November 10th, 2009
Cutting Through the Digital Media Fog
While much of what is being written in blogs and in various forms of digital and social media is just recycled advice and information, every once in awhile you stumble across a piece that really gets to the heart of the matter for small businesses trying to market themselves.
I’ve been making time lately to read everything I can on digital and social media as it applies to small business marketing and branding. Trust me, it is like scaling Everest — one step forward and twenty steps back. For every creative, well-written and informative post you find, there are hundreds that simply re-gift it.
Most of it is just recycled. People blogging about same old/ same old or, in Twitter language, re-tweeting other people’s stuff. I have no problem with re-tweeting — in fact, it is great to be able to share the really original and useful bits of information one finds floating around in the cyber sphere.
This morning I happened upon a blog post that truly stands out, one that I’d like to tie my clients to a chair and make them read. In the always-interesting Hubspot blog, there’s a piece called, “Ten Ways a Start-Up Can Use Social Media to Market Itself.”
While each of the ten points is well worth taking to heart, here is the first, to which I say, hallelujah!
Craft a brand position rooted in a customer benefit.
An awful lot of young companies do a good job of describing a product’s features rather than synthesizing them into a single benefit. A simple handle, either expressing what a brand stands for or declaring its point of difference, will serve you well in everything from appearing in search results to being remembered.
If you read nothing else today, read the whole article. And then start applying it to your small business.
