How To Exactly Present Your Business To Your Market?
Here's a Surprising Source of Information for You
"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter -- it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."
- Mark Twain, in a letter to author George Bainton
Sooner or later, you have to set yourself apart.
This is true whether you are you, yourself, and thou; you are a business; or you are method-acting as the client or business you are writing copy for.
The tightrope you walk is just about the biggest upside/downside risk that exists:
● Get your unique identity in the marketplace right (stay on the tightrope all the way to the other side), and huge rewards are yours;
● Miss it by a hair (fall off the tightrope) and you're condemned to mediocrity in the marketplace -- at best -- or miserable failure at worst.
So how do you get your pinpoint identity identified and stay on that elusive tightrope?
There are many ways, but the easiest and most reliable is paying attention to the questions, comments, kudos and complaints of your customers.
This might sound like a big "duh" to you -- and it would be, except for the fact that almost nobody does it.
Here are some examples of those who have:
● My friend, mentor and collaborator Jay Conrad Levinson wrote the world's best-selling series of books in his field, Guerrilla Marketing. Jay spent a dozen years teaching an extension course at the University of California on this very subject before he wrote the first book. Do students who need to apply what you teach in the real world -- in their businesses, where the difference between success and failure ripples through many aspects of their lives -- do these students provide feedback to help you pinpoint your marketing identity?
Hello???
● My San Francisco Bay Area neighbor John Gray, who also created an empire with Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, based his initial book on years of couples counseling and seminars. I bet he heard plenty of questions, comments, kudos and complaints. To his credit, he listened and acted on them.
● Another nearby phenomenon, Richard Bolles, originally started the job-seeking bestseller What Color Is Your Parachute? as a church course. If things worked, he heard about them. If they didn't, I'll just bet people weren't too shy pointing that out. Now look at him.
I can almost hear what you're saying.
"Great. Best-selling authors. But how about a real person like me?"
OK. First, these are all real people who took an idea, put it out there, got feedback, and ran with it.
Check out businesses that have nothing to do with book publishing and you'll find there is a pattern. Fred Smith and FedEx. Barry Gordy and Motown. H & R Block and taxes. Ray Kroc and Mickey-D's.
Second, if your customers don't know, who does? Think about it. The fastest way a client can get a forlorn sigh out of me is to say, "I just know that people need this. I can't understand why nobody's buying it."
Of course, there is a way to find out why: Ask them.
Postioning, branding, developing your Unique Selling Proposition, crafting your marketing identity -- whatever you want to call it -- is not an instant process. Nor is it a pure science.
But there are some reliable steps you can take to narrow the choices and all but insure that sooner or later, you'll make your way across that tightrope. Maybe not the first time.
When you do, though, your day in the sun has just begun.
David Garfinkel
Publisher, World Copywriting Newsletter
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