Top Dawg Business Blog

Benchmarking is an extremely effective tool, and you are probably already using it in one form or another.
From a business perspective, benchmarking the practice of investigating and analyzing your competition to understand what they are doing and to build from that learning to plan your own strategy.
From a marketing perspective, we drill down a bit further and try to understand all of the influences that are competing for our clients and prospective customers’ mindshare.
So benchmarking is not copying or stealing others ideas. It’s simply the intelligent approach to learning from what has been done and what seems to be working within a given marketplace. Then it means taking that learning and developing your own strategy to carve out your own piece of the market.
Here are some great benchmarking exercises.
1. Who are your 3-5 closest competitors?
• What are they doing right? Do they have a strong brand identity? Is their Unique Selling Proposition (USP) clear?
• What could they be doing better? Is their website lacking? Is their logo or tagline weak or dated?
• What can you learn from their efforts and put into practice for your business, but with your own unique spin? While imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, you don’t want to flat-out copy your competition. Instead, you should take a concept and rebuild it to support your own brand identity and USP.
• Where can you leverage the efforts of these competitors to promote your own message? A restaurant on a corner often will experience a clear boost in business when one or two more restaurants or bars open on the other corners at that intersection. This creates a destination for diners. Think in terms of your competitors creating a “destination” or a “market” for the service or product you sell.
2. What are some other direct and indirect factors competing for your audience mindshare?
• For a web-based business, a brick and mortar store would be in direct competition for your audience, but only in a limited geographical area.
• If you offer pet walking, pet sitting and skilled pet training, then an indirect competitor might be a popular dog training course that is being heavily promoted by Amazon. This course is indirect because your customers probably buy from you because they want the personal attention they can’t get from a DVD, CD or book.
• If you offer a line of premium, organic diet food and personalized consultation, you might consider Weight Watchers to be an indirect competitor. Again, this is indirect competition because your USP is a personal, premium service that a standardized national program like Weight Watchers can’t provide.
3. Use the power of the Internet to benchmark both direct and indirect competitors
• Try Googling each of your competitors’ brand names and see what comes up. How many pages of their websites has Google cached? What types of content is displayed? Blog entries? Articles? Press Releases? Directories that you have never heard of? Local search results?
• Run their websites through free online tools like Alexa (http://www.alexa.com), SpyFu (http://www.spyfu.com) and check their Google Page Rank (add this button to your Google Toolbar on any Internet browser you use). These tools will tell you if your competitors are using Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, what keywords are driving traffic to their sites, and lots more.
• Setup Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) for each of your competitors.
4. Stay up to date on whatever industry data you can get a hold of, whether from an industry organization or through analysts and journalists covering your area.
These exercises are just a few of the steps you should take to benchmark your competition and industry segment. But even if you just undertake one or two of these, you’ll be getting closer to understanding how to more efficiently reach and retain your customers.
Make it a practice to allocate an hour each week, or 20 minutes each day, for one or more of these benchmarking exercises. The beauty of benchmarking is that you’re likely to glean something useful every time: a new perspective; something your competitors are doing differently; an opportunity you hadn’t been aware of.

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Need help benchmarking your competitors or industry? For assistance all your marketing and branding needs, check out AcuteVisibility|BMO, a full service integrated marketing agency that specializes in launching new businesses as well as optimizing the success of existing brands.

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Although many human foods are not good for dogs, most of these items would have to be eaten in large quantities to have a serious adverse effect. On one end of the spectrum, your dog may experience some flatulence, which can be truly miserable to be around, even if it’s not actually dangerous for your pet. The next level of symptoms might be short term diarrhea or muscle spasms. Foods that are very toxic to dogs and could have serious consequences if ingested in any volume include (listed alphabetically):

avocados
animal fat
broccoli
caffeine
chocolate (unless it’s specifically made for dogs)
coffee grounds or beans
dough containing live yeast
fried or fatty foods
fruit stones or seeds (too many to list!)
garlic
grapes
green parts of tomato plants
hops
macadamia nuts
nutmeg
onions of all kinds
potato peelings
raisins
rhubarb leaves
salt
tea
tomatoes
yeast

If you ever fear your pet has ingested something toxic, call your vet immediately or the ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center at (888) 426-4435. This is a good number to post somewhere near your pet supplies where you know you can find it in an emergency.
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A Purchase Order, often just shortened to PO, is essentially a contract to purchase something. You might decide that you will accept Purchase Orders from an established customer who makes frequent or larger purchases. You would then deliver products and services per the PO, and issue an invoice to the customer for payment upon receipt or within a specified payment term (15 or 30 days is pretty standard.) In order to do business with some larger entities, you may have to accept POs, because their purchasing departments may not have the ability to pay you by credit card, check or PayPal.
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SERP is an acronym that’s short for Search Engine Results Page. When you go to Yahoo and type in a query, such as “Online Pet Store” and hit Search, the page that Yahoo displays is a SERP. Every SERP generally includes both paid search results (at the top and the side—look for “Sponsored Results” in small type) as well as the top ten organic search results. For all the obvious reasons, websites that appear in the top ten organic search results for a given query, or keyword, get the lion’s share of search traffic.
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CRM is an abbreviation for Customer Relationship Management. You may see it referring to a genre of software applications that integrate and automate various aspects of managing your customer relationships: automated emails, newsletters, cross-selling and up-selling, etc. But CRM is a broader concept that asks you to look at everything you do to nurture an ongoing relationship with your prospects, customers and clients. Good CRM practices include everything from having a good website with clear navigation and appropriate content to maintaining accurate customer records and keeping all your communications consistent, well-branded and sincere.
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Continued from Being a Brilliant Brand Ambassador: Part I
In the first installation, we covered the first two figurative building blocks for establishing the foundation of your Brand Embassy:
1. Keeping up Appearances
2. Maintaining Knowledge Leadership
In this final chapter, we’ll address two more.
3. Take Initiative and Stay Engaged
o Introduce yourself at every opportunity with an intro of the appropriate length and content. Every business needs three basic intros that you can deliver seamlessly and at the drop of a hat:
 A “Bumper Sticker”: Think of this as a descriptive tag line. Should be no longer than you would put on a bumper sticker.
 The 30-Second Elevator Pitch: If you only have 30 seconds in an elevator with a stranger, how do you describe your company in a compelling and engaging manner?
 Your 60-Second Value Proposition: This is a distillation of the value you propose to offer your customers. It can take a little less or a little more than a minute to deliver, but 60 seconds is a great rule of thumb.
o Put your story out there wherever you can. Think of it as plastering the neighborhood with flyers.
 Make it a practice to do ONE thing online every day to “spread the virus”
 Set up profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. Update them all weekly.
 Look up the top 100 Social Media Networks and create an identity for your company on at least 50 of them.
 Blogging: Find compatible blogs to comment on, and start your own.
o Always carry business cards and flyers or coupons or brochures to give anyone who’s interested
o Post business cards on physical bulletin boards at coffee shops, pet stores, Laundromats, grocery stores, groomers, vets, doctors offices… wherever they have a board, put a card up!
o Be sure your business card includes bullet points listing the types or brands of products, or describing your service offering, as well as your “Bumper Sticker” or tag line.
4. Be an Entrepreneur and Take Ownership
o Follow up with contacts you make, whether you meet in a grocery store or a networking event.
o Think outside of the box. Look at other businesses that you interact with and think about how you could integrate what they do well into your business.
o Always look for ways to improve. If something isn’t working, fix it. If something is working well, see if it can work better. Test and try new ideas. Always be willing to fail, but be sure you learn from your mistakes instead of repeating them.
o Say Thank You for referrals, leads, inquiries, new business and return business. Say Thank You for suggestions, feedback, even complaints. Remember a complaint is an opportunity to improve and earn a customer’s profound loyalty.
If the concept of Brand Ambassadorship resonates with you, you may be interested in reading more about what leading business evangelists are saying. We recommend three excellent books: Guy Kawasaki’s Selling the Dream, Word of Mouth Marketing by Andy Sernovitz and Seth Godin’s Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Extraordinary.
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Need help with your communicating your Unique Selling Proposition? For assistance with identity, branding, advertising, search engine optimization and all your marketing needs, AcuteVisibility|BMO is a full service integrated marketing agency that can help launch your business and maximize your success.

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ALT tags, short for “Alternate” tags, are abbreviated descriptions attached to images and photos on a website. ALT tags help websites maintain keyword prominence and density throughout the site. As a user, you can usually view an website image’s ALT tag by right-clicking on the image. So for example, if you have a picture of a puppy on an pet store web page selling dog collars, you might assign the following ALT tag: “Premium dog collars for puppies and dogs of all sizes.”
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WYSIWYG is pronounced “Wizzy-Wig” and is an acronym for “What You See Is What You Get.” It’s a term that arose out of the computer industry because early computer software was very definitely not WYSIWYG. Accomplishing basic formatting tasks required you to know codes which were often different for every software application. For example, in order to make something bold-faced, you might enter:
_bf_happy_/bf_
which would display as
happy
Now, many software applications and interfaces are largely, if not entirely, WYSIWYG, although most programming applications are not. Why do you care? Well, if you want to learn some basic coding, you might enjoy dabbling in HTML or Drupal. But otherwise, be sure the applications you purchase or license are WYSIWYG and you can be confident you’ll be able to take full advantage of their capabilities.
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A Brand Ambassador can be an invaluable asset to any business, whether it’s a mom and pop corner store, a professional corporation, a non-profit organization, a Fortune 100 enterprise, or even an ecommerce website.
If you’re a large company, you can afford to hire a high-powered professional schmoozer or strategist and give her the title of Chief Corporate Liaison or Executive Director of Branding.
In the non-profit world, Ambassadorship relies on everyone from the Director of Development to the fleet of volunteers.
When you’re a sole proprietor, Brand Ambassador is just one of the many hats you wear as an entrepreneur.
In ecommerce, where you may rarely (if ever!) meet or speak directly to your prospective customers and clients, the concept is more abstract, but it still applies. If we may continue the metaphor, here are some of the most important building blocks that will form the foundation of your Brand Embassy:
1. Keep Up Appearances
o Ensure your website is always in good order, with accurate and up-to-date information.
o Be sure you are prepared to answer phone calls, email and written correspondence promptly, and professionally.
o Look at all your “customer-facing” portals (website, emails, auto-responders, letters) with an eye for how it all supports the image you want to portray.
o Whenever you have the opportunity to represent your business in person, be sure you dress, speak and act the part of a successful proprietor.
2. Maintain Knowledge Leadership
o Know your “brand” inside and out. Be prepared to answer questions about your mission and brand identity, and policies.
o Know your products. Read about them and their manufacturers. Learn about competitive products and retailers. Use your products. Ask your customers to tell you about their experiences.
o Know your industry. Become a subject matter expert. If you have an online pet store, you want to be sure you know who else is selling similar products and at what prices. Know their policies. Keep up on trends.
For more Brand Ambassadorship building blocks, look for our blog posting next Friday: Being a Brilliant Brand Ambassador: Part II!
Ready to start your own home-based business? Visit Top Dawg Pet Supplies and start one risk free!
Need help with your branding? For assistance with identity, branding, search engine optimization and all your other marketing needs, AcuteVisibility|BMO is a full service integrated marketing agency that can help launch your business and maximize your success.

Ready to start your own home-based business with some of the world's best drop shippers? Visit Top Dawg Pet Supplies and start one risk free!

24/7/365 refers to customer service or technical support that is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Spoken as “twenty-four-seven” or “twenty-four-seven-three-sixty-five,” it means phone lines or live chat or email response are open all the time, and don’t take holidays.
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