Most new businesses fail in the first five years. Let’s beat the odds together.

I usually write about more complex tools and strategies, but in speaking to new entrepreneurs or small business owners this past year, the questions I most often get are:

• How can I add social media to my marketing without adding additional employees?
• How can I do everything you suggest and still have time to work on my products?

Lack of time and money are the #1 and #2 saboteurs of start-ups.  So to everyone who has not yet jumped into the social fray to promote their business or service, here’s my simple beginner’s guide to using social media for business.

I believe most businesses can benefit from a simple, straightforward social media strategy that includes:

• A Facebook profile for the “face” of the business; the owner or spokesperson
• A Facebook fan page for the business itself
• A Twitter Account
• A YouTube Account
• A Blog

With these five social media basics, even the most cash strapped and time deprived entrepreneur can begin to create digital footprints that lead back to their business.

Setting up the accounts is easy and entrepreneurs should not become distracted by the bells and whistles and they wish list that comes with fully tricked out Facebook pages or beautifully designed Twitter accounts.  When you’re swamped, stick to the basics and don’t let “ideal” stop you from starting with “good enough.”

Here’s a simple beginners guide to a social media marketing strategy map anyone can use.

• Blog 2-3 times per week and keep posts to 250-300 words. Make them keyword rich (words you would enter into Google Search to find YOU). Make sure each post gives one interesting or useful piece of information to the reader about your area of expertise.

• The same day you blog, post a link to that blog on your Facebook Fan Page, adding an invitation to join you on the blog for more posts on your subject matter.

• Allow this post to auto-post to your Twitter account by linking your Twitter account to your Facebook fan page through this Facebook app link: http://Facebook.com/Twitter.

• The next day press the share button under your Fan Page post and share it to your personal profile.  Your friends are your closest supporters.  Ask them to share your post with their friends, leave you comments and let you know if you can help them with your area of expertise.

• Two days later, turn your blog post into a simple, how-to video by reading it into your web cam. Put the “script” up on your screen so you can look directly at the camera.  Speak as though you’re explaining the concepts in your blog to just one person.  Post the video to YouTube and tag the video with your keywords.

This is an over simplified map, designed to get you thinking about sharing content throughout social media.  There are many, many subtle and more complicated nuances and strategies to increase your visibility, but this is a start.  If you’re a new business owner or entrepreneur who has not yet begun to use social media in your business marketing, begin here and add new strategies as you get comfortable.

I’d love to see your first efforts and answer your questions.  Feel free to post your links below and I’ll take a look at your new social media platforms.  Here’s to a year of action and success, to us all.

For free or low cost marketing tips, look to the BIG players.

The answer, of course, depends on your product, your business goals and the bandwidth of your human resources.  However, there are some no brainer’s in the small business toolkit I highly recommend adding in 2012.

1. E-mail management system: The big guys work hard to capture your e-mail during any online interaction with you. They’ll reward you, entice you, invite you and engage you, all in an effort to obtain your permission to send you future communications about their products and services via e-mail.  E-mail is cheaper than advertising, direct mail, live events and nearly every other consumer facing promotion, and your small business or brand should be following the example of industry leaders. Set up an opt in form on your website, your Facebook fan page and include the URL for that opt in page on all printed collateral customers see.  Even if you don’t yet know how you’ll use those names and e-mail addresses, start capturing them. Even if you don’t currently have a product or service to offer, start capturing them. Your “tribe” follows you because they’re interested in what you say, teach, offer or share. An e-mail database will help you deepen that relationship, share more, find out what your tribe needs and either create it for them or find a product from someone else to recommend to them. As that famous brand says, “Just Do it.”
2. Segment the List: You heard “the money is in the list?”  They’re not wrong. Your most valuable customer or client is one that has already purchased your product or service and is happy. Set up your e-mail database management system to allow you to see, at a glance, where any customer joined you.  With e-mail database management systems like AWeber, MailChimp and others, you can easily set up multiple lists to reflect their point of entry into your brand, be it Facebook, a live event, a newsletter or an advertisement.
3. Test the Opt in Offer: Experiment with different offers to see which one resonates with your customers.  Do they want discounts on your products? Are they motivated by free content? Do they take action when you make yourself available to them personally? Use your current customers as a marketing research test group?  Test your offers one at a time and see which one(s) motivate people to sign up for your list.
4. Internet Commercials: This is a fancy way to say add video to your marketing toolkit. You can create video without spending a dime. Demonstrate something and capture it in video form using the built in software on your computer. With Apple’s Keynote, you can capture your presentations and upload them to YouTube and embed the video to your website. For a relatively modest investment, you can install Camtasia or ScreenFlow and easily create video demonstrations of your activities online.  You can upload still photos and add text and create a professional looking 30 second spot using Animoto, all for free or you can purchase a pro account with much more flexibility for a just $249.  Money or lack of experience is no longer a stumbling block for using video in your marketing. Your video commerical is only limited by your imagination.
5. Google Analytics Account: You simply must know which of your marketing activities, launches and product offerings are driving interest. A Google Analytics account will tell you the number of hits your website is getting, how long people are staying on your site, which pages they are viewing, where they’re coming from (key information), where they are located and a variety of other information. This is a free tool and a must use for all small businesses and entrepreneurs.
6. Social Communications Platform: Use asocial media platforms to amplify your message. A very wide variety of free broadcasting and communications platforms are available and easy to use.  Try Tumblr, Facebook fan pages, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, Blogger to name a few. Find the one(s) that fit your personal brand personality, ease of use and most importantly, make sure that the ones you choose are used by the audience you want to attract.
7. Facebook ads: There is no budget too small to use Facebook ads. I have clients who are budgeting as little as $20.00 a day and paying an average of $0.07 per click.  Some are paying about $0.75 per click and spending $50.00 to $100.00 per campaign. The price per click and the final costs depend on the keywords and competition for those words on Facebook during a given time period. You can set a daily or a lifetime budget and turn ads on or pause them. Facebook gives you the ability to micromanage your budget and to drill down to a very specific customer, when choosing who will see your ads. You can direct the end user to your Facebook fan page, to a specific tab with a specific offer or you can direct people who click to an outside website with a special offer.  Facebook ads are one of the most inexpensive advertising options available to small business owners.

Make 2012 the year that your small business or personal brand tries at least one of the success strategies used by big, successful businesses like Target special offers to Facebook fans, Lexus internet commercials, Amazon’s new product launches and Wal-Mart daily deals. If you’ve used one of these strategies and have a success story to tell, we’d love to hear about it. We also invite you to leave your company URL in the comment section below if you have an example you’d like to share.

You are a brand.  Your products or services are your brand offerings.  When you add something new to your offerings, that becomes your brand extension.

Let’s say you are a successful author.  You’ve written a great book on marketing.  You’ve promoted the book with advertising, personal appearances, traditional media and even social media.  Your brand, to the consumer, is “marketing expert.”  Now you’re ready to add something new to your services.  You might add consulting, coaching, webinars or live trainings.  But if you were to add a cookbook to your brand, you’d have a great deal of work to do in order to bring people along with you as you evolve your brand from business to baking.  BUT, if cooking is your passion and you’re using cooking as a metaphor for blending, mixing and creating a product, you’d have a brand extension.  If the book were about your favorite cookie recipes, you’d need a new branding strategy.

It’s possible for a personal brand to evolve and include a wide variety of products and services.  However, adding things far afield from a brand’s original DNA is best done once the brand is mature and the brand leader (YOU) is well established and has a strong and loyal following.

For the rest of us, annual evaluation and planning for our emerging brand life cycle is an exercise worth doing.  As you plan your growth, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Where’s the money? What is my most profitable offering right now? In other words, what are people buying from me now?  When people are willing to part with their money to purchase your products or services, that’s the simplest and purest market research.
2. Customer needs: are my current clients or customers asking me for additional information or services I don’t yet provide?  If those services or products are within your skill set, this is the proverbial low hanging fruit.  Put energy and time into providing your current client base with what they are already asking you to offer.
3. Next offer: after I’ve delivered my first product or service to a client, and I know they are happy, what do I want to offer them next?  This is the beginning of your funnel.  Take note of the needs of your clients. See if there are natural additional ways to serve your client base.  Repeat this question after every new product or service to create additional offerings.
4. Brand extension: once you’ve developed a client base the trusts you and is thrilled with what you offer, you can begin to stretch your brand. This is best done in increments.  Taking our example, the marketing book author might now write about sales by making the connection in the consumers mind between sales and marketing and letting marketers know they also have to be salespeople, especially if they are entrepreneurs or small business owners.  Next, our expert might branch out and claim mind share as a provider of information about product development, distribution and even sourcing.  He or she might divide upcoming product offerings into categories that provide deep knowledge in the how-to aspects of each phase of creating new products or services. Then our expert could create speeches, live events, webinars, DVD series, more books and other creative delivery systems for those new products.

Brand development is like story telling. Don’t try to take your reader from “Once Upon a Time,” to “the wicked witch was dead” in two steps. Tell the full story. Lead the consumer through your thinking process by offering logical, helpful, inventive product and service development. And, every step of the way, double check to see that your brand development is ringing true with your customer base.

Do you have questions about extending your brand? Let’s talk.

Shifting your thinking from how to rank to what to rank for can be a valuable exercise in creating a solid digital marketing strategy.

Five Simple Steps for Determining Video Content

1. Content Tools: Use the Google Keyword Search Tool to find out how clients and website visitors are currently landing on your site.  While this tool allows you to search keywords and find out how many people are searching for those terms, you can also enter your own professional website URL in the “Find Keywords” feature at the top of the page and Google will show you the keywords others have entered before your site was recommended to them.

2.  Research Technique: Using a spreadsheet or a word doc, keep track of the phrases or keywords that have local monthly searches of 2,000 or more and where the competition for those searches is medium or low.  The reason for staying away from high volume, high competition words is that an entrepreneur or small business will most likely not have the financial resources to rank highly in these areas during their building phase. But if you were to rank on the first page of Google for a relevant keyword with lower competition and convert some of those searches into clients or buyers, without advertising, activities that caused this would be worth the investment of your time, right?

3.  What to Search: I searched my own website URL and found that 18,100 monthly searches are being entered for the phrase “Tools for Twitter,” and Google tells me that the competition for this is “low.”  Now Twitter marketing and Twitter Tools are right in my business sweet spot.  I lecture on Twitter Tools and write about them often.  So I will put “Tools for Twitter” onto my list of videos I may want to create for my website and my YouTube Channel.

4.  How To Interpret the Results: Next, click on the link within the Google Keyword Tool and Google will show you a search page with the number of entries for that term in gray at the top of the page.  In this test case, “Tools for Twitter” has 1,560,000 results.  That’s a heck of a lot of competition for me to go up against in landing on the first page of searches for this term.  But I’m considering using video to demonstrate my expertise in this area, so now, I’ll go to the left hand side of the Google results page for this search and click videos.  Instantly, I see that the competition for this term in videos is significantly less, 180,000, but still steep.

5.  Claiming Your Spot on Top: Next, I’ll scroll down the page and see the dates when each of the ranking videos on the first two pages were created.  I can see that for this term, not all the ranking content is fresh.  This encourages me and I’ll place this “Tools for Twitter” title on my To Create list for videos.  I may create several and roll them out as a series.  Google values fresh or new content above other content and so I have a better chance of ranking for this phrase because not all of the content on page one or two of Google (for this phrase) is new.

That’s it.  I’ve used this strategy to rank on page one for many terms including a video I created for parents about “Facebook and Kids” where I rank in the #1 spot for this phrase.

I’d love to hear about your searches and the titles of videos that you’ll create.  Please share your findings and I’ll be glad to watch your videos and comment, which can also help ranking.  Remember to always give viewers a clear call to action, which may simply be “Please let me know what you thought of this video.”

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.

10. I can’t afford to invest in expensive equipment

9. I don’t know what to talk about.

8. I don’t have anyone to run the camera.

7. I don’t know how to use the video even if I could create it.

6. I don’t like the way I look on camera.

5. I think people will think I’m boastful or vain.

4. I don’t have time to learn how to edit video.

3. I’m not convinced that video will increase my revenue.

2. I don’t have a tangible product to show on video. I’m a consultant.

1. I’m not comfortable in front of a camera.

According to a January 2010 report by research firm Forrester, optimized video increases the incidence of Google front page search results by a factor of 53x. And, Internet Retailer’s April 2010 report states that e-commerce site visitors are 85% more likely to purchase if they’re presented with a video.

Let’s debunk the top 10 concerns about using video in your brand marketing.

10. You do not need expensive equipment to create video. You can upload still photography and copy to a site called Animoto and create polished 30 second commercial style videos in minutes, free of charge.

9. The How-To category on YouTube is very popular. Any subject related to your business that you can show or tell is perfect for a video. Think about what you offer and add “How To” to any aspect of it and you’ll have your first video.

8. You can use the camera already inside your computer to record yourself. You don’t need a camera operator. You can purchase an inexpensive tripod to mount your video camera, turn it on yourself and walk in front of the camera. YouTube gives you a simple and easy to learn way to clip the unwanted beginning to a homemade video so you can start your video at the beginning of your presentation.

7. Create the video. Save it to your computer hard drive. Upload it to your YouTube Channel. Share the link on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and your website. Put the link into your e-newsletter. These are just a few ways to use the video you create.

6. Get over it. No one likes the way they look on camera. But consumers like to see the face behind the offer. They like to look into your eyes and know that a real person is making the offer. If you truly can’t do it, create a powerpoint and capture your presentation with a program like Camtasia for PC or Screen Flow for Mac and you’ll have a video without ever showing your face.

5. This is old mental programming. We’re marketing in a new very social, very connected world and to succeed, you’ll need to put those feelings behind you and operate from the knowledge that sharing the things you know if actually selfless and generous.

4. You do not have to edit your video, in the beginning, if you keep it short. Practice making 15-30 second videos where you deliver one tip or strategy or idea at a time. Put it up and repeat after me: “Imperfect action is better than no action.” Your audience will value your authenticity and watching you improve. Later you’ll be able to reference those early videos, laugh and share your journey with your followers. Sales is about storytelling. You’re early efforts become part of your story.

3. If you still don’t believe that video will increase your revenues, you haven’t been paying attention. See the intro paragraph to this article and spend some time on google.

2. Sharing ideas on video is demonstrating authority. If you are a consultant, you’ll want to position yourself as an authority and let people see you in action. Video is ideal for consultants. Consumers buy based on a “know, like and trust” factor and video is the fastest way, aside from in-person presentations, to establish a feeling of relationship.

1. Confidence comes with practice. Talk into the camera as though you are at a cocktail party or networking event. Create a heightened sense of yourself without going over the top. Practice. But above all, to borrow a phrase from Nike, just do it. You can see some of my early work and later work here, which I hope will encourage you. I am not remotely “perfect,” yet I’ve been able to impact people, share knowledge and increase my personal brand awareness.

Have you been using video in your marketing with positive results? Please share your thoughts here to help encourage the entire community.

Bufferapp will suggest a Tweet when you’re feeling uninspired.

1. As soon as you create your free account, Bufferapp recommends the ideal times of day when your followers are most engaged and mostly likely to be paying attention to what you Tweet.  This, of course, increases your chances of being seen, having your brand messages shared and increasing your social influence.
2. As you create Tweets and add them to your Buffer, the program automatically schedules them for those recommended times.  You can override this feature at any time and schedule the tweet to suit your needs or just set it and forget it which is my favorite type of time saving tool.  You can also choose to post the tweet immediately, of course.
3. Bufferapp has a “Suggest an update” feature that I love.  Imagine that you have four core messages you’d like to send to Twitter throughout the day and you know that my recommended strategy is to post five times a day but you are stumped.  Just click the “suggest an update” button and Bufferapp serves up a series of mostly motivational quotes.  Click until you find one that speaks to your audience and send it to your Buffer queue.  Most brands or business can easily tweet one nice motivational quote every day and their followers will enjoy it.  And, if the quotes don’t really speak to your audience, I’ve found that the essential message in the quotes often prompts me to write something that is similar but is in my own voice and is directly related to my own brand.  This is a great feature.

Bufferapp And Other Twitter Tools

Bufferapp is just one of the Twitter tools I use daily, and in an experiment during the past three weeks, I saw a marked increase in follower engagement on a client’s account by incorporating Bufferapp.  I also use Hootsuite to see multiple accounts at a glance and to easily spot and reply to DM’s and @replies, and in fact, Hootsuite Pro is my primary Twitter tool for managing more than 10 accounts, three team members and monitoring multiple competitors.  I use Tweetadder to find and follow Twitter accounts based on my brand’s keywords, and to un-follow accounts who don’t engage with me or reciprocate my follow within a reasonable amount of time.  And, finally, I go on the Twitter platform itself daily because I enjoy seeing the real estate or background designs other Twitter accounts use.  The way they design and display their brands is important to me and helps me decide whether or not I want to converse, engage, and follow their account.

I’m always looking for new, free and easy Twitter tools to enhance both my and my client’s efforts and I give Bufferapp the thumbs up.  Try it and let me know what you think.  Are there other tools I should try?  Let me know and I’ll add them to my review schedule.

Think your Twitter follow needs to be at 1,000,000 or more in order to monetize?  When Sponsored Tweets launched, they created connections between Kim Kardashian and products that wanted to be connected to Kim Kardashian. The idea was that for a price, and I believe Kim’s price per tweet was more than my mortgage payment, Kim would choose to tweet something complimentary about the sponsor. A simple idea and frankly, pretty standard celebrity marketing albeit with a new social twist.

But if you weren’t Ashton Kutcher or Justin Bieber, your sponsored Tweets wasn’t interested in you. That’s changed and I recently did a test drive of as a non-celebrity Twitter for Hire.

28,000+ followers = $30 per tweet

It was easy to sign up using my Twitter account and a quick click of the mouse analyzed my account to tell me that my tweets were worth about $75 each, IF someone was willing to pay me. Then I was able to peruse the opportunities that Sponsored Tweets calls “Opps.” Nearly all were for $.02-.07 cents, and I wasn’t familiar with any of the products or offerings and so I passed.

About a week later, I received an e-mail telling me a client opp was waiting for me at my account. I logged in and checked out the link that the client wanted me to tweet. It was a television show that I find interesting anyway, so I decided it was a good experiment.

Here’s how it works. Sponsored Tweets gives you the link from the client. You take a look at the offering at the end of the link and decide how to position the tweet. You write the tweet and include the link and the word “sponsored.” The client reviews the tweet and it is auto scheduled to go out from your account. Smooth, easy and you can decline the offer or cancel at any time, if you change your mind.

It was fun. I didn’t feel I was damaging my reputation with this tweet experiment and I made $30. I don’t believe this will become a revenue stream for me, but will I do it again? Maybe. It really depends on the offer, the product and my next experiment. How easy is it to collect this $30? Stay tuned.

Would you “sell your tweets?”

When used strategically and in synergy with a well-rounded marketing campaign, Twitter is the social whipped cream.

Here are five nifty Twitter tools to add to your entrepreneurial arsenal. Each one brings something special to the table and could add just the sparkle you need for your next campaign.

TWEETDOC

Create a document bringing together all the tweets from a particular event or search term. A tweetdoc allows you to keep a record of what happens on Twitter. You can set parameters such as date and time ranges, number of tweets to capture, hashtags and search terms and capture the Twitter conversation. Great for brand monitoring reports, competitor analysis, real time news stories such as the recent Hurricane Irene reports on Twitter, conference chatter to find and follow influencer’s and other attendees or simply to keep your finger on the pulse of an industry or technology.

TWYLAH

Twylah aggregates your tweets and highlights your brand areas of expertise, based on what you tweet about. It serves them back to you in a beautiful SEO optimized webpage that gives readers a clear visual impression of who you are and what you talk about. When you send a “power tweet” from your Twylah page, your Tweets are captured, organized visually and by keywords and your Twitter followers are directed back to you optimized landing page, which is populated with relevant tweets on the same topic. Twylah gives you yet another piece of high style social real estate to reinforce your brand identity. Seeing all your Tweets in one spot, visually and topically aggregated is an eye-opener too and can serve as a brand audit to help you quickly see if you’re hitting your target messaging or going off topic too often.

TWEETGURU

A quirky series of Twitter tools, auto tweeting bots and services that allows you to, among other things, direct message multiple Twitter accounts at once. You might want to use this feature if you’re reaching out to your personal list of press people on Twitter about a launch party or a big brand announcement. The free version has a limit of 12 accounts at one time for your direct message but this can save you time and that’s the point.

HOOTSUITE

Hootsuite’s free tweet scheduling feature is easy to use and with a modestly priced pro account agencies can manage multiple accounts at once, assign individual tweet action items to team members and keep track of which team member answered the Twitter query and their new analytic tools generate custom reports for clients and play nicely with Google analytics. Hootsuite is a timesaving tool, a team tool, a monitoring tool and a scheduling tool all in one.

TWUBS.COM

Twubs are groups built around content aggregated from hashtags. Twubs gives you a live tweet feed of an event, conference or Twitter Chat based on a specific #hashtag and offers tools such as a Tweetup and Events scheduler. You can register your event hashtag at Twubs, embed a Twub widget on your website, and the Twub offers a complete Conference suite of tools like live moderation, conference displays, live event audio and presentation streaming, RSS feeds and more to engage participants who attend in person or those watching remotely. These features could be used by speakers and can even include photos and videos. A moderator can view the stream in a time delay mode and control which tweets are shown to the audience and which should not be.

What other Twitter tools would you add to the list? Let’s share our favorites here.

Many still fear that Twitter is a time rabbit hole and that building a large following on Twitter will unleash a time commitment they can’t accommodate.

Here are eight timesaving tools to help any sized business or individual entrepreneur find, follow, engage or manage their time on Twitter for productive results.

1. Twellow: This site is the Yellow Pages of Twitter.  This free site allows you to register your Twitter account under three different keywords such as marketing, branding, social media or whatever keywords a potential client might enter to find your business.  Listing your Twitter account here will help others to find you when searching for the service or product you provide. Therefore, leads or followers coming from Twellow are more likely than average to be seeking what you have to offer. It’s fast and easy to register and worth your time.  Additionally, if you use Twellow while logged into your Twitter account and Twellow, you can search, find and follow others directly from the platform.
2. Twitter App for Facebook: The Twitter stream is a fast moving conversation and therefore, your tweets once out of sight are out of mind.  Making any content you create do double duty is a good timesaving strategy.  Using this app to cause Facebook to auto-post from Facebook to your Twitter account makes your daily Facebook post work harder by also speaking to your Twitter followers. And, the added benefit is the way this app creates a truncated link to bring people back to your Facebook page to read a post that is longer.  This is a subtle invitation for Twitter followers interested enough to click the link to continue reading to “like” your Facebook page.  Again, always ask your content to work in multiple ways.
3. SocialToo: Auto follow everyone who follows you. I’m a believer in auto following everyone who follows me on Twitter. It’s an easy way to build your following and allows people who find you to DM or Direct Message you on Twitter. I’ve been interviewed by national newspapers and contacted by future clients this way and had I not employed a policy of auto following, they would not have been able to reach me as easily and quickly.  I upgraded from a free account at SocialToo to a one-time $10 fee to use their set it and forget it auto follow tool. I love this feature and cannot recommend it enough.
4. Hootsuite: In my opinion, Hootsuite is one of the best social media dashboards for managing Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin accounts at a glance and pre-scheduling tweets. I use it regularly manage 10 or more Twitter accounts alone, using Hootsuite and their newly enhanced metrics are terrific for creating client reports and for insight into which marketing messages are working and which are falling on deaf ears and may need tweaking.
5. Tweetbeep: Google for Twitter. Set alerts for your keywords, your business name and your competitors to keep yourself in the loop and to find good information to tweet to your followers.
6. Tweepi: This handy site allows you to weed out the accounts that don’t follow you back, to reciprocate those that follow you first and to clean out inactive accounts from your Twitter tribe.  A free version is suitable for smaller accounts and a paid version adds significantly more functionality for larger accounts or agencies.
7. Tweetchat: Follow hashtag conversations in real time without distractions.  By doing so, you can quickly and easily find people talking about keywords and topics that interest you or your potential customer. Use hashtag conversations to bring yourself and your brand to the attention of others by participating in interesting, on-point twitter conversations.
8. Timely: Analyze your Twitter patterns and get recommendations on times of day when your followers are most likely see, read and respond to your posts.

What other tools are in your Twitter toolkit?  If you have tools and strategies for maximizing your time on Twitter, I’d love to hear about them.  Let’s share with one another.

Can you put your core offering into one compelling sentence?

I always ask them, for the purpose of achieving those goals, to shift their focus from the end result to the first challenge; clearly stating their unique value to a potential customer.  This “why to buy” focus helps businesses center their marketing, branding and public relations messages around the most important point of all—their offering.

F.O.C.U.S stands for “Find Our Core Unique Service.”  Figuring this out helps companies address one of the four key elements of branding; variation.  Asking the tough questions, doing the research and creating clear, concise communications will save entrepreneurs and even bigger companies time, money and frustration.

Some questions to ask to help define the unique service or selling proposition are:

How is this service or product different from all others in the competitive set?

• Less expensive, more detailed, easier to use, more conveniently located?

Does the personality of this business or service give it something special?

• Is the business or service provider more highly qualified, more experienced, personally enriched by the product usage?

Why would someone choose this product or service from all other choices available?

• Better customer service and support, first to market, more stylish packaging, more rave reviews, higher perceived value?

Try to put your core offering into one compelling sentence.  This exercise will tell you if you’ve nailed your F.O.C.U.S.  I invite you to post your F.O.C.U.S. statement here and I’ll give you my opinion on whether or not your statement conveys your F.O.C.U.S. to me.  Go.