When building your brand, it's really important to understand who else competes in your category, as well as, who ranks the best in the minds of the customers.
Based on this simple assessment you can decide two things:
- Design a strategy to become number 1 or 2 in your current category
- Become the number 1 in a new niched category
At LittleEngine we tackled both of these assessments early on. At the beginning of 2007, when we set out to create LittleEngine, there were no other ...
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When building your brand, it's really important to understand who else competes in your category, as well as, who ranks the best in the minds of the customers.
Based on this simple assessment you can decide two things:
- Design a strategy to become number 1 or 2 in your current category
- Become the number 1 in a new niched category
At LittleEngine we tackled both of these assessments early on. At the beginning of 2007, when we set out to create LittleEngine, there were no other competitors. I guess you could call Myspace and Facebook a competitor, but they looked like a mess and did not cater to businesses at all.
After we launched, we saw a large patch of new competitors in the business social network realm. To be honest, they were: CitySquares, YellowBot, InsiderPages, Upsring, and smaller guys. They were all trying to attract general businesses, not exactly how were handling it, but it pushed us enough to decided to radically shift and niche LittleEngine to one category we were more passionate about: Small Business.
That slight movement in to a smaller niche allowed us to gain higher in search rankings (we are now almost #1 when you search for small business social network on Google), as well as, align ourselves as number 1 in the minds of our customers!
Furthermore, going back to yesterdays blog post, we then had a better identity and sense of ourselves. We were THE only Small Business Social Network! It motivated and aligned everybody's mindset on the LittleEngine team. It was easy for investors to understand us. It was simple to QUICKLY explain and market ourselves to the press, small business owners, and the world.
So when setting out to build your small business brand, ask yourself, who else competes in your category? how else can I niche my brand to separate myself and conquer a new category?
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