Whether you’re starting a brand or creating a new product or service from scratch, or you’ve had one for a while and you know it needs to be reworked, this episode is for you. These 4 strategies will help you build and launch a successful brand.
Welcome to the show notes! Remember, this is a brief summary from the How to Market Your Horse Business podcast. You'll want to listen to the entire episode for all the good stuff!
Recently, I was at an American Horse Publications conference as a guest on their podcast panel. While there, I sat in on a session led by Jim Jennings, Editor Emeritus at The American Quarter Horse Journal as he shared about completely transforming a print publication in what many are saying is uncertain times for print.
If you don’t know, The American Quarter Horse Journal was about 70 years old and in need of a change. But, deciding how they’d make the change, what the goal of the change was, and how it would happen was quite the process for the association.
Thankfully, it’s been a very successful transformation for them, so they were able to share about what worked well along the way.
And, as he shared, I couldn’t help but think about you, my horse business owner friends.
As he was sharing about their experience, how they made decisions, and what the outcome was, I was taking notes of the lessons and takeaways I saw in their journey that I knew you could learn from as well.
These are not sessions notes from Jim’s presentation, rather my own personal takeaways that any horse business owner who is launching or re-launching a brand should keep in mind.
4 Keys to a Successful Brand Launch
Be willing to start over from scratch. The AQHA had been doing The Journal the same way for years and years, so change wasn’t necessarily going to be easy. But, they knew that the way they’d been doing things wasn’t working well anymore. So, they made the decision to start with a blank slate and see it as an opportunity to serve more of their members.
Listen to your audience. Using a member survey as well as existing date they had on hand, they were able to look at their audience interests as a whole to be sure they were meeting them where they were at. Resisting the temptation to cover every single discipline involved in the AQHA in every single issue, they looked at the largest groups represented and narrowed it down from there.
Learn from others you admire. They were wise to look outside of the equine industry to see what other publications were doing that was working well for them. From that, they identified one that they felt was successful in their own right and even built a relationship with the team there so they could really learn from them on a deeper level. If you’re building a brand, being willing to look outside of your niche, circle, and even industry for world-class examples is key to pushing yourself to excellence. (Dani Powers talked about in episode #32 here.)
Stay in your lane. They didn’t start out by looking at what other equine publications were doing at the time so that they could just copy it. They stayed focus on serving their members to the best of their ability. While it’s great to learn from others, don’t fall into the temptation to comparing your product, service or business to someone else in a similar space as you. Own your calling. Own your unique passions and expertise. That’s going to fuel everything else as you build or rebuild your brand.
Of course, you'll want to listen to the full episode to dig into each strategy and discover how you can apply each one to your business!
Links Mentioned In This Episode
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