This is the first of a ten part tutorial.
It occurs to me that my accomplishments (and other entereprenuers lack thereof) are often due to basic sales savvy that is greatly lacking in many online marketing companies: Now that more and more business is conducted online, there is a gap between supply and demand that can only be filled with a knowledge of how and why people make decisions to buy, or not to buy as the case may be. This is the first in a ten part series:
Israel Rothman rule number one: pick a battle you can win:
When people ask us: are you web designers, web developers, SEO experts? We answer “no: that is a small part of what we do.”
These are all things that fall under the umbrella of what we do (Internet advertising), but each only plays a small part of a larger enterprize: making money online.
The first rule of any marketing campaign is to know the market, and your target customer: in our case, it is a messed up marketplace: with everybody and his brother claiming to be able to design websites and/or create placement and hits; yet most of them are what I call the “blind leading the blind”:
people who do not really know what they are talking about selling to people who do not really understand what they are buying, with no standards of pricing or performance.
For that reason, we take great care not to fit into any box that allows people to mistakenly categorize us: nobody who needs a consultant is willing to pay for one: so we sell the result of what we do (first page organic search engine placement), then do what we must to bring about that result; adding value along the way after the sale.
Since anybody else who can assure the same results with any consistency is exorbitantly expensive because of these very same problems with the market, we are positioned perfectly to offer a wanted and needed service to a starving market, packaged and delivered in a readily accepted bundling: which is the secret to my repeated success in marketing our services in a competitive marketplace.
The same methods can be applied to any business (and they are all online these days!):
2: Address the problems of the market (your intended customers) with the way you position yourself in that market (address the ‘pain’ of the customers, and provide a solution)
3. Say so.
Summary:
If you make the market itself more efficient: bridge the gap between supply and demand by removing roadblocks that are inherent in the process, you will always be positioned between your client’s needs and your solution in a very effective way. Stay tooned, 2-10 in this series will follow.
