In the consumer product market we know that brand refers to how, for example, electronic manufacturers differentiate themselves (or try to differentiate themselves.) One car manufacturer may promote safety as its brand while another may promote its economical price.
And when it comes to personal brands, we may be clear about some elements of brand. For example, some dinner guests are known for never arriving on time, while others always knock on the door at the exact moment the invitation calls for.
When it comes to the online promotion of your book or business (whether online or offline business), the concept of brand may not be as clear. For example, there are many online book marketers. Can you think of which ones have individual brands that come to mind readily?
And this cyberspace universe of similar businesses is precisely why working to establish online a clear brand for you and your company is so important – you want to stand out from all the others.
One additional point I’d like to make here before going on about brand. In the past, with less resources easily at hand, we would often stick to one service provider for everything connected to that service. Nowadays we have many more options – we can pick from a menu, using several service providers to each provide a piece of the whole.
And often these several service providers promote each other’s services because these providers do understand the menu choice of today’s business world.
It’s this knowledge that makes it easier for us to establish our own brand. We no longer have to be THE internet marketer and spend thousands of dollars of ad revenue trying to convince everyone that one size fits all and we’re that one size.
We can now create and establish a brand to a specific niche market – and thanks to the Internet that niche market can be quite huge.
I just read a post on a private Yahoo blogging group to which I belong. The author said that the next time she promoted her horror novel she wasn’t going to promote it to the horror-reading audience because there were so many thousands of horror books out there. Instead, she was going to market to people interested in books about jinns, which is an important element in her horror novel.
I thought about this post comment – she realized she had to have a specific niche brand for her horror novel rather than get lost drowning in the general horror novel category. And I agree with her that I think she’ll have more big sales promoting to this much smaller but much more targeted market.
