The #1 Rea­son Why Your Mar­ket­ing Fails

To­day I’m invit­ing you to re-think your busi­ness strategy.

I’m not of­fer­ing a small change, but a rad­i­cal one. One that you are likely to dis­miss at first sight.

But what if a changed strat­egy would give you eas­ier ac­cess to clients, more re­fer­rals, and higher profits?

Sounds in­ter­est­ing?

Then give your­self a chance to eval­u­ate the ef­fects of a new strat­egy by think­ing it through and col­lect­ing ideas.

3 Strate­gies Demonstrated

These strate­gies work for every busi­ness. As an ex­am­ple I’ll ex­plain them for a web agency.

Imag­ine, for a mo­ment, you owned a web agency.

• Mon­day, a plumber calls who needs a new web site. You’re happy to get a new client.
• Tues­day, a real es­tate agent calls who needs to up­date his ex­ist­ing web site for bet­ter SEO. Happy!
• Wednes­day, a den­tist asks to have Google Maps in­te­grated into his site. Uh, you never did that be­fore. But you’ll fig­ure it out. It’s ac­tu­ally easy to do.
• Thurs­day, a roof­ing sup­plier sends an in­quiry for a site where vis­i­tors can search for roofers by zip search. Wow, that’s re­ally some­thing you have no clue about. But you’re a web de­sign com­pany, so you’ll fig­ure it out.
• Fri­day, re­search­ing avail­able ‘zip search’ so­lu­tions you find that there aren’t any. At least none that’ll work out of the box. You’re get­ting nervous.

This is demon­strat­ing the prob­lem of try­ing to do every­thing for everyone.

It’s the mar­ket­ing strat­egy most busi­nesses use. As long as it’s some­what in their area of ex­per­tise, they will of­fer every ser­vice to every pos­si­ble client un­der the sun.

The prob­lems are obvious:

1. You’re con­stantly work­ing on solv­ing prob­lems in dif­fer­ent ar­eas. It’s stressful.
2. You mar­ket­ing lacks mag­netic at­trac­tion be­cause you’re a me-too business.
3. You of­fer the same stuff every­one of­fers to the same peo­ple every­one is go­ing after.
4. You don’t have any com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage. In­stead you have lots of com­pe­ti­tion, of­ten beat­ing you.

A Change Of Mind, A Change Of Strategy

Now imag­ine, while mak­ing the den­tist and the roofers happy, it oc­curs to you that the Google-maps-thingy and the zip-thing are re­lated. Both are about busi­ness location.

And lo­cal mar­ket­ing is a huge trend. One that’s sure to last years to come.

So you fo­cus on cre­at­ing a new so­lu­tion for lo­cal search on web sites.

• A few months later your so­lu­tion is bet­ter than any­thing else on the market.
• Soon you’re the go to per­son for busi­nesses who have zip based search as a cen­tral part of their biz model.
• The more you work with them, the more you learn about how to make your so­lu­tion even bet­ter.  It’s be­com­ing harder and harder for com­peti­tors to win against you in this spe­cific area.
• The bet­ter your so­lu­tion gets, the bet­ter known and rec­om­mended you are as the go-to-person.

By spe­cial­iz­ing on solv­ing a spe­cific prob­lem you’re be­com­ing a mar­ket leader in a tightly de­fined niche.

What if you fo­cused on a spe­cific industry?

Jep, for­get about zip-search, and imag­ine you’d fo­cus on real es­tate agents.

What would happen?

• You would soon have bet­ter so­lu­tions for web sites for real es­tate agents than most other agencies.
• You would soon know more about the needs of real es­tate agents than any­one else.

Re­mem­ber, your com­peti­tors are split­ting up their time be­tween den­tists, butch­ers, roofers, lawyers, etc. etc.

By spe­cial­iz­ing on a spe­cific in­dus­try you’ll get the same ad­van­tages you’ve seen above about spe­cial­iz­ing on solv­ing a spe­cific prob­lem.

The 3 Strate­gies At A Glance

Strat­egy 1: Of­fer every­thing for every­one. The me-too busi­ness model.

Strat­egy 2: Fo­cus on solv­ing a spe­cific prob­lem and cre­at­ing the best so­lu­tion. Of­fer that so­lu­tion across all industries.

Strat­egy 3: Fo­cus on a spe­cific in­dus­try, and of­fer the com­plete range of so­lu­tions for this industry.

For ex­treme spe­cial­iza­tion you could even com­bine strat­egy 2 and 3.

The Fear Barrier

Busi­nesses are afraid to spe­cial­ize be­cause they’re afraid to send cus­tomers away.

• Think about the agency spe­cial­ized on real es­tate agents. They’ll have to send away the roofers, lawyers, den­tists, etc.

As long as you think about the busi­ness you’ll have to send away, you’re not un­der­stand­ing the ad­van­tages of a spe­cial­iza­tion strategy.

You’ll only un­der­stand it when you think through in de­tail what would hap­pen with those cus­tomers within your spe­cial­iza­tion.

If you’re interested,

• start mak­ing notes and col­lect­ing ideas.
• Start talk­ing with peo­ple about it.

It’ll take a few weeks un­til the pieces fall together.

Then you can de­cide what to do, or what not to do.