"What's In It For Me?" Let's make this a little easier to understand.
Trying to build a web site around the brand, "Business Systems 2000: The Company who Cares" would be a horrible idea. Nobody cares. They don't care about your company name or what you care about.
They want to know what's in it for them. Using the brand, "When You Buy Any Book From ABC Online Booksellers…You Get a 90 Day Money Back No Questions Asked Guarantee" is a much better idea. Most booksellers don't offer full money-back guarantee on everything in their bookstore. If you give customers an ability to reduce their buying risk, then you've branded yourself as the company who cares (unlike just trying to tell them you care from the paragraph above).
To create the brand, "XYZ: Our Products Work" wouldn't tell anyone anything. I hope your products work, but it doesn't provide a real benefit to your customers. How about this one, "XYZ - Our Staff Is Available 24 Hours a Day at 1-800-Help Now to Help You With Any Problems."
In other words, you have to build a Direct Response Brand. Your brand needs to get over to people the benefits they only get if they buy from you instead of doing business with your competitors.
Find out what your customers want from you instead of trying to force your game plan on them. Do this and you will already be ahead of 99% of your competitors? Become a friend to your customer.
Stop thinking like a marketer or a business owner and start thinking more like a customer. You will learn more about what your customers want and what they are thinking if you take on their mindset. Become a customer in your market.
What does a customer want from your business? What pains are they experiencing already? What are their desires and dreams? How can you help them either relieve the pain in their life or reach their desires in life? That is your goal in developing a direct response brand.
How to Build a Brand: Here's the simple step-by-step solution for building your own powerful web brand.
Step One: Research Your Competitors:
Find out what your competitors do well…and where they are lacking. Visit their web sites. I love to do this research using the Goto.com search engine because I can find out how much my competitors are willing to pay for visitors while I do my research.
Start searching for your competition using the keywords your customers would be searching for. Mark down your opinions of the web sites you visit (this would require you to keep a small notebook handy to take notes). Make at least one note of something you like and something you don't like on each site you visit.
Step Two: Research Your Market
Go to Forumone and Liszt to watch and listen to your future customers. Do a search for your keywords and then join the groups who are most representative of your target market.
Start watching the discussions for at least a week or two. Take notes when people ask questions about web sites or are having trouble looking for specific items. If people seem to keep talking about the same problems over and over again, then you know this is a desire that needs to be filled.
Step Three: Look At Some Other Companies and Ideas
One of the major reasons most Internet marketers never come up with any good ideas is because they only visit web sites in their own market. Most of the breakthrough marketing strategies you will come up with will occur when visiting websites, which aren't in your niche.
Go over to Hot100 and visit some of the top sites on the Net. Do the exact same thing you did when visiting your competitor's sites. Mark down something you like and something you don't like about every one of these websites when you visit. Do any of them make outstanding offers you could somehow apply to your product?
Step Four: Prepare a Sheet of Paper
This is where we get down to the real nitty-gritty of developing your web brand. Take one sheet of paper and at the top write, "Most ________ web sites…" Write the type of business you have in the blank (gift shops, tennis, marketing, etc.). Then go through and write the average offer being made by your competing sites. Halfway down the page, write, "What we do is…" Now write how you are going to make your web site and brand different from every single one of your competitors.
Why should a customer buy from you instead of any of your competitors? Take the whole rest of the page if necessary. How are you going to stand out in the crowded online marketplace? How will you make your business unique?
