Welcome to our weekly update of the "Founder's Log" a blog dedicated to the progression of American Butchers JERKi, highlighting the things we've accomplished thus far in the past week, paths we are currently working towards right now, and unchartered paths we hope to accomplish in the upcoming week! Starting a business can be a tough decision so I've added this so you can stay up to date with things I've learned along the way! Have a question, don't hesitate to leave a comment below!
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A look into the past week
Where to start on a perspective of the past? Better yet let me focus on the goal that we established in our previous post and pave the path towards our own personal journey of progression in the last week. Our main goal for last weeks plan was to focus on giving back more than selling forward. We read countless articles specifically recommending the importance of sharing information or providing customers with an opportunity to learn/ solve their problem and NOT the importance of trying to promote your product or service. So did we provide any valuable information in the past week? I'll be honest here... was slacking a little bit on that one. Had things in personal life come up that hindered my ability to focus as much attention on assistance than I had hoped. I hope to spend this upcoming week more on this weeks goals and as a continuation of last weeks.
Next, this past week we experienced some pretty cool opportunities for promotion and marketing. Spoke with a few key markets in the industry and understood their perspectives on how marketing can play a huge role in promoting a product. Let me first say that we added a key player to the team. Joe Melanson, Massachusetts native joined the team as a marketing and product outreach team member. This helps me throw some ideas his way and gets a perspective. It probably came down to us being very bored with our current real life situation (being on hold for Army Aviation flight school) that Joe was looking for something to keep his mind engaged. It's really a win win for both of us. Anywaysss, the two of us sat down this week with 3 unique groups. The first being a very popular podcast group who we had hoped to partner with and help share our message and gain attraction towards our cause. Safe to say about $10,000 later we realized this would be a long shot so we'd have to approach it down the road potentially. The next individual we haven't actually made communication with but the marketing pitch was unique and FREE so we can't complain (more on this next week when we actually talk). Our final team meeting was with Back30, a new marketing company, who pitched us a campaign plan and promotional pitch for the future. Very valuable information and was interesting to hear for us because we've never engaged with one before. It provided us with just some key terms and things to look for down the road while also showing us what exactly marketing teams can do for a business. Neither Joe or I majored in business or marketing so this was a new thing for us.
The final note i'll leave you with from the past week was the focus on setting up additional social media campaigns. I want to highlight this in the "today" section of this blog but we learned about the importance of being your own media company and marketing yourself on anything and everything! That being said we've set up a number of new social media platforms to secure the branding and push new avenues. Find us now on Twitter, Twitch, and finally YouTube! These are new platforms for us so we might not be posting on them all right away but it is our goal to eventually be pushing out content in some type of content calendar to each of these social media outlets. Now onto TODAY!
Today
I've been spending the beginning of my day each morning reading a book titled "The New Rules of Marketing & PR." It was written by David Meerman Scott and it highlights the importance of using social media, online video, mobile applications, blogs, news releases & viral marketing to reach buyers directly. This book as given me an inside look at conducting new ways to market unlike traditional advertisement such as tv or newspaper ads. The push in todays generation is everything social media, becoming a game changer to the web. A lot of the focus and strategy for our development as a business has come directly from this book, that is how i've provided you with in these blogs. Todays push has been entirely focused on the "Buyers Persona."
The book breaks down a buyers persona as a biography for a specific buyer in your business. This profile highlights a typical customer that might engage with your business, not just as a job description of that person but as a persona description. What that person hopes to achieve by your product, what they hope to learn form your product, what is most important to them as a customer? and what words characterize your customer into purchasing a product. Todays focus has been on the push of creating these ideal customer personas and highlighting the problems they are facing and how we can ultimately solve our customers problems. Remember the importance of not selling or pushing your product as we highlighted in last weeks blog. The importance is informing and educating.
Cheers to the Future
This section of the blog is probably my most favorite part. It allows me to look to the future and think of where I want our goals and objectives to be targeted while giving me a potential path to pave in achieving that said goal. I am able to write out this blog and almost visualize a strategy we want to take in just a weeks time. A week may not seem like a long time and i find many businesses look at what they want to accomplish in months or quarters. A week gives me real feedback and engagement that I find measurable in these blogs.
The next week is going to be focused on creating each customer persona as highlighted above. I want to think about our ideal customer and figure out ways to specifically help them. How can we solve their problems and how can we help them. This might not even be able to get me a sale or send a bag overseas but what this does allow us to achieve, is the customer engagement through our website and the satisfaction that we might be able to help a larger audience. At the end of the day that is our goal and that is our mission. So as they say all goals should be "S.M.A.R.T Goals" let me highlight the goal here.
"In one weeks time, American Butchers JERKi will create 5 target audience personas highlighting each audience as a way to find a problem and fix it while also providing informative value"
You heard it here first ladies and gentlemen. We have a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-bound goal. I will tell you this now as to lot leave you hanging next week, these target audiences will stay specific to the company and not be outlined in this blog. I will however, do my best to highlight things i've learned this week as i've created them and help provide you any valuable insight in potentially creating your own target audience personas. With that, I think i'll be signing off and leave you with the exert.
For more information on the importance of creating a buyer persona and a link to the featured image on this blog, check out the following link: here!
They do a great job highlighting the importance of customer profile and how to build your ideal personas.
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The Founder's Log is designed to be a behind the scenes of American Butchers JERKi. With that, I encourage you to ask any questions you might have regarding our product or about the business! Hope to catch you next week, Same time?
-Calvin