know Your Customer

How To Build Your Brand

Are You An Entrepreneur, Or Are You Really A Hard-working Employee?

Project Confidence To Win Business