Now is the Time to Get to Know Your Market

Hello and welcome to Small Business EASY Branding Tips.  Brought to you by SSS for Success (EASY Brand Marketing Specialists), working to help Small Businesses Survive through EASY Sales. 

Over the past several weeks, we’ve talked about EASY Small Business Brand Marketing Tips, ways to build traffic to your website and/or blog, and “The Basics of Branding and Why Anyone Can Do It”.  We detailed the 4-Step Common Sense Branding Strategy that I think most small business owners should be aware of when seeking to create, build, and enhance their company’s brand: 

• Step 1: Determining & Defining Your Brand.
• Step 2: Researching Your Market and Positioning Your Brand to Capitalize on a Sector of it.
• Step 3: Launching Your Brand.
• Step 4: Managing, Monitoring & Tweaking Your Brand 

In this week's podcast episode, I want to talk about Step 2 of Researching Your Market and Positioning Your Brand to Capitalize on a Sector of it.  I chose this topic this week, in part, because I am featured as a guest poster at The MicroEnterprise Journal Blog this week, where you can see my featured post entitled “4 Tips to Get a Better Feel for Your Market” (thanks to Dawn Rivers Baker, Editor of The MicroEnterprise Journal and its Blog for featuring my article this month).
 
When you venture over to The MicroEnterprise Journal Blog, you’ll read about my experience starting out in business 2 years ago.  When I first started my original business, I was similar to Richard Pryor’s character in the 1985 classic movie “Brewster’s Millions” where I was “in the business of being in business”, and I made the classic entrepreneur's mistake of answering “everybody”, whenever anybody asked me who my target market was.

Over time, I’ve learned to narrow down my target market to my “ideal customers”, and here are some tips that can help you get to know your market:

 1. Conduct informal research
 2. Try The MiniMarketing Survey
 3. Conduct a formal large-scale market research project
 4. Review your customer records and feedback you already have.

Reminder: Within the next few weeks, I’m going to have a podcast episode devoted entirely to questions and answers from you, my listening audience, so please submit your Small Business Branding Questions for that upcoming episode.  You can visit our website sss4success.com and go to the Contact Us page to submit your question, or reach out to us via email at “podcasts[at]sss4success.com”, or finding us on Twitter (@sss4success), or leaving a comment below.  Don't forget to stop by our Facebook Fan Page and let us know you LIKE what we're doing.


Also you can submit your feedback about this site here: Small Business Branding Tips Blog Survey.  If you’re a Small Business Owner that has been in business for a while, please fill out this survey.  We’d really appreciate your input on both, if you have the time. 


Finally, if by chance, you would like to learn more about how EASY Sales can help your bottom line, then give us a call at 615-336-4325.

Have a great day!

Kindra Cotton

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By the way, Transcripts are now available upon request.  If you want one, please email us at "transcripts[at]sss4success.com".