Are you reaching your market with a voice of authority or are you at the mercy of a market that is not what you hoped for?
I find that many companies fail to bring a sense of authority to their marketing. It is time to improve that right now. Let us consider where marketing authority comes from, and why so many businesses are lacking it.
This world is made up of people … flawed people … every last one of them. Businesses are made up of one or more of these flawed people, so can you really expect perfection to come from that? Of course not, and those flaws often come through in the same ways in business as they do in the flawed people’s personal psychology. This makes perfect sense, right?
Lack of authority is a weakness for many people and it comes with insecurity, which often comes from lack of proper information. Fear is a strong emotion, and one that can wreck your hopes of bringing authority to your marketing. With all of the right facts and figures to draw from, it starts to look like science, and that makes it harder to deny. It also makes it much easier to have confidence and to market with authority!
How do we begin to repair that lack of authority and reach your market with confidence? I want to offer you some ideas.
Define Your Authority
If you are marketing pizza, and people tell you it is the best pizza, they offer you authority. Take it and use it! Stop being afraid. If enough people say that your pizza is the best in town, all of the sudden, guess what … it is! Testimony is a hugely important factor in court trials … even the court trials that get people hanged by the neck until dead. Shouldn’t your customers’ testimony be enough to give you authority, too?
Sales Volume Does Not Equal Authority
It is really easy for companies (flawed people) to perceive their authority to be diminished when sales are slumping. It begins a downward spiral. I will stick with pizza for this example. If you are marketing pizza and a Pizza Hut or other chain moves in and captures a piece of your market, does that mean your pizza is not still as good as it was? Sometimes this is the case, but as an after-effect, and not as the cause.
If you have good pizza to market, be sure to market it with the same authority that it deserves, and not based on the mood you awakened to on a given day. It is really easy to get this wrong, but a common and very inappropriate response to the marketplace. Remember that only because Pizza Hut sells a lot more pizza than you do it does not mean they take authority away from your brand.
Uphold your Authority
If you convey authority, there is an inherent responsibility to uphold that authority. I believe it is easy for people to forget all of the things that give them authority in their marketplace. This is especially true when their authority is questioned. Tragically, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it is questioned from the inside.
You can see this all around you, if you look for it. Just consider how many companies you can find that beg for business instead of taking the time and effort to become an authority, and project that authority in their marketing.
I see this problem more often in smaller companies, but weak efforts and asking to be right are problems of companies in all sizes. It seems that it often comes with an uncertainty of how others perceive a business, rather than having a rock solid position that the company is better than the competition, and knowing why.
Are You an Authority?
Maybe you are already an authority in your field but you just don’t know why, or how to prove it. If you are not an authority, maybe it is your time to get there. The odds are pretty good that you are an authority at something. Come on … there has to be something. Start with that “something” and grow it! Lastly, don’t neglect to push your marketing “Go” button!
SEO and Potato Chip Vertical MarketingHere are some delicious tater chips for your enjoyment. Many SEO / Internet marketing and non-SEO people alike took notice of my recent article on how to sell SEO (and compare SEO). It is a pretty important topic for anybody hoping to do more business using the Internet. So, I thought I would write a piece on how to market SEO, but as before, this is not just for the SEO and Internet marketing folks. Whether you sell SEO services, fishing lures, or potato chips, this article can help you, too.
Don’t get confused just yet if you are not in the fields of sales or marketing. This should help to get your thoughts in the right place, too.
Sales and Marketing Are Not The Same!
I want to get this point clear first. Sales and marketing are so often intertwined that some people just look at them as the same thing. Please pay close attention. Sales and Marketing are not the same thing!
People in the fields of sales and marketing often realize this, but even they will get this mixed up a lot of times. Sure, the two disciplines of selling and marketing both have the similar focus of driving more dollars into your pocket with super-fantastic return on investment (you know, ROI). If you seek the definitions in many places, you may even find these two terms to be very similar. The truth is that they are different … they are vertical, but not the same. I can tell you that many salespeople know a similar amount about marketing analytics as their marketing counterpart knows about being bitten by that dog that answered the door on the last sales call.
Some people have called me a great salesman. They clearly missed something, because I actually kind of stink as a salesman in some ways. I give them the proof they want, but I am not about to grovel to the lowest bidder … that is just not my style. If I have to ask somebody to buy what I do, I consider it a failure in my marketing. This is because if the marketing is done right, the sale should be nothing but the fun part. Really, if somebody wants a big sales pitch, I just tell them to get a pen handy so I can have them call some of my customers … or even better, read more of my blog.
So argue if you must (that is why I allow your comments), but let us look at this as Internet sales being when somebody clicks your “buy” button or rings your phone, while marketing involves the sequence of events that led up to that wonderful (huge beam of light coming from the sky and angels singing) click that made your cash register ding.
Vertical Market? Guard your Wallet!
I do not like those industry terms people toss around just to sound smart or to throw the customer off long enough to grab their wallet. I have made fun of this in the past, because it is often designed to obscure the message just enough to distract a smart and hard working person who just doesn’t have a reason to know everything about cytology, acetaldehyde dehydrogenase, or how to bring more customers to their business.
If you are not a marketing person, you may not understand a vertical market compared to a horizontal market, or a skazmodic market. OK, I made that last one (skazmodic) up just for fun. You are not expected to know everything about marketing. Seriously, nobody knows everything about marketing, and the majority of the world’s population has another discipline to focus on. Should a dentist know as much about marketing as a marketer knows about dentistry? Not at all, but I can tell you that either of them is just as important in whether you eat or not. Without good marketing, most of what you know in this world would look a whole lot different.
So you may ask, what is a vertical market? Let me break the term “vertical market” down for you. If you are selling fishing lures, it is a vertical of fishing supplies, which is a vertical of outdoor sports. Other vertical markets are camping supplies, and hunting, but fishing lures will probably never be a part of aircraft repair (and if so, please choose a different airline).
Wikipedia includes the description of a vertical market as follows:
“The activities of participants within any given vertical market are typically similar in that they aim at solving the same or similar problems. These markets are typically competitive, due to the overlapping focuses of the products and services that are provided to the customers.”
Love Your Vertical Market … I Do!
In the SEO profession or in any market, I suggest falling in love with your vertical market. Get to know this market and it will not take very long to realize that your vertical market is chock full of mutually-beneficial assets. With this considered I use SEO as my example. Surely you can see how SEO is a vertical of website design, web development, web hosting, technology, marketing, advertising, and more. These are markets for the SEO professional to consider as their friends. Yes, vertical markets are your friends! Do not mistake this, because if you do it will hurt your bottom line whether you sell SEO / Internet marketing, fishing lures, or potato chips.
Any marketer worth the water they are made of should be highly aware of the vertical markets of their clients. Sadly for marketers, as so many marketers seem to be fighting for the same dollars, they forget about their own vertical market. For example, I am a search engine optimizer (SEO), but if you think that means I do not work very closely with other SEO, you must think I am totally stupid. These folks are my closest allies, and often my best clients. That is because as with any industry, we each have specific skills and when we put those skills together, we get a whole lot more accomplished. Digg.com is really not a huge piece of my own personal work, but you can bet that I know a whole bunch of people to who leverage it massively. On the other hand, I have somewhat of a whacky way of producing content with massive appeal. I mean, I produce really great results with things I come up with after a gallon of coffee and a pack of cigarettes. I do all of the things an SEO does. I create content, I am a programmer of about every known language, I have wicked skills with incoming link production, I am highly active in a squillion social media venues, I write for a good handful of blogs, and so many other things. So am I out to grab up the whole market by myself? Heck no! Not at all, because the more meat on the bone for those friendly competitors, the more food is on my table, too.
This, my friends, is vertical marketing at its best. Never think you are so amazing that you should try to do it all by yourself. The best SEO people know where their marketing talent lies, just the way the heart surgeon knows that he doesn’t want to perform vasectomies.
Horizontal Market … Oh, Beautiful Sunrise!
If the sun rises with your horizontal market, there are still some pretty huge things to consider. If you are trying to sell your product or service to anybody and everybody, you do so at your own demise. Trust me … no wait … I hate that term, because it implies that I have been lying to you all along. Don’t trust me … just go find out for yourself how miserably you will fail at trying to reach the hundreds of millions of people who desperately need what you offer if you can just tell them all about it. Let me know how that went after you spend hundreds of squillions of dollars on that campaign. Just be sure you set a couple squillion aside for when you are ready to do it the right way.
Consider the massive potential customer base of a potato chip company. They must have a really easy marketing plan. All they have to do is tell everybody who eats potato chips how good their product is, right? Wrong! If this was the case, you would probably never see a potato chip company advertising that their product is fat-free, in earth-friendly packaging, cheesier than the rest, low salt, in a nice can so the chips don’t get broken, or any of the other things that segment their market based on targeted desires.
To the SEO / Internet marketing people reading this: Let’s think about that vertical market and start working together.
To the rest of you: Call me right now so I can get my vertical market to talking about targeted reasons that your potato chips taste so amazing.
Wow, did you see that coming? I have something that anybody with something to market needs, but I am calling my vertical market to action. It is fancy how that works, isn’t it?
I do not support the mentality of a free-for-all “bailout” as has been so commonly sought these days. This comes down to the old “if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day” mentality. Whether a loan is appropriate, I do not know. I wish I had the right information and know-how to form a fact-based opinion on this. Maybe I am not that smart, and maybe it is above my pay scale. Read on and I will give you some opinion and insight to my opinion. Don’t get me wrong. I struggle right along witht the best of them. I lost millions of dollars in 2008.
I learned a long time ago that I have been able to perform much better with the understanding that when I fail to achieve my requirement of sustaining an income, there is nobody around to save me. I believe this to be among the most valuable business lessons I ever learned.
In my youth, I had parents with some money. They could have bailed me out and made life a lot easier for me on many occasions. I think this was in the back of my mind for a while as I grew my first couple companies. I never let those thoughts take over, but when I was 17 years old and off on my own and running a marketing company along with three to four jobs to support it, I suppose it was easier to think that if I failed, there would always be a warm bed and something to eat back at Mom and Dad’s place.
I have failed like GM, only worse. I remember some really hard times when I was all alone with nothing in the cupboard. I am not here to pluck your heart strings, so I will not get too far into the details, but I will say that there were times when I lost a lot of weight without trying.
I was not lucky, and I did not have huge windfalls. I took on as many as five jobs at a time and I developed my product better. This is the part that GM neglected. Jimmy Carter begged for cutting dependency on overseas oil 30 years ago, but GM had enough money back then to ignore the market. Over the following decades, there have been many indications of GM weakness, but they did not hear the call. It is not just about gasoline … it is about many other business and marketing strategies that have hurt them. They made a bed over decades, and allowed ignorance and arrogance lead them.
I believe that it is time for GM to do what I did in the face of catastrophic failure … work harder and work smarter. If their plans and ideas have failed, there is a reason.
As I write this, I would like to note that just in the past three years I have purchased two Hummer H2, three Corvettes, and one Escalade for a total of about $325,000. This makes the contents of my garage predominently GM in origin. I am certain some of you readers have sent some dollars their way, too. Yes, I am a fan of GM products, but what did they do with all of that money?
Author Mark Murnahan is the Chairman and CEO of YourNew.com, Inc. and provides SEO consulting services to companies and non-profit organizations. Mark Murnahan may be reached toll free at 866-A-Web-Guy (*REDACTED DUE TO AGING WEBSITE*) for consultation.
