Fletch Sneak Peak: When the Market Lines Up to Your Business
We are working with one of the largest pest control chemical distribution companies in the U.S. Given the ZIKA scare, companies like Terminix are now stocking up on mosquito repellants products, and our client is positioned to be a market leader.
Becoming a market leader is not something that happens overnight, it takes careful planning and hard work.
Here are some steps to take to position your company as a leader in the field:
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You Don’t Have to be First
In order to be a leader, you don’t have to be the first out of the gate. You do have to be the first to deliver what’s called a product-market fit. Find out what your competitors are doing and do it better. Not convinced? Intuit was not the first company to introduce a finance tool with Quicken, but they watched what others were doing and adapted. The same applies to Apple. The iPod was introduced in 2001, close to 10 years after MP3 players were introduced (Wikipedia).
Or find a narrower market to be a part of and become a leader in that segment. Find your niche.
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Be a Purple Cow
Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, states that being a leader boils down simply to having a stand-out product.
Apple, Google and even Facebook fit this model. When Facebook was launched, only one key thing set it apart from Myspace – privacy settings. People wanted to control who could view their information and profile. Google became the search engine leader not because it was first, but because it employed a user-friendly interface and had a new approach to ranking search results. Apple chose to focus on design and experience.
Can your company develop a purple cow?
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Satisfy Your Customers
Remember that customers have the power to make companies, or even break them, thanks in no small part to social media and technology.
A 2013 survey found that 90% of people said that positive reviews influence their buying decisions, and negative reviews influence 86% of buyers.
Don’t be so quick to be different or become a leader that you compromise quality.
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Marketing = Investment
Now that you’ve learned how to become a purple cow, you want to make sure that your company is employing smart and creative marketing tactics to build brand awareness. How else will people know to look for your product?
Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 content marketing survey found that B2C marketers use at least 11 different content marketing strategies ranging from social media to blogs. And that at least seven social-media platforms are used.
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Move Quickly and be Ready
Now that you’ve learned how to become a leader and a purple cow, the best way to become a market leader is to be ready and move quickly when something occurs.
For example:
- After 9-11, the market responded by looking for experts on personal safety. We suddenly saw a spike in sales of companies that sold gas masks, parachutes and other personal emergency stuff. The companies that positioned themselves as experts experienced the highest sales.
- In the wake of identity theft, data breaches and credit card fraud, EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) banded together to develop credit cards equipped with computer chips and the technology to authenticate chip-card transactions. “These new and improved cards are being deployed to improve payment security, making it more difficult for fraudsters to successfully counterfeit cards,” says Julie Conroy, research director for retail banking at Aite Group, a financial industry research company. (creditcards.com)
Market Leader: How will your company move quickly? How will you rise to the occasion and position yourself as an industry leader? Will you be ready with a solution for the next problem that is on the horizon?
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