Part 4 of 8: The 8 Key Mistakes Made By Entrepreneurs

You're business isn’t “special” enough

All businesses offer benefits that should differentiate them in the eyes of their customers. Unfortunately, most businesses never tell their customers about them. Whatever makes your service or product special, therein lies the core of your marketing efforts. If you only have a couple of differentiators (and if your closest competitors make the same claims, it doesn't count!) you need to work harder.

If your business sounds the same as your closest competitors, there’s no reason for anyone to choose you over them. Develop eight to ten unique reasons why someone would want to do business with you.

Square 2 Marketing - helping business owners

Part 3 of 8: The 8 Key Mistakes Made By Entrepreneurs

Mistake 3 - You believe that your customers will be loyal

Some customers will be loyal. Many, however, will jump ship as soon as think they can get something better. This means you have to continuously improve your offerings. Always add to, change and adapt your services. Every client has their own dynamic, and if you solicit frequent input, you can tailor your services to address their ongoing issues, creating terrific motivation for loyalty.

Choose four or five customers per week and give them a courtesy call to find out what they need. You might be surprised at what they tell you.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Part 2 of 8: The 8 Key Mistakes Made By Entrepreneurs

Mistake 2 - You misinterpret what your business really does, so you can’t effectively communicate it to prospects

Too many people view their businesses in broad terms, focusing on a market instead of touting the specific goals they can deliver to their clients. Our agency works with an executive search firm that thought they were in the recruiting business. Now they're in the business of helping their clients get new drugs to market faster by acquiring key executive talent. This was a major shift in how they identified themselves.

Your business exists to serve your customers in the way that they most need it. Keeping that in mind, make sure your value proposition is focused on your customer’s true challenges, or what we call their "pains."

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Part 1 of 8: The 8 Key Mistakes Made By Entrepreneurs

Let me start this post by letting you all know, this is our 50^th post. Not so startling, that it took us halfway through June to get to 50 posts. That wasn’t my original intention when I started the blog. I was actually hoping to do about 20 a month, but goals and reality often diverge. The key take away for me is that I stuck with it and I hope you have stuck with it as well. My goal is to finish the second half of the year strong and hopefully cross the century mark on or before the end of September and finish with over 150 by the end of the year.

For my 50^th post, I wanted to start another series, this one based on the top mistakes made by business owners in the area of marketing.

Mistake 1 - You haven't articulated a clear vision for your company's immediate future

Set aside 30 minutes before your hectic day begins. In quantifiable terms, plot out what you want your business to look like in six months, 12 months, and two years. By what percentage do you want your business to increase? Do you want to tackle a new market? Will you take on a new product line or add a service? Will you need a new facility or additional partners?

Draw up a bulleted list of changes needed to accommodate these goals. Keep the list on your desk, desktop screen, or a bulletin board so you can see it every day. You'll still have plenty of work in front of you, but you'll have taken the first steps toward concrete objectives and you'll have become a visionary for your company.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

To Blog or Not To Blog

We talk about Blogs in our company a lot. We suggest it to clients often and of course we have our own. In May 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 71 million blogs. That’s nice, but what are the business benefits of maintaining a blog? How much work is it and what should we expect form it?

Let me see if I can answer some of your quesitons. First, the business benefits. There a couple of significant business benefits. The first is search engine optimization. The presence of a blog provides pages and pages of additional content that can be indexed by the natural search engine spiders from Yahoo!, Google, MSN, Ask.com and others.

This saves you from having to invest marketing dollars to have your site optimized. While the blog approach to SEO takes much more time and requires your personal energy, it is an effective approach to getting your site ranked more highly. I want to be clear, a blog isnt a substitute for an SEO program. But it does provide key content that helps your site be ranked.

Blogs also provide clients, customers, prospects, suppliers, press, partners, potential employees and other people in your business world an opportunity to get to know you, your business, your people, and more importantly your approach to business. In short, it gives your company a personality. It can be an effective screen for clients you might not want to work with, could encourage prospects to contact you more quickly, and might prescreen out potential cultural mismatches from job candidates.

If done right, it’s a no cost way to enhance the outside reality of your company and can be a fun way to share your thoughts on the world, just be ready to take heat if you say something controversal. Remember, its public on the web and available for everyone to see.

Let me know how it goes.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.

Viral Marketing – What is it?

If you haven’t heard of Viral Marketing, you will soon. Viral Marketing, also known as, Word Of Mouth Marketing is getting more and more popular because of its effectiveness in communicating messages across a large group of similar people. It is also usually relatively inexpensive.

An example of Viral Marketing is myspace.com which grew to have millions of users without any real marketing. The company grew simply through a social network of users, visitors and potential users. Enough people talked about it, emailed links, and drew new users into their myspace sites to have the website literally explode on the scene.

Here are a couple of historic viral marketing examples.

· AFI's Clandestine Mystery, surrounding the album, Sing the Sorrow.

· InkIsIt.com from Kodak

· Dancing Bush 2001 interactive game which launched the largest privately held entertainment website.

· The spread of the R. Tam sessions for the 2005 film Serenity

· Burger King's The Subservient Chicken and Coq Roq

· Carlton Draught: Big Ad campaign.

· Ford Motor Company's Evil Twin campaign

To execute a viral campaign, the first trick is to identify the “sneezers.” These are the highly social people who talk to, influence, and spread the message on their own. These types of plans are only effective if they are well planned, organized, timed, and designed to target the key influencers in the target market. For more information on Viral campaigns, drop me an email.

Square 2 Marketing—helping business owners.