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Corporate Blogging: 7 Best Practices
Blogs have become one of the hottest communication tools on the Web. Offering the opportunity for anyone to create their own free Web site, encouraging opinions and interaction, blogs provide forums for individuals to create their own highly...
"I Have Nothing To Say!" Overcoming The Fear Of Writing
Do you have a fear of writing that first article? If so, this article will help you get started and help overcome that fear of writing.
You have worked hard on your business and now the time has come. You keep reading that you should do it...
Increase Your Leads with Search Engine and Lead Optimization Strategies
Copyright 2005 Tim OKeefe
The most optimal way for an online Real Estate agent to succeed
is thru rapid lead generation and follow up. And in order to
escalate your leads, you must start off with an acceptance of
your current traffic and...
Search Your Soul: The Psychology Of A Search Engine
In Don Delillo's novel, THE UNDERWORLD, the main character is a nun seeking the mysteries of the afterlife. In the end of the story she discovers the bewildering truth; after death we simply become the content of our website.
If this were true,...
Why is My Restaurant Not Full Every Monday Night?
In a quest for customers and to keep those customers, restaurants are now compelled to develop a marketing plan. Marketing plans are a crucial component for anyone who has the desire to make their restaurant a success. Marketing plans are a crucial...
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Get Out of Your Head to Improve Your Business
The classic novel by Robert Louis Stevenson tells the story of
one man's struggle with his duel personalities - Dr Jekyll, the
kind and respected physician, and the violent Mr Hyde.
But if you think living as two separate people is hard, spare a
thought for the one-person entrepreneur. To survive and succeed
as a solo enterprise in the business world we need to develop
not just two, but a multitude of alter-egos.
We have to be the company accountant, marketer, operations
manager, chief executive officer, customer service manager and
general gofer. We have jump from balancing the books, to
stuffing envelopes, from formulating our strategic direction
from an overall market perspective to handling our customers.
Most of those roles are skill based. To master them you do a
course, read a book, and/or get the appropriate tools or
software to handle the task. You could even employ someone to do
them for you, if money was no object.
However, there is one alter-ego that is all to easily missed,
but arguably is the most important of all.
You see, even though the above roles that you must adopt are
very different, they all have one thing in common - they are all
roles WITHIN your business.
This critical role is OUTSIDE your business.
If you really want to succeed, you must also take the time and
effort to BE your customer. To mentally step out of your
business and imagine you are a potential customer. To look at
your business with fresh, objective eyes, as if you were a new
customer seeing it for the first time.
What would this person see?
Look at your product, service, business and marketing through
their eyes, not yours. Don't be fooled, this is not as easy as
it sounds. Because we have intimate knowledge, emotional
attachment and have invested so much time and effort it is all
to easy get stuck, only seeing your business in one way - OUR
OWN! A new customers will be looking at everything you do,
and have done with virgin eyes.
What would your advertising, branding, all that you communicate
about your products, services, and business say this person?
Assume that they have no prior knowledge of your business and
what you do. Your company's name is nothing
more than a
meaningless label to them. Your service or product a mystery. (A
mystery, that quite frankly, your customer will not care to
decipher. That is not their job, but yours, to make it crystal
clear.)
Does your message inspire confidence and trust? Is it
understandable to an outsider? Is it offering what they want?
All this may appear to be stating the obvious, but doing it
properly is a lot more difficult than understanding the concept.
It requires an emotional shift, putting aside what you
WANT and seeing what IS.
Recently I had direct experience of this difficulty in getting
out my head and into my potential customer's.
I asked a couple of friends give me their feedback of a software
program I had written. While reading one lengthy response from a
good friend, a strong sense of frustration grew inside me. I
started to get annoyed at what I thought were his 'stupid'
comments.
"What was wrong with HIM? It is obvious what that section
is for!"
My first reaction was to emailing him, explaining his errors,
and point out where he was going wrong.
Halfway through writing that email I stop myself. I suddenly
realized how defensive I was being. The reason I had asked him
to review the demo was to uncover any weak areas that required
further work. And here I was taking his honest feedback
personally. I remembered that it was the first time he had seen
the software, whereas I knew it inside and out, and back to
front. Suddenly, his 'stupid' comments became a rich source of
improvements that I was thankful for.
It is important that you make the time to take a big step back
from your enterprise. Forget that it is your little baby that
you have spent hours, days, months or years working on. Look at
it afresh with new eyes and a calm emotion-free detachment, as
if it were someone else's project and you are seeing it for the
first time.
Once you can see your business through your customers' eyes, it
will become clear which improvements, changes and alterations
will boost the success of your business.
About the author:
Lee Kendall is the owner and creator of Key Comments.
http://www.keycomments.com/ Software to help you discover what
your customers really want.
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| Brand - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| The brand, and "branding" and brand equity have become increasingly important ... From the perspective of brand owners, branded products or services also ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| Branding - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Livestock branding, the marking of animals to indicate ownership; Human branding, ... Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branding" ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
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| AllAboutBranding.com : Home |
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| All items tagged branding ??? view popular ... industrie./design and branding consultant specialists./ · save this. by kittim to design branding graphic ... |
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| The Brand Called You |
| Big companies understand the importance of brands. Today, in the Age of the Individual, you have to be your own brand. Here's what it takes to be the CEO of ... |
| www.fastcompany.com |
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| Branding: See what people are saying right now on Technorati |
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| www.technorati.com |
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| Mozilla Branding |
| The purpose of this document is to describe mozilla.org's branding strategy during and after the release of what has generally been called Mozilla 1.4. ... |
| www.mozilla.org |
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| What Brand Are You? A branding viral by The Design Conspiracy |
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| Branding - Yahoo! Small Business |
| Find information to help grow your online business with business plans, Thomas Register, news articles and more. |
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| Lexicon |
| Lexicon Branding appears on KTVU News; Lexicon Branding creates Ridgeline for Honda, Viiv for Intel, and GameTap for Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. ... |
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| Branding and Usability |
| We're finding that a site's usability can dramatically affect branding. ... There are two basic techniques for branding: direct experience and indirect ... |
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| iMedia Connection: Research & Metrics - Branding |
| Majority of marketers feel branding opportunities -- online and offline -- aren't ... IAB case studies prove real-world power of online in branding mix. ... |
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| Small Business Marketing And Branding |
| Small business marketing and branding advice and how-to guides for small business owners. Learn how to start and grow your own successful business. |
| smallbusinessbranding.com |
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| Beyond Branding |
| Beyond Branding, published in hardcover in 2003 and paperback in 2005, presents innovative business models for the survival of 21st century organizations. |
| www.beyond-branding.com |
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