Smart entrepreneurs leverage visibility to dominate their niche, their competition, and create explosive sales and profitability. Entrepreneurs who do not understand the pros and cons of visibility will be left in the dust by those that do.
Entrepreneurial Leverage: How to Transform Your Business Using The Power and The Paradox of Visibility
Smart entrepreneurs leverage visibility to dominate their niche, their competition, and create explosive sales and profitability. Entrepreneurs who do not understand the pros and cons of visibility will be left in the dust by those that do.
Any business attempting to compete in the Age of the Internet and the Age of Speed has to confront the major issue of remaining invisible or becoming visible. Those companies that understand the power of attention marketing or visibility can dominate their industry.
To understand attention marketing you need to understand the Paradox of Visibility:
1. The traditional advertising formula AIDA calls for getting the customer’s attention, interest, desire and action.
2. Because of the overwhelming amount of images and advertising, the traditional mass marketing advertising method is definitely declining. Traditional mass marketing is aimed at a broad audience with average products and controls the media with large advertising budgets.
3. Today, the movement is towards niche marketing where you are attempting to target specific customers or clients who have very specific needs, wants, and desires for which they are looking for answers and solutions.
4. In the traditional advertising model the main focus was on the last step in the AIDA formula which was getting the potential customer to take action and buy the product.
5. In the new direct marketing model the focus is on getting a potential customer or client’s attention.
6. To get attention, you as a company or as a person need to become visible.
7. From your past conditioning you have been taught that being invisible means conforming or being like others. In fact, the people who didn’t conform, the geeks and the socially inept where made the brunt of jokes.
8. To succeed in today’s world of the Internet, Speed and Time Poverty you must find a way to get your customer or client’s attention. To do this you need to become visible.
9. Just becoming visible is not enough. There are key elements to visibility that need to be in place for you to stand out.
10. The stand out variables are:
a. Have a big huge idea
b. Be an expert in a certain niche
c. Develop a unique selling proposition or USP that takes into account your big huge idea and your unique talents and expertise.
d. Come up with a unique story or slant that has an element of controversy.
e. Develop products and services which deliver on your big huge idea and expertise so that you answer and/or solve what your customer is seeking
from transacting with you and your company.
f. Your entire company and any of its communications are all aligned with your unique selling proposition.
g. Find traditional and non traditional channels of distribution for your products and services.
h. Create alliances and joint ventures so that you can trade a percentage of profits for your marketing partner’s list, credibility, and
experience.
i. Evaluate all feedback from the market before launching. Test every aspect of your product or service from your headlines to your USP to your
offer and guarantee’s.
11.Even though visibility can create the breakthrough marketing and sales that you are looking to achieve the real paradox is that the answer to being visible lies in the invisible:
a. Most entrepreneurs and their companies are limited by the invisible or hidden liabilities.
b. The greatest invisible liability is fear. The greatest challenge is the fear of being a non-conformist or an outsider.
c. The most significant inventions such as the telephone, electricity, the radio, the TV, the Internet, the computer and the car were all
created by outsiders who risked being visible when the marketplace wanted to drive them back into invisibility.
12. The irony of the marketplace is that the outsider becomes the success and ultimately the insider. The so called conformists or insiders are really the ones that end up being mediocre and ultimately on the outside.
Here are the steps that you should take so that you understand the paradox of visibility and how it can enhance, limit, or ultimately destroy your business:
1. You need to assess what strengths or skills your company possess that no one else in the market has.
2. You should evaluate all the ways that you are copying your competition.
3. You should develop a strategy that would make your competition irrelevant. This means developing a niche category, a sub-category that
differentiates you enough from your competition that you have created your own unique positioning. This positions you to be viewed
differently, i.e., to be visible with a real benefit to your customers or client’s.
4. Evaluate the invisible or the hidden liabilities in yourself and in your company. Typically, these hidden liabilities are the confusion fears
messes and shadows. Look around your office, you will find piles of documents and products that haven’t been touched or dusted off in years.
There are people who you have gotten used to but who serve no real value.
5. Until you can make yourself and your company more visible you will be working for your hidden liabilities.
6. The hidden liabilities ultimately are reflected as growing financial liabilities, decreased sales and/or decreasing cash flow.
7. Hidden liabilities cause a lack of trust which increases your cost and decreases the speed at which you can achieve your personal and
business goals.
In sum, the paradox of visibility reveals that there are both positive and negative aspects to visibility and invisibility. Your ability to sort out where visibility can benefit you and where invisibility can limit you will be a determining factor in your building your company’s, sales, cash flow, and ultimate net worth.
http://www.askdestiny.com is dedicated to showing companies how to attract money and build money through creating strategic visibility and positioning. AskDestiny® believes that significant cash flow and wealth is created by using entrepreneurial leverage, i.e., a certain mindset plus strategic leverage techniques.