Do you sometimes get the feeling that your ideas and effort are being overlooked?
When it comes time for promotions, perks, or in the case of your own business – the competition – you feel like screaming “what about me!”
It happens to all of us in our careers, relationships and life in general – when it comes to your position inside your company or your position within your marketplace as a business, the tendency is to blame our personal shortcomings or to blame those around us when neither factor is really the cause.
The degree to which we are “visible” to those around us has everything to do with how much perceived value we offer to them.
In a job, your perceived value is measured by your upper management…your direct boss and those above him or her. To really become more visible you need to understand exactly what it is they value the most (which means understanding their ultimate goals, dreams, desires, aspirations and of course the frustrations they have that you can help them overcome).
So, when it comes to becoming more visible in a corporate setting – often the perceived value of your upper management team is of most importance, even though great lip service is paid to “customer focus” and the like. Ideally you can combine the perceived value of your company’s customers with those of your management team and can satisfy both in your bid to become more visible, but more often than not, there is a disconnect between the private objectives of your upper management and those of your customer.
It is this discontinuity that often leads to frustration, disillusionment and lack of productivity within medium to large corporations…and for you personally, you must decide if you want to play the game of trying to satisfy multiple end players (your boss, your boss’ boss, your end customers).
Now, when it comes to your own (or your company’s) visibility in a marketplace – suddenly what becomes very important is your measure of perceived value to your marketplace.
What makes up perceived value?
1. How well your market feels you are like them or fully understand them at a deep, emotional level. You need to be perceived as truly and honestly being on their side in the struggle to achieve their desires and dreams
2. You have a product or service that will help them get closer to their end objective – better may mean different, more clearly explained, additional levels of support or simply more effective as presented
3. That you can be trusted in terms of both personal image, reciprocity – but also by extrinsic measures such as quantitative proof, social proof, word-of-mouth and so on.
Certainly, what leads to massive results for many of our full-time online marketers within InfoMarketer’sZone is designing (or re-aligning in the case of existing products or businesses) their entire business and marketing around these 3 principles – without fail making these changes has a dramatic impact on profits
By enhancing your level of discourse with your marketplace focusing on building your attachment, unique position in the marketplace and trust you will quickly become highly visible in your marketplace leaving those feelings of being overlooked or being invisible behind forever.
