Marketing

Surely this title must have captured your attention.  Everyone wants to know the big secret to business success, right?  Hundreds of books have been written on this subject.  While there are many different ideas of what the ‘big secret’ may be… I agree with a handful of scholars who have come up with one simple and clear solution:

The Big Secret To Business Success is:  Do what you competitors don’t do, won’t do, or wouldn’t even think of doing.

That’s it!

Very simple and very clear.  Obviously, in order to do what your competitors don’t do, won’t do, or wouldn’t even think of doing, you must be in a position to know your market extremely well.  Market feedback data is extremely important.  In order to know what your market niche really wants, you must be able to essentially ‘get inside their head’.  As the famous copywriter Gary Halbert once said, “you must enter the conversation already going on inside their head.”  More true words have never been spoken.

Certainly, understanding your market’s needs, wants, and desires is critical.  There are many ways that this can be gathered:  online research, evaluations of targeted forums, focus groups, surveys, industry-gathered information, books targeted on the subject, asking questions of everyone you know you fits your target market mold, etc.  The ways to gather this valuable information is endless.  The critical component is that to become a master of your business, you really must become a master of understanding your prospect.

Only after you have a thorough understanding of who your ideal prospect is, what their truly want, how they prefer to consume information, and how they buy, only then can you begin to position your value delivery in a way that can become most enticing to them.  By having this firm understanding, you are already at an advantage over any of your competitors.

It does help to study what your competitors are doing to draw the attention and sales of their customers.  It is invaluable to closely monitor and research what they do.  However, I want to be extremely clear — this is simply an exercise for you to get an idea what others are doing.  It is NOT to identically mimic what they have done to reach their success.  If you try to do this, you will most certainly not be successful.  You are your own person, you are your own brand.  The only way you will be successful is by capitalizing on your own unique strengths and passions.  It is by studying their processes and ‘best practices’ that will be most valuable to you.

Inevitably, by studying the sales and marketing processes of your competitors, you will get a clear idea of what could work best for you.  This is exactly how smart marketers build their businesses.  Why start from ground zero and blindly build an entirely new path, totally unaware of what has worked in the past and what hasn’t?  That is a foolish way to begin.  No, you’re smarter than that.  Take advantage of the available information out there, from people who have forged the way before you.  Learn from their mistakes as best you can.  You will be a much better business person as a result.

So, once you have gathered a critical  mass of information, you can sit back and reflect on what it all means to you.  You can assess this data and discern how your best strengths and passions can be optimized given this new perspective you now have.  With this insight, you can design your strategy.  Then proceed to build your successful business by doing what others don’t do, won’t do, or wouldn’t think of doing!