What do your customers want? How is your natural product helping them? And who exactly are these customers? Before delving into marketing, branding expert Dan Burak suggests entrepreneurs assess their brand and understand core customers. Here are three steps from the managing director at Boulder, Colorado-based Sterling-Rice Group (SRG) that every brand needs to take on the road to success.

Know your target.

Do you really know your brand inside and out? To gain true customer insight and understand expectations, answer questions such as:

From the field: Burak worked with Kashi to determine if it should launch a frozen food line. Originally, Kashi execs didn’t think  healthy eaters would buy frozen food products, so SRG helped them visit customers to test this hypothesis. The researchers were surprised by what they found in kitchen freezers: lots of frozen food. The insight they gained: Even healthy eaters need fast, easy food options. Because Kashi reps spent time with customers and really got to know them, the company successfully launched healthy, frozen, food options.

Have you inspected your customers’ kitchens recently?

Understand the uniqueness of your offering.

Gain a deep understanding of what differentiates your product. If there’s nothing special, why would consumers spend money on it? To develop and understand your unique value proposition, do these exercises:

From the field: SRG worked with Dave’s Killer Bread to understand how unique and safe the company is from competition. The answer: pretty darn secure. What Dave’s Killer Bread has is a great story, with an edge. Dave is an ex-convict and the entire brand is built around second chances (1 in 3 employees has a criminal background). Even when Dave had a recent run-in with the law, the Killer Bread community rallied around him and the company.

What’s your brand story and differentiator?

Make a sufficient, focused marketing investment.

Once you’ve assessed your product and the reasons it’s amazing, you might think that everyone, everywhere should know about it. Ground yourself and focus marketing efforts on a core target audience. As Burak explains, don’t spread messaging too thin by “whispering to a broad audience instead of shouting to a single, very targeted group.” Focus geographically, demographically or even psychographically.

From the field: SO Delicious Dairy Free excels at targeted marketing. The well-known dairy-free food and beverage company caters to a passionate community and makes it its business to know what websites dairy-free customers visit and which blogs they read. This knowledge allows the company to effectively target its marketing effort by focusing communication to core consumers.

Are you whispering or shouting to your customers?

To learn more from Dan Burak about branding, online surveys, strategic distribution and budgets, log in to the NEXT Accelerator to watch the whole on-demand webinar. When you do, you’ll also gain free access to the entire suite of NEXT Accelerator educational tools and resources.