To develop a marketing strategy that sets your company apart from the competition you need to ask yourself three questions. On the surface the questions appear to be simple, yet it’s the way you craft your answers that will form the foundation for all of your future marketing efforts.
1. What Is Your Business?
This may seem obvious, but the way you answer that question will either pique someone’s interest and prompt them to ask for more details, or leave your listener yawning and looking at his watch. At one of our recent small-business marketing seminars for the office superstore, Staples, a gentleman answered this question by saying he was in a software business. We asked him to think about what he actually did for a living and why people bought his product. Upon reflection, the man responded that he was really in the business of helping people analyze and keep track of information to simplify their decision making process. The man’s first response said little about his business while the second revealed enough to capture the attention of potential customers.
2. What Is Unique About Your Business?
You won’t be able to target your ideal market until you clearly understand what you have to offer them. Take for example, Starbucks, which is able to charge a premium price for a cup of coffee because of the high quality of the beverage, and the clean, upscale environment of the stores. Starbucks knows who its customer is and everything it does, from the way it brews its coffee to the color of the cup, to the decor of the stores, is aimed to please those customers.
3. How Do You Want Your Business To Be Remembered?
After every exchange with a prospect or customer, you’re going to leave an impression. Unfortunately, most small-business owners are so busy tending to their business that they leave little time to work ON their business. Consequently, they give little thought to the impression they leave.
We call the way you are remembered “psychic real estate,” the image your business leaves in the minds of customers and prospects. To understand how enduring psychic real estate is, think of your associations with the words, “plop, plop, fizz, fizz.” Undoubtedly these include, Alka Seltzer, a fizzing sound and the image of two white tablets foaming in a glass of water. By practicing what we call, VCR, or visibility, consistency and repetition, Alka Seltzer now owns a piece of our collective psychic real estate. Of course this can work against your product or service as well, if the associations are negative ones. That’s why it’s vital to engineer your marketing strategy to construct a durable piece of psychic real estate that people feel good about.
The ultimate level of psychic real estate ownership is achieved when your brand name becomes synonymous with a category in the manner of Xerox, Q-Tip, Kleenex and BandAid.
