Each day I work with people that are struggling or feel they have outright failed in their journey to start and grow their own successful business.
They begin to doubt their ability to be a successful entrepreneur.
They question their market.
Confusion sets in because they don’t know why they are failing to see results…is it their ability to connect with their market, their product or something else?
Almost as common are those that come to us with under-whelming results, their businesses limping along without sign of a true breakout anywhere to be seen.
For these people, the result is even worse than the person who has given up because they continue to bang their head against the wall with little hope or chance of success because they simply do not get why their results are limited.
The answer is actually pretty simple in most cases…it is that “X” factor that makes you, your business and your products exponentially different from your competition.
In fact, the “X” factor is so powerful it is as if you have moved from being a commercial engine and climbed right into the mind of your marketplace…attaching yourself to their emotional psyche as if being implanted there since birth.
What is the “X” factor and more important, how do you cultivate it for you and your business?
Problem You Solve Is Driven From Customer Wants
Most entrepreneurs try to impose their personality, their message and their products onto others, that approach rarely works and never goes viral.
In truth, there are those wants that customers know they have today (they want to lose weight, overcome a health challenge, solve an immediate problem with their social life or relationship) and those wants that they don’t yet know they have (to stream music digitally as the Ipod did for us or to share our voice through streaming video as Periscope, Facebook Live and other platforms are bringing to us)
The consistent pattern though is that the problem or desire you are filling is in the mind of the people in your marketplace (whether they know it or not).
A major part of finding your “X” factor is getting inside the head, pysche, and emotional state of your prospects so that you can then craft your unique value targeting exactly what is already playing in their brain.
How You Solve The Problem Is Driven From Your Proven System
The second major part of your “X” factor is what you create, position and then prove that a) gives hope to your marketplace in terms of fulfilling the wants/desires you uncovered in step #1 and b) provides actionable steps (a system) that you can test and improve and that your market can APPLY directly to their situation in attempting to achieve their desired outcome.
I always keep a very clear picture in my mind of a supremely frustrated, anxious and desperate subset of my target market who have been completely beaten-down, on their last nerve…and it is to that subset of the market I will give both HOPE (to start with ) and the SOLUTION (which will deliver the result they are looking for).
When you focus on this two-step system of Hope and Solution, you can’t go wrong in terms of simplifying the powerful solution that make up the second part of your “X” factor.
This will be the position that you will carve out in the marketplace that will differentiate you from your competition and take you to the top of your market.
Your Plan To Get Attention
The final part of your “X” factor after you have a clear sense for your market, their emotional triggers and you have crafted your Hope and Solution system is to determine how you will get attention and engagement with your audience.
It is no longer enough to just throw advertising out to your marketplace, increasingly content becomes the vehicle through which you capture attention, interest and engage your audience – content marketing becomes critical to both organic and inorganic marketing.
Developing your attention plan starts with understanding your voice, your personality, your character toward your marketplace.
What will your story be?
How will you connect with your top prospects in the marketplace?
Can you combine entertainment, instruction and engagement with your content?
These are all critical steps to becoming a master at carving out your own attention capture marketing campaign.
When you combine these 3 aspects to your business you will have crafted your own “X” factor…which leads me to one final point.
All of entrepreneurs that you follow, look up to and that mentor you may SEEM to have naturally arrived at a place where they just HAD this magic “X” factor…the truth in 99% of the cases is that they figured it out along the way (most likely from someone above them) and crafted their own plan no matter how natural it may look to you today.
That’s exactly where you can be in a very short period of time. With focus on these 3 success factors combined with hard work and some extra help along the way (which you can get through InfoMarketer’sZone for example) you will be well on your way to being confident, successful and high-achieving very soon.
