3 Steps to Creating Your Branding Message
You only have one value proposition and you want it to stick in your customers' minds. BMW is the "ultimate driving machine." Apple customers "think different." In my column "The Secret to a Strong Branding Message? The answer is to triangulate. Look for the intersection of three perspectives to identify your promise: the customer perspective, internal perspective and marketplace perspective. Take, for example, the Oakland, Calif. Here are three essentials it looked at to create its brand message: The customer perspective: First, you need to get into your customer's head. This kind of observation revealed to Cat Town that it wasn't for just anyone wanting a pet. The internal perspective: For a brand promise to be effective it must be true. Cat Town wanted customers to know that not only their cats, but the process for finding them homes, was unique. The marketplace perspective: Only one brand can own a position. Ultimately, Cat Town decided its message would be: "Open the Cage."
Starting a Virtual Assistant Business
Interested in starting one of the fastest-growing homebased businesses around? These existing business owners' advice can help you get started. When Wicked Wordcraft president Angela Allen-Parker started her online business in 1999, she admits her parents feared she'd made a horrible mistake. Allen-Parker is a virtual assistant, and her decision to become one was more than a career change - it was a lifestyle change. A single mother of three, Allen-Parker left her marketing post at a cancer research organization to start her new venture and moved her family from the city to a 25-acre farm in rural Kentucky. A critically ill daughter was the reason Pamela Braue became a virtual assistant last year. Allen-Parker and Braue are just two of an estimated 2,000 virtual assistants worldwide. Some say the virtual assistant industry has become so popular because it helps women become entrepreneurs yet also achieve a work/life balance. 1. Worldwide Organizations Networking and Support Groups Books
Pinterest Marketing Tips: What You Can Learn From 20 Big Brands | Slideshow
Having a specific strategy for using Pinterest is still an entirely new realm, and it can help to have some inspiration from others who have blazed the trail for the rest of us. Pinterest-marketing experts such as Cynthia Sanchez of Oh So Pinteresting have helped show other marketers how Pinterest can be beneficial to their businesses. For some companies, Pinterest can be a huge online marketing opportunity. To know how to make the most use of the picture-sharing platform, sometimes it's best to look at how larger companies are using Pinterest and getting it right. The following 20 brands on Pinterest give us some insight into the type of content that makes users gain so many followers, as well as how your target audience's overall exposure to and perception of your brand makes an impact when building up a faithful online community. Related: How to Keep Your Pinterest Boards Fresh, Fun and Relevant Comedienne Ellen DeGeneres is her own brand, built around her daily talk show and books.
3 Apps to Help You Write a Marketing Plan
You might have a great product or an excellent service but your business won't grow unless people know you're out there. That requires marketing -- online, mobile, on Google, Facebook, direct mail or even printed flyers on doorstep. But where do you begin? It all starts with a marketing plan. It's a written strategy to help achieve your goals and spread the word about your startup. Here are three apps that can help you figure out your needs, understand your competition and develop a cost-effective marketing strategy: 1. From there, the app helps you analyze your competitors, determine your target market and come up with a price. Related: A Data-Driven Reality Check for Your Marketing Budget Once you fill in all the blanks, Marketing Plan Premier inserts your answers into a pre-written multi-page, executive summary. Price: $9.99 2. This app can help you craft everything from your Vision Statement and market analysis, to helping you determine your marketing budget. 3. Price: Free
3 Apps to Help You Write a Business Plan
If you have a killer idea for a startup, but lack the time, resources and budget to develop a business plan, a business plan-generating app can help you get your plan on paper and, ideally, off the ground. A number of apps simplify the often tedious, complicated process of crafting a thorough bank- and investor-ready business plan. You provide the information, they organize it into a plan, and hopefully soon you'll be in business. Here's a look at three apps that can help get your business plan rolling: 1. Enloop. Enloop's Free & Easy option includes a single custom business plan packaged in a clean, professionally formatted PDF file that you can download, print and share. Related: Reworking Your Business Plan? 2. A free basic StratPad edition is available for students. 3. Business Plan Premier leads you through writing your prospective company's vision and mission statements, product descriptions and marketing plans. Kim Lachance Shandrow is a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com.
Great Businesses are Discovered, Not Planned
Heard at an outdoor café along University Avenue in Palo Alto: “The strategy was clear. You can’t start as a platform. You start as an application and then, when the user base is large enough to get a network effect, you can pivot into a platform.” Knowing nods around the table; wisdom understood by the cognoscenti. I was hunkered down with a Super Tuscan at the last sidewalk table, eavesdropping on the ideas circulating among the start-up crowd. For more evidence, go back and look at the strategic plan from years ago at your favorite successful company. So how do we deal with the fact that discovery trumps planning? One common reaction is to pretend that the success was planned. Another bad reaction is to wax cynical, surmising that success really just comes down to luck. But there is information in those unanticipated consequences for those who know to seek it out.
