Position Your Business

If you've been blaming the economy for a slump in your business, perhaps you've overlooked opportunities you have to grow and change.  Below is the latest Advertising & Marketing eLetter by my friend, mentor and greatly respected colleague, Jerry Bellune.  He makes some great points, and this is well worth the read!  Enjoy!

Position your business
for greater success
 

Whatever business, industry or practice you’re in, I trust you won’t make the mistake of many of my colleagues.

Unless you’ve been living on a remote Pacific atoll, you are aware that the newspaper industry is in trouble.

Many colleagues strapped on the hairshirt of truth and prematurely reported the decline and fall of newspapers.

What were they thinking? Honesty is one thing. Masochism and self-flagellation are quite something else.

Radio and TV are losing money and viewers as fast as newspapers,

But do you see TV, cable and radio executives boasting about it?

How many blank or peeling billboards do you see?

But is the outdoor industry singing "Woe is us"? No way.

You can bet the horse-and-buggy crowd didn’t proclaim their demise when Henry Ford came along.

All that aside, I'm sold on the future of news publishing with one simple proviso:

We must accept that we are not in the newspaper business.

We are in the . . . drum roll . . . advertising, news and information marketing business.

What newspapers have to market is advertising, news and information that people want and will pay for.

When we embrace technology’s better, faster, cheaper ways to deliver products, we will survive . . . and thrive.

We must reposition ourselves as publishers and distributors of products people want and will buy.

"Positioning is the battle for the mind," Jack Trout wrote in "The New Positioning" almost 10 years ago.

I recommend highly you read Trout’s book.

It is NOT outdated. In fact, it is prophetic.

What he reports has not changed dramatically since he wrote it.

I also recommend Dan Kennedy’s "No B.S. Direct Marketing in the New Economy".

What they say can mean the difference in your business despite competition and the economy.

The problems business owners and professional practitioners create for themselves are:

1. With success comes rapid expansion into products and services they can’t profitably deliver.

Look at what Xerox did to itself by disasterously entering into computer manufacturing, a business it did not understand?

2. Mergers and acquisitions into fields and industries they don’t understand or know how to compete in.

You can name a dozen successful industries that ignored the limitation of their expertise and know-how.

3. They cluster their products in the middle price or low price range where competition is most intense.

General Motors is an example. Except for Cadillac, their brands are in the mid-price range. They compete with themselves.

4. To control costs they impose a uniformity upon their separate products.

Take a look at the U.S.-made sedan today.
Except for the Hummer, don’t they all look pretty much alike?

So what lessons can we take from this? How can this help us?

1. Don’t confuse our clients and prospects.

They expect us to deliver excellent products and services in narrow niches.
We should not strive to become all things to all consumers.
They become suspicious when we dramatically widen our array of products and services.

2. Adopt a laser-like focus on the market and client needs and wants.

We must stay in touch with clients and gain their input on how to impove our products and services.

3. Focus on what we do best and forget the rest.

It’s less risky, efficient and cheaper to market a few successful concepts than 50.

3. Stay abreast of the opportunities technology will give us to compete and satisfy clients’ needs.

"The best way to peer into the future is to watch small companies," Jack Trout says.
IBM should have had its eyes on Apple and the MacIntosh instead of antiquated hardware.

4. Don’t become consumed with your own creativity and let your ego run away with you.

We must align our products and services with what our clients want and their dependence on us.

5. Look for and enter into partnerships with other providers . . . even competitors.

For example, we have a successful partnership with our competitors to offer advertising as a package.

This has meant thousands of dollars in business to all of us.

Now we are looking for partners in the advertising and marketing industries.

We need partners to be able to offer our advertisers one-stop shopping for their marketing needs.

6. Embrace and prepare for change . . . because it’s coming and it’s relentless.

That’s what happened to some of our colleagues in newspaper publishing.

They embraced online news delivery but misread how they could do it profitably.

They could not free their thinking in terms of their old model where advertising pays the bills.

They still give their expensive news and other content away free, thinking advertising will pay for it.

It may one day. So far it hasn’t.

The Wall Street Journal was smart from the get-go. Theyoffered paid online subscriptions for their content.

After we lost 1,500 subscribers, we bit the bullet and started charging for ours.

Did this drive down our traffic? No. People want local news and will go where they can get it.

In fact, we sell print and online subscriptions as a package.

Believe me, it works.

What products and services can you offer online at your web site?

How can you drive the maximum amount of traffic from clients and prospects to your site?

How can you use technology to sell more products and services once you drive them there?

Next: Start your own prospect attraction program.

For a free copy of our "Special Report: 7 Strategies to Cut Your Costs Without Cutting Your Throat in a Sluggish Economy", email me at JerryBellune@yahoo.com

Just put "Special Report" in the subject line so I won’t think it’s spam.

To discuss my "cost cutting" and "profit building" workshops for your clients, please let me know.