Jumpstart Your Business

• Target a specific market segment and draw up a customer profile of the population in that segment that will most likely buy your product.
• Understand how to represent your product to the average customer in your new segment in language they understand.
• Have a search engine optimized web site that can draw in traffic to pages about your new product.

1. Describe the marketplace or environment both from a business and
social perspective.

2. Establish a set of goals for the company that allow you to:
. Take advantage of the marketplace
. Deliver products/services to meet present and future market needs
. Effectively communicate product and market positioning to
customers, business partners as well as your own personnel
. Reposition the company to fit the changing marketplace

A Saudi student renting a room at my girl friend’s was really happy because he had finally worked up the courage to go to the supermarket alone and had returned with a couple of bargains including “fat free” milk. He was really proud of this accomplishment because he likes his milk with all of the cream (unprocessed fat) in it and thought he had found that and more since he got the “fat for free”.

This story started me thinking of all of the things that are sold “fat free” like certain cuts of beef, yogurt, cottage cheese, hamburger meat, and a miriad of other products and wondered whether these misconceptions in labeling are taking advantage of all of us.

Here are some questions to ask yourself about how you and your business is perceived by your customers:

Do we appear helpful?
Do we appear to respect the customer’s time

This post is excerpted from a business article by Lindell Associates

If it’s not customer focused then it’s you focused, channel focused or technology focused - other focused. Customers don’t care about those things. They are focused on their needs.

What is the specific problem they are trying to address and do they need one or more of your products or services to make this problem go away? Exactly how will your product or service make their pain disappear?

If you want to build a sound relationship with your best customer, you need to focus on communicating well with him or her. There are 7 caveats to good communications and here they

Your advertising message should be geared to address the following 5 questions on your customer’s mind:
What is it for?
Why do I need it?
What will you do to fix my need?
Why should I choose you?
Why should I not choose the others?

I saw this YouTube video and had to share it with you. There are some very good tips here. Your business runs on converting prospects to customers and it all begins with the offer. The focus is on using the right words like [tag-tec]guarantees[/tag-tec] and [tag-tec]testimonials[/tag-tec]. Avoid multitasking and use technology to automate the conversion of your prospects to customers.

First thing to do is try to protect your invention by filing a patent. You can go up on http://www.uspto.gov and there are step by step instructions on filing a patent. There are also searches you can perform to see if the patent already exists.