If you are not asking this question in terms of the market you serve each day then you are already falling behind.Â
Business used to move at a speed where copying someone else’s success model (product, marketing technique or business model) was enough to buy you years of success…
If you were good enough at reading your market and copying your competition, you could be one of the market players and fill your bank account with some decent profits.
Those days are now gone…copycats are a dying breed!
Consumers are now moving too fast…they have the tools at their fingertips (Twitter, Facebook, Google, Discussion Groups, etc…) to know exactly what’s out there and find the “next” advancement in whatever they are looking for.
As information marketers, what this means is that we can still look to the past and find out what is selling well today or what sold yesterday, but we should ONLY be using this information to understand the underlying BIG PICTURE outcome our customers are looking for.
From there, we want to advance the information available to them.
Advancing the information could mean…
- Delivery it to them in a new, personalized or advanced way…teach an online, interactive course, put together a home-study course, combine a video tutorial with your ebook, etc…
- Advance the key solution concepts. As info-preneurs we help people move from A to Z – we want to look for a uniqueness to our methods that will help improve the liklihood that your customer will achieve their desired outcome
- We want to out-market the competition by using new technologies, new methods of getting the word out (Ex. moving to Pintrest as a method of connecting with your market…followed by the next social networking platforms)
- Out “know” and Out “hustle” your competition. So many of your competitors will be stuck in the same mode of working inefficiently and being half-committed to their business…you want to be more efficient and 110% committed to take the lead in this fast-paced consumer world
- Execute, execute, execute…there never was very much room for those who held back fearing mistakes, there is even less room today. You have an idea, go execute – learn from the results, refine your next step and execute again.Â
Looking at what is working now and what has worked in the past is important to understand what drives your market, but each day we have to be asking What’s Next...the answers to this question are what will really drive our profits this year and next.
