Derek Champagne on BLS, Part 1

Derek Champagne talks about the 5 crisis points in marketing your brand from the following interview.

Listen to the podcast here. 

Derek: And thank you for joining us today on the business leadership series.

I am your host Derek Champagne.

Like many of you listening I myself am an entrepreneur and a small business owner.

I am the CEO of a company called the artist evolution and we are a comprehensive marketing firm that helps our clients grow through brand development, building effective marketing tools, and developing and executing strategic marketing campaigns.

Our audience is comprised of business owners and leaders or entrepreneurs like you who want to continue to grow and learn and want to become better leaders for your team and for your business.

I am just like you; I am a student of the game.

So we set this podcast up so that we can continue to learn from one another and so we can have great guests on that we can talk with that can help us to grow.

For the majority of these podcasts we will have a guest, but today I wanted to spend just a few minutes to talk about the five mistakes to avoid when growing your business.

I have a new, bestselling book called Don’t Buy a Duck: Stop Wasting Money and Only Do Marketing that Works!

In that book, we talk about the five crisis points that a business will commonly face, either when they are in the startup phase or when they are in a pause in their lifecycle and they are looking to grow and are unsure of what to do next, or maybe they are hitting some challenges and they are not sure how to get over the next hurdle.

According to the Small Business Association and American Express study, professional practice owners are spending 7 to 15% of their budget to grow their business, but not every dollar spent is effective.

So how do we take that guesswork out of marketing? In my industry, I am in the unique position to have been able to do countless consults with startups and small to medium sized businesses who will address the same core challenges in their growth.

Many of them are hesitant to spend because they have been burned in the past or they are trying to outspend bad decisions.

How do we take the guesswork out of marketing? How do we unlock this mystery world of marketing and start holding our advertising and marketing dollars more accountable?

And there is a way to do that, to find these five common crisis points and these five steps, if you follow them, they do take the guesswork out of your marketing so you should be more confident in how you spend.

Let’s talk about these five crisis points.

The first one is your identity. In my book, I talk about the identity crisis, a brand’s Bermuda Triangle.

A brand essentially is what your target community knows about you. I have often seen great products and successful business people who have an amazing story to tell and an amazing service, but they are not quite sure how to effectively tell their story.

I like to recommend to clients to make sure their brand is top of mind and tip of tongue. That is easier to do when you have a concise message and you package more concisely who your brand is and why it matters to your target.

We like to recommend that you make sure you have an elevator pitch. Some kind of concise message that you, your team, and your brand ambassadors – those who are enthusiastic about your brand and who have engaged with your product – know.

Give them an easier way to refer your services. When you have a clear identity and there is a clear association with the experience that your target customer is going to have with your brand it makes it easier for them to say yes to you when they are presented with the opportunity to buy or engage with your services or your product.

Let’s use Starbucks as an example here.

When you drive by a Starbucks, you know exactly what it would feel like to be sitting inside. If you see a Starbucks commercial, you can practically taste the flavor of your favorite coffee.

You know the experience; you know what Starbucks stands for. From sipping your favorite coffee, to engaging with a friend, to the familiar smells and sounds, to snacking on your favorite scone.

There is no confusion when you see the logo or hear the name of what experience you are going to get when you engage with that brand.

So you must figure out who you are and what your brand offers and what you want to communicate to your customers.

You really, essentially, get to write your own story from the very first word on. You get to help shape perception about who your brand is and how consumers can engage with you in a meaningful way.

I like to ask a few questions when we start this process. These are just few of the questions: “What is it that you do well? What do you want your brand to be known for? What core services are you going to offer? What moods or emotions do you want customers to associate with your business? Do you want to be a warm and friendly brand? Are you technology savvy? Are you customer service oriented? What are the things that are going to help you stand out so that consumers can make a choice quickly when they engage with you and have the opportunity to say yes if they are a good target?”.

So the next crisis point in a brand’s Bermuda Triangle is understanding your customers- who are they? Where are the pinpoints that they deal with? What are some needs that you are solving?

It is crucial to really understand who your company is, but you equally need to understand who your customer is. It is important for us to understand our core customer, because those are the ones who are going to be most enthusiastic and appropriate for buying our services or products.

Now this sounds simple and for many of you this is elementary, but this is a core issue that we have seen.

Again, we have talked about the five crisis points. This is one of them that we have seen from startups to multi-million dollar brands that get stuck sometimes, and we go in and do an audit on why their advertising or marketing is stuck or is not working.

This is one of the challenges that we find. Sometimes there wasn’t a really, truly good understanding about who our customer really is and what we need to change in messaging or service or product to make sure that we are offering something that is the most relevant and can make the best connection for them.

I want to talk about some other ways that brands get stuck, some other crisis points, in marketing, next.