Having a recognizable and lovable brand is something every business owner wishes to be able to achieve when they start their company. Your companies’ brand is what your customers see when they look at your business. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, once said “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” In the early stages of creating your business footprint, it is imperative that you establish your brand the way you intend, otherwise your market will do it for you!
The Beginning Stages
The beginning stages of building your brand is similar to building a house. You must first establish a solid foundation prior to constructing the walls and remainder of the house. If the foundation isn’t sturdy, the house will not be able to withstand any type of resistance. In the beginning stages of building your brand, a solid foundation is imperative to be able to survive in today’s market. As the business owner, you need to put forth serious thought and effort while constructing your business’s foundation in order to stand out from the competition in a positive way. As a small business, your competitors are going to be established companies who have already achieved success in their market. To ensure success for you, you have to find a way to be unique! Using modern technology platforms and social trends are easy ways to get your company noticed and bring your brand to the forefront.
Launching Your Brand
While launching your brand, you must be able to easily articulate why people should take the time to walk into your store if you own a brick-and-mortar business or visit your website while they are scrolling through their social media newsfeed. Second, while walking through your store or browsing your website, they have to have the opportunity to get to know you, identify what sets you apart from your competitors, fall in love with your service or product and more importantly, trust you to deliver as promised. All of this can be explained by focusing on your strengths and what part of your brand sets you apart. Whether it be reliable customer service, product quality or convenience, let the market know! A hard learned lesson for most is that you don’t need to be all things for everyone. Focus on your strengths and lead with that!
Identifying Your Target Market
Identifying your target market is crucial to your business’s success. Understanding your customer base and providing a solution to their problem will allow you to be the place that they can go to fulfill their wants and needs. Sometimes defining your target market and reaching your potential customers can be tough in the beginning, but don’t give up! Take the time to conduct market research to help understand and identify who your audience actually is. The Small Business Administration (SBA) defined market research as “the process of analyzing data to help you understand which products and services are in demand, and how to be competitive.” Once you are able to obtain this data, you will be much more effective in putting yourself in front of the right people, offering the solution to their problems!
Marketing Strategy
There is no argument that the best form of marketing is word of mouth. However, you have to develop a strategy to reach you target market and advertise your products and services. Of course, there is always the traditional approach. You could put an ad in the local paper, run a mailer ad campaign, or even use the local radio station to broadcast your services. However, with how reliant the world is on technology, you must become familiar with social media platforms. As published in one of our recent blog posts “More than 2.8 billion people from around the world use Facebook on a monthly basis.” Other powerful social platforms include Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and LinkedIn.
If you find yourself struggling to find the time to market your business, Select Marketing Solutions offers new marketing packages to help launch your business in a big way! Contact us today to develop and implement your marketing plan!