Positioning Your Business
| Positioning your business is the first step when creating your marketing plan for your Yahoo! store. This includes reviewing how your communications and collateral materialsuch as your letterhead, business cards, brochures, and advertising copy (print, radio, TV)are integrated into your digital strategy solution. For example, all your offline collateral materials and activities should include at least an email addresses and a reference to the URL of your website. You might even consider offering readers, viewers, and listeners the ability to sign up for your informative newsletter or for further information on your company. If you have a printed catalog, advertise and promote it on your website.
Positioning also includes reviewing your website's search engine placement and ranking in the search results, and analyzing site traffic logs, your business positioning, and your communication process with site visitors. That last piece is important: How do you communicate with your site visitors? In fact, how do you communicate with any visitor who communicates with you through your digital presence? The phrase digital presence reflects the many more ways a business today can communicate its presence than just in a website.
Finally, there's the importance of branding.... The Alphabet of Branding: USP, ESP, OSP, and BSDHow you position your product or service in the digital marketplace is your brand. Now, branding has many definitions. The best we've found is from the free Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org):
Examples of great brands are Nike, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, IBM, Amazon, Ben & Jerry's, Starbucks, and Priceline.
As you can see, a company's brand is not just its name, its logo, or its packaging. It's also a set of shopper expectations and the service you supply your customers. Let's take a closer look of what makes up a company's brand. First, the positioning and branding of your Yahoo! store should reflect your company's unique selling position (USP). Your USP tells a potential customer the uniqueness of your product or service, how your business differs from your competition, and, above all, what's in it for them. In other words, you need to answer that burning question of every shopper: "What's in it for me?" (WIIFM) Several studies have shown that when a customer looks at your ad or website, you have 1.54 seconds to convince them of the WIIFM before they close your window. Then if you do, you have less than 5 seconds to keep them there. So, what makes the business unique in the market and in the eyes of a potential customer? To do that, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
For example, maybe it's your no-questions return policy, like Nordstrom's. Or maybe your delivery policy matches that of Dominoes: You get it within 20 minutes, or it's free. Or you might offer service that matches the latest Best Buy guarantee: Place your order online and pick it up at the nearest Best Buy store in 23 minutes, or you get $23. Too many companies believe that it's about them. It's not. It's about the customers. Remember this cardinal rule: Consumers could care less about you. They want to know what you can do for them. Then they will hand over their hard-earned cash. Vincent Flanders, who runs Web Pages That Suck, advises e-commerce sites to write the following two sentences and post them near their computer so they can see them every day:
Consumers care only about getting their problems solved. They're looking for information. They're looking to make a purchase. They're looking for entertainment. Fill those needs, and you will have a successful Yahoo! store. Tip: Include Keywords in Your Tagline You should be able to reduce your USP into keywords that you can later to optimize your Web pages for search engines and in your search engine marketing campaigns. A good tagline that appears on your home page should contain these keywords. If your keywords do not describe your USPyour value proposition to the shopperthen rethink your keywords. A good tagline should include the keywords you're targeting on your home page. If you find that you can't use your targeted keywords to describe your value proposition, you might be using the wrong keywords. A good example is "Ray's Rare Books: More Signed First Editions Than Any Other Online Bookstore." Martin Lindstrom, a recognized branding guru by the Chartered Institute of Marketing, adds some other elements that you should consider when branding your Yahoo! business. Besides your USP, you should consider an ESP, an emotional selling proposition. He cites Coke and Pepsi as good examples of ESP. They differentiate themselves from each other not on rationale logic and product attributes (after all, a soft drink is a soft drink, no matter what the "taste challenge tests" say) but by calling on the feelings, identity, and values they promote in the consumer's mind. Kevin Roberts, Worldwide CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, has stated that "the brands with legs are those that create an emotional connection with customers." Another of Lindstrom's branding elements is your organizational selling proposition, or OSP. This type of branding is reflected in the organizational structure of the business itself. Lindstrom cites Nike as an example of OSP. Nike promotes a sports culture among it employees, and encourages them to use Nike's products and make sports a big part of their lives, both at work and away. The offices of Nike are more than just a workplace; they're a sports lifestyle for its staff.
Lindstrom's final element of branding is the brand selling proposition, or BSP. With BSP, the product or service itself is irrelevant. He cites the Harry Potter brand as an example. Although only the books have been sold, thousands of related products (toys, clothing, lunch boxes, and more) sell only because of the brand name "Harry Potter" on them. George Lucas created this type of branding, now called merchandising, with Star Wars. So, when you're creating your company brand, keep this alphabet soup in mind and apply the different elements of branding, where appropriate, to your positioning strategy. Underpromise and OverdeliverA big part of brandingand, thus, the positioning of your Yahoo! store in the digital marketplaceinvolves consumer perception. That is, it involves the set of expectations that arise in the consumer's mind about your product or service. One of the best ways to do this is to underpromise and overdeliver. One way is to respond to customer inquiries faster than you promise. For example, you might claim on your customer service and frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages (you do have a separate FAQ page that answers many of a potential customer's questions about your product or service and company policies, right?) that you answer all email inquiries within 48 to 72 hours. But let's say you actually answer your inquiries in 24 hours. The consumer now expects that if he or she buys from you, you will go the extra mile for that customer if a problem develops. Or perhaps you add a small present of nominal cost in each order that the customer was not expecting. Remember, it's not the cost, but the thought that counts. If you deliver a quality product with better service than the customer expects, you will win the most important promotional tools that a business can have: positive word-of-mouth that builds a valuable brand in the minds of consumers. Martin Lindstrom offers a good example of this. A man purchased a barbeque grill as a gift for a friend. After spending the time to assemble the grill, the man's friend said that he could not accept the present. So the man returned the grill to the store for a refund. The merchant gladly accepted the grill, and the man was refunded the full amountplus $30. The man asked what the $30 was for, and the merchant replied that because he had taken the time to assemble the grill, he should be compensated for it. The salesperson replied, "You've used most of the day collecting and assembling this grill, so you've made life easier for its next owner. You should be rewarded for this." You can bet that the next time someone asks the man for a recommendation on where to buy a barbeque grill, that store will be his first suggestion. Surprise your customers by underpromising and overdelivering, and your brand will reap the benefits. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 208