Maybe your competition isn’t as fierce as the one between soft-drink rivals, Coca Cola and Pepsi (dubbed “The Cola Wars”) but the more you know about your competitors, the better you’ll be able to position yourself in the marketplace.
 
Competitor Research should be a critical part of your marketing strategy. By examining the competitions’ successes, failures, and messaging, as well as how they attract their customers and what they do to retain them, you can improve your own business performance. 

​A Unique Selling Proposition, or USP, is a concept you bring to your marketing that clearly defines what makes your business stand out from the competition.

It should directly illustrate to your potential customer why your product or service is different and how it offers solutions to them.

It’s the statement you’ll use to position yourself in the marketplace.
​
Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably familiar with many iconic USPs. 

I heard a radio commercial for a bank the other day that made me cringe.

Throughout the ad, they continually repeated their simple tagline: “We’re the best.”

​While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with making that claim, the problem I had with the ad was that it did nothing to convince me to stash my cash at their institution.
 
The problem? 

Years ago, I wrote direct mail marketing pieces for a well-known grocery delivery service. In my entire career, I’d never seen a company that had so meticulously built customer profiles through their extensive market research.

Every direct mail piece had to be repurposed for each one of their market segments. Their audiences consisted of budget buyers, classic customers, evening buyers, senior samplers, and platinum customers.

Every segment had well-documented purchasing habits and preferences. The work could sometimes be tedious, but I’m certain it was worthwhile.

One cannot argue with the $3B in revenue this company pulls in every year.

Does your content speak directly to your target audience? If it doesn’t, it should.

Here are 21 questions to ask yourself when creating a customer profile for each of your products and services:

​In one of the final hilarious scenes of Steve Martin’s 1979 movie, “The Jerk,” he staggers out of his mansion, telling his wife that he doesn’t need any of their possessions…except an ashtray. And a paddle game. And a remote control. And matches, a lamp, a chair, and a magazine.
 
The last four terms in our ABCs of Marketing may be some of the things you really need to make your business go places.

​(Hopefully, not like Steve Martin, with your pants around your ankles as you shuffle down a Beverly Hills sidewalk.)

Coming up with great ads for your company begins long before you write web copy or design a Google banner ad.

​First you must start smart by considering the identity of your audience, your own brand message, and the strategy in which you want to deliver it:

​Over the course of fifteen years, I purchased five Saturn compact cars. In that same time frame, I bought four Gateway computers. Setting aside for the moment my incredible talent for choosing brands destined for extinction (perhaps Kellogg should take note…I do love their cereals and my patronage seems to be a kind of kiss of death), I think the bigger picture here is about brand loyalty. For me and Saturn and Gateway, it all began with relationship-building.
 
No matter how big or small your business, your success is dependent on relationships, e.g. with existing customers, with potential customers, with vendors, with contractors, with your employees, with your partners. The cigar-chewing, acid-tongued executive may foster fear, but he also nurtures contempt. And in the end, everyone with whom he does business knows that he just doesn’t care.
 
The proof of all this for me is that if Saturn and Gateway hadn’t gone the way of the Triceratops, I wouldn’t be buying their brands anymore anyway. Why? Because they were like the small-town yokels that hit it big on Broadway and then forgot about their roots and the folks back home. Too busy to care, only interested in making a buck, they never called, they never wrote, they never sent flowers anymore. (Actually, they never sent flowers at all, but they both used to offer free services and perks and promos that evaporated as soon as success sullied their souls.)
 
The lesson then is to never stop working on those relationships because you want your customers, your loyal employees, your dependable contractors, and vendors to be around for a long, long time.
 
Today’s focus will help you begin to build those important relationships:
 

​A few years ago, a friend and I took a jaunt to downtown Minneapolis to attend a rally where someone we greatly admired was scheduled to speak. In search of refreshments, we separated, agreeing to meet up in ten minutes time at a designated spot. This would have been fine, except that when I arrived at the spot, he wasn’t there. What followed was 90 minutes of me frantically searching for him in a crowd of 92,000. (This was pre-cellphone days, so apart from sending up a flare, I had no way to contact him.) After the event ended, we did meet up again at our car, but I had missed the entire rally.
 
If you’re not applying proven marketing principles—whether online or in direct marketing—you may find that your business is going to get lost among the thousands and thousands of others out there.
 
Commit these words to memory this week. They are critical to your marketing success:

I’m not what you’d call “handy” around the house. I confess to hammering in a nail with the heel of my shoe, using duct tape to wrap gifts, and securing open chip bags with those little clippy things you use to bind reams of paper together.
 
If you read enough Buzzfeed, you might refer to these unusual practices as “life hacks.” But in all honestly, I think they just show that in matters of domesticity, I’m kind of just a “hack.”
 
It can be tempting to put together your marketing strategy with cheap apps or work-around fixes, but for long-term success, it’s best to follow the proven path to success.
 
That’s why I recommend using the following three tools or methodologies to make marketing magic for your business: