Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

If you want to develop a solid brand strategy, there are some things you have to do first.  I want to challenge you to focus on these two elements before you even get started with graphic design.  Before you get started on your website or meet with your website guy, you must wrestle with these elements.  And before you start thinking of all the different concepts for a new logo, wait.  To be honest with you, if you can’t answer these questions, you’re not ready to do anything else.  It’s like sitting down with an interior designer to talk about the color of your drapes before you’ve ever met with an architect.

1. You must know who it is you’re trying to reach. Identify this group demographically and geographically. Pinpoint “psychographics” – know well your customer’s likes, dislikes, and how they live and make decisions.

I formerly worked in a French-speaking country of West Africa. In Benin, the common language of all the various people groups was French. But you can guarantee, even among the well-educated (where French was well-spoken), when conversations turned to passionate arguments or intimate conversations, the Africans would break into their own dialect!  It’s there where you can draw from a well of emotions and you can best articulate your pain.  If we had wanted to, we could have chosen to speak in this common “state” language and we might have made inroads into the psyche of a select few. But we were seeking to impact a large number of people, so we were compelled to go deep.  We could not use an interpreter to communicate our thoughts.  We had to invest the time in learning the specific language of these people.  Soon, we learned not only to speak the local dialect but we learned to live and act as closely mirrored to this group that an American family possibly could.  As a result, I believe we made long-lasting and loyal inroads into the lives of the Aja people.

As a small business marketer, you have no choice.  You don’t even have the option of a seeking a interpreter to bridge the communication between you and your customers.  And for most sophisticated consumers, they don’t have the patience, time or loyalty to wait for you to bring someone in to explain your brand to them.  You cannot afford to sit idly by waiting for your prospect to come to you, to communicate on your terms or to try and figure out what your brand is all about.  This violates a core belief of marketing in a 2.0 world.  You must abandon self-serving communication methods that force your customer to communicate on your terms.

2. Repeatedly articulate clearly your core message. Once you identify the pain/need of your targeted segment, you will want to identify two distinct messages that will help you reach this group.

First, it’s your internal message. “We want to be the #1 choice for (your industry) among (specific demographic). We want to blow away (our competition) by (doing something different than your competition).” This is your rallying cry. It’s posted in your employee break room or on a post-it note next to your computer.   It’s the sign above the tunnel that football teams slap as they hit the field.  Ideally, it tears down individual agendas and puts your entire staff on the same page.  It’s the best way to rally your entire operation as part of the marketing team.

Secondly, your external message is developed. This is not necessarily a mission statement because those tend to be mostly about ourselves and offer non-resonating generalities (”We pledge to the best service and best quality for the best price.”). Instead, try articulating a message that resonates with the pain/need of your target market (”We will offer the fastest oil change for Moms and Dads who would rather spend time with your kids than have to mess with automotive repair.”) When you do this, you generate a host of key words and phrases that resonate with your target market. These are words that include their pain, your specific solution, your differences, and their benefit for choosing you. You will use these in ALL your marketing communication so that these keywords remain associated with your brand.  A disjointed message communicates to your target market that you are similarly confused.  But a strong consistent choice of words (and even in your style and design strategy), you will provide a welcoming environment in which your customer feels like they are involving themselves in something that is orderly, valuable, and strong.  That gives your customer confidence and creates a powerful loyalty that keeps them coming back and turns them into powerful advocates for you on the street.

So if you’ve got your web designer and logo guy on speed dial, put down the phone and make sure you answer these questions first.  As a matter of fact, if your web guy or logo designer doesn’t at least ask you about these two questions, you might consider choosing different people to help you.  It says to me that they are more interested in award-winning design for their own gallery than they are about helping you communicate most effectively with your target market.

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Randy Vaughn is a Duct Tape Marketing Coach in Fort Worth, Texas.   While Randy fluently speaks English and the African language of the Aja people, he’d be the very first to invite an interpreter to communicate in French.  “I parlez Francais very poorly,” says Vaughn.