I often hear people talk about “market leadership”, wanting to be “the market leader” or even to “dominate my marketplace”. Many business and marketing seminars hype their audiences up with these and similar terms.
But these concepts cause the opposite type of think to what actually brings success.
You see, in order to succeed in business, online or offline, we must let the market lead us, rather than trying to lead the market. There is one of us or maybe even 50 of us in the business, but the marketplace, particularly online, is endless. There’s no way we could lead it anywhere.
What we need to do is pay attention to where the market is headed and position ourselves there as a good supplier that delivers products and services to the heart of what the market wants and needs.
In other words, we need to follow our clients’ lead. Market leadership is not about us leading the market, but about the market leading our online marketing strategy.
Who needs to dominate and endless market anyway?
One of the best sayings I’ve every heard about online marketing was this:
Instead of dragging your message across the land to your audience, why not just drop it into the river?
Basically, what this says is that instead of focusing on what you have to offer, packaging it beautifully, putting up signs about it, calling out to anyone who will listen to tell them about it and putting up a great website to sell it, you’d be better off finding out what people need and tailoring the perfect product or service for that.
They will then ignore the packaging, come up with messages of their own, spread the word to all their friends and sell your product or service for you.
Where your website is concerned, by the way, if you create it so it looks beautiful to you and your product or service is featured brightly and with hyped up statements, you may very well sell nothing.
On the other hand, if you take the time to study you clients first and build a site that they will like, a site that uses their language, pictures of people like them and their favuorite way of using a site, they will carry you again to online sales and online profits.
So trust in your market’s leadership and let your clients lead you to success.
Gal