Yesterday, we started talking about the 10 laws of Influence and how you can use them to become a leader within your industry.

But, as most crucial business-building instruction goes, these are laws that can’t all be covered in just one single blog post. For that reason, we’ll close out the week with the remaining five Laws of Influence and send you into the weekend with more knowledge than you can shake a stick (or weekend margarita) at.

6. Law of Expectancy: As a business owner, people will develop their own assumptions and expectations of you pretty much right away. It is your job to meet those expectations as best as you can. Keep in mind, that the expectations people have about you are usually based on your track record and the way you present your brand. As long as your advertising is honest and you aren’t promising people the moon, you should always be able to meet these expectations.

7. Law of Consistency: This one should be obvious. If you deliver excellence to one customer, you need to provide that same level of excellence to every customer. But that’s not all…in terms of consistency, u need to also remain constant and unchanging in your brand message and views. Failure to do so will lead the public to believe that you are indecisive and go back on your word.

8. Law of Association: There’s a reason that big companies pay celebrities millions of dollars to appear in their ads. Seeing a celebrity is more than just a focal point for the ad—it also gives the viewer something to associate with. Hey, I know him!  While small businesses can’t really reach for these sorts of stars, you can use small networks online and offline.

If a person’s friend has dealt with you and was pleased, then that friend could tell their friends and those friends can tell their friends. And on and on. Even these minor types of brand association among friends can help you achieve success in regards to the law of association.

9. Law of Conformity: This law tells us that it’s okay to be a follower…to c certain extent. We want to conform to the expectations of others. We want to jump through whatever hops people throw up in front of us to make sure we get their business.

10.  Law of Power: This is perhaps the easiest of the laws to understand. You’ll be perceived a powerful if you are an expert in your industry or can offer people goods or services that others can’t. Be careful, though; power can be real or simply perceived. Don’t get fooled into thinking your sense of power is authentic when it’s really not.

Now…go forth and practice implementing these laws into your branding practices.

One of the most common ways your brand will likely win over a new client is through the way you influence others. There are many different ways to influence someone, especially when it comes to branding and advertising. But the main thing you need to concern yourself with is making sure you are abiding by the 10 Laws of Influence.

I know…I know…laws. Yuck. And 10 Laws seem like a whole lot. Given that, we’ve provided all ten of the laws below and only expanded upon the ones that can truly apply to growing your business.

Today, we’ll discuss the first five laws. No sense in bombarding you with too much information all at once. Besides, if you read through these and find that you need to adjust, you’re not going to have time to fully investigate all ten of them.

1.  Law of Reciprocity: If a customer is giving you their divided attention and time, the best way you can reciprocate is through great customer service and wowing them with a finished product or service.

2. Law of Time: Always be aware of the fact that your customers have schedules to keep, too. Show them how much you value their business by delivering the goods on time or, better yet, ahead of schedule.

3. Law of Friends: This one can be tricky for anyone, as it concerns treating every customer like a friend. This is just common sense in the business world, so let’s move on…

4. Law of Contrast: You can really make this one work for you if you can confidently contrast what you can provide against what your competitors can provide and come out looking like gold. You should do this every chance you get.

5. Law of Scarcity: This one is simple—be able to offer customers something that they aren’t going to find anywhere else. This can be as simple as exceptional customer service or as important as the rarity of the services or products you provide.

How do you fair on these five items? If you have these bases covered for the most part, chances are that you have a potentially influential brand on your hands. Tune in tomorrow to see if you have the other five laws nailed down as well.

You could be the best business in your industry within a wide geographical region. You could even be rocking out success after success online and taking the internet by storm with the sheer awesomeness of your business.

But how long will it last? It really all comes down to how your market yourself. And really, when you boil it all down, there is one surefire golden ticket for positioning yourself to always succeed at online marketing: a unique selling point.

Think really hard about this for a minute. Do you have a unique selling position? Do you have something that differentiates you from your competition? What is it about your brand that should make customers choose you over any of your competitors?

If you can’t answer any of these questions fairly easy, you could be in trouble.

Dig deep into your brand—maybe even into your personality and interests—to see what really separates you from the pack. A few things to look for:

Are you legitimately funny? No, drunk-funny-at-the-office-party humor doesn’t count. But if you have a personality that tends to be humorous mad makes people laugh, you should be using it at the core your marketing.

Are you helping the community? You should be vocal about any strides you are taking to better the environment, particularly when it comes to improving your own community.

Are You Experienced? If you’ve been working within your industry for longer than your competition or even if you have previously worked for some big names, use this as part of your marketing platform. Show your target audience every possible way that you are better than your competition and don’t pull any punches in doing so.

Based on these three factors, you should at least be able to find a few clues as to what your “unique factor” is. Polish it up and insert it into your branding message and your marketing to take full advantage of it.

It should be obvious to any small business owner that the difference between online and offline marketing approaches are pretty significant. Still, some older business owners tend to resort back to older tactics that they were trained on—offline tactics that may work in a small segmented group but have no hope of reaching the masses the way online marketing approaches can.

So let’s boil it down here…what are some of the most basic ways that online and offline marketing are different from one another?

Cost: This is an area where online marketing has a clear advantage. Older advertising methods involve print distribution, graphic design, maybe even packaging and direct mail costs. This can get quite expensive and you aren’t even sure it’s going to work as well as you’re hoping.

Online marketing, on the other hand, is incredibly affordable when it is done right. In most cases, you can do it yourself. There are some approaches that might cost a little cash but you have more control over these avenues than you would with offline marketing.

Analytics: In the world of online marketing, you can study and scrutinize everything. If you want to know how many people on the East Coast visited your site on the 4^th of July between 12 a.m. and 6 p.m. you can do it within a few minutes. Being able to study details like this can help you further plan for your advertising strategies.

With offline marketing, you’ll be lucky to even learn how many people your marketing efforts reached.

Customer Targeting: With offline marketing, the best “targeting” you can hope to do is sending mass mails to certain neighborhoods that you feel might best fit your target demographic. Beyond this, you can just hope one of your fliers reaches the right set of hands.

Of course, with online marketing, you can use social media tools to target your audience with pretty scary precision. From location to age range, you can hunt down your prime customers and market to them directly.

How about you? Have we missed anything? Alternatively, are there any offline marketing practices you still use that work?

It’s no secret that many businesses are flat out using social media wrong. Some just don’t have a clue what they’re doing while others get their accounts and then let then never really use them.

What many small business owners don’t quite understand tis that social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are more than just a way to reach out to current customers—they can also be great tools for finding new clients.

Sure, you can just scroll through the followers lists of those that are in your same industry. But that can take forever. Instead, using the Search feature on both Twitter and Facebook are great ways to find new customers. Both platforms offer search features that let you easily discover what people are currently talking about and what sorts of topics are trending.

As a small business owner, this is a simplified way to find out the wants and needs of your customer base. More than that, you can also get real answers and opinions form them. As if you didn’t already know, most people are incredibly transparent and vocal on social media. If you want to see how people are truly feeling about something, you need to hit up social media.

And all of this honesty is easily searchable through this search feature. And by performing such a search, you can find out which people are in need of what you have to offer.

So you can go in and search for keywords or things people would share before they need your product or service. And best of all, you can narrow your search down by geographic area.

This is just another way that social media has helped businesses and their clients connect in more ways than ever before. Beyond the awesome ability to engage with existing customers, it is also helping to connect perfect matches in terms of business/client relationships.

What are some other ways you’ve been able to get social media to work for you?

In the same way that we can all learn from big business success stories, there is just as much to be learned in their failures as well. And thanks to social media, many of those failures are very easy for the public to follow and take notes on.

On Twitter alone, there have been some pretty atrocious mistakes made by big business. Let’s see what we can learn from some of the biggest Twitter fails from big businesses.

McDonald’s Apparently Doesn’t Understand Hashtags

The lesson to this story is to fully understand how to use a tool before you implement it. They wanted to have people share their great stories about McDonald’s by urging users to use the hashtag #McDStories. This backfired pretty quickly as people starting sharing stories about food poisoning and terrible customer service. In the end, there were far more negative stories than positive ones.

Chrysler’s Social Media Guy Confuses Chrysler Account With Personal Account

The header alone should give you an idea what is to come.  This has actually happened many times over the years and employees have certainly had their hands slapped on occasion. But none have been as damaging as this one that was actually posted on Chrysler’s Twitter feed:  “I find it ironic that Detroit is known as the motor city and yet not one here knows how to fucking drive.” Yikes.

Bing Gets Insensitive When Promoting Its Twitter Account

While it was certainly noble of Bing to raise money for earthquake victims in Japan, thousands of people found it in bad taste that they were only offering the money based on re-tweets. They would pledge $1 for every re-tweet they got for their post. Essentially, people saw this as Bing using the deaths of thousands to promote their business.

Have you seen any cringe-worthy Twitter posts from big businesses? What were they and what can small business owners take away from such grave mistakes?

Yesterday, we started talking about ways to shape your brand’s voice in a way that will better reach your target audience. We learned that by learning to anticipate what they’d want from your band, you can get an edge on the competition.

There are other ways to learn how to alter your brand’s voice, though. It comes down to asking yourself a few questions. This isn’t so much a simple analyzing of your brand, but a way to better understand how you can reach your own goals through your audience.

For instance, ask yourself some of the following questions whenever you feel that the voice of your brand isn’t connecting with your audience in the way it should.

Now, spend a bit of time answering the following questions:

• How do you want your brand to make people feel? What emotion should rise up in them when they think of your brand?
• What is one popular brand that you’d like to immolate? What are some traits of that brand that you admire as a business owner? Alternatively, what are some traits you admire about them as a consumer? What can you do to make sure you get to that point with your business?
• What are three words that describe your brand? Take those three words and explain to yourself why those words fit your brand. If you’re successful in this, you may have just found primary keywords to drop into slogans and taglines….words that will hopefully resonate with your target audience.
• What are a few brand “voices” that irritate you? Why do they irritate you? Take this answer and make sure your own business is not inadvertently mimicking those traits.

By looking at your own brand in this kind of light, you are almost able to view yourself from the place of your audience. If any concerns or major questions come up when you ask yourself these things, these are items that you should really scrutinize. They could be one of the reasons your brand’s voice isn’t as popular with your audience as you’d like.