When establishing your brand, you need to determine who your crowd is: Who will be your supporters? Who will be your audience? Who will take interest in your company, your work, and your brand?
When used to its potential, your crowd will bring you business. It will be a never-ending chain of recommendations and networking. When ignored, your crowd can pull you down and make your brand harder to establish and your business harder to grow.
What defines a crowd? The stereotypical definition of identifying a crowd is by pure demographics: male or female? Age? Marital Status? Education?
The next, more complex step is to look at psychographics: What is your crowd’s behavior like? What kind of lifestyle do they lead? What groups are they involved in? What are their values? What do they fear? What drives them? Psychographics look at what makes your crowd tick and why they would want to carve time out of their schedules to interact with your company and your brand.
A step in another direction starts looking at affinity groups. Not everyone acts alike, but there are groups and organizations that bond certain types of people (in a sense, it’s a natural blend of demographics and psychographics). Explore groups and organizations like the local Chamber of Commerce, or get out on the web to find groups on LinkedIn or MeetUp.com. Search for clusters of people who already meet regularly, that happen to have a common thread. Look for a common thread that would strike a chord with your company that would be interested in what your company has to offer. Get involved or ask to speak at an event.
Once you start winning over your crowd, they will become one of your biggest resources; they will influence others by word of mouth and personal recommendations. The influence your crowd has on others will become one of your most powerful forms of advertising and lead generation for your business.
Brand well and prosper.
Cyndi