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The Undeniable Value Of Differentiation
With all the people offering products and services online, what sets yours apart from the crowd? You can't argue this, to succeed you need to differentiate yourself. Online businesses come and go every day and about 90% fail. The reasons online businesses fail vary from situation to situation, here's a few:
All of the above reasons are valid and one of the most common reasons the product offering itself fails, is because the niche market that the business owner is marketing in is semi-saturated and the marketer had no "differentiator". A differentiator is anything that makes your unique selling proposition differ from any other by the benefits it delivers to the user. Those benefits need to be itemized in the sales copy to make sure the prospect will understand what makes the offering specific to his/her needs. A differentiator could simply be a different angle or viewpoint on some problem or product not currently realized by anyone else. How many ebooks have been written about Internet marketing? Hundreds if not thousands...the ones that make money have easily identifiable differentiators. A differentiator could be an added bonus to your product offering that the prospect can't get anywhere else. **Simple example: Suppose there are 2 products that a prospect is considering purchasing. * Product offering #1 offers a bonus that can be easily found on the Internet. * Product offering #2 offers a bonus that is exclusive to this offering itself that cannot be obtained anywhere else other than through this specific offering. If both products are equal in benefits to the user and have the same price, which product offering will the prospect choose? Of course, the prospect will choose Product #2 because of the "exclusivity" of the bonus. That exclusivity is a differentiator. A differentiator could be a discount on a service that no one else in your niche offers. A differentiator could simply be a promise to respond to customer inquiries within 24 hours. The trait that defines a truly effective differentiator is uniqueness. A differentiator could even be something as simple as the packaging of the sales process of a product or service itself. The packaging of a product includes graphics, format of delivery, appearance of web presence, etc. With regards to graphics, it is important to understand that people respond positively to visually pleasing graphics regardless of whether the end product of offering is actually affected by those graphics. Due to the average person's reluctance to buy online, the better things look, the better the prospect feels about moving forward with a purchase. In the online world, the prospect decides to purchase a product or service that is being marketed to them somewhat "virtually"...it is intangible to them until they buy. In this instance, a differentiator could be something as simple as slick graphic or choice of product format-pdf, exe, audio, RAM, MP3, etc. Before you can actually identify a truly effective differentiator for the product offering, a good amount of competitive intelligence needs to be done within the appropriate vertical niche market. Begin by reviewing all products and services that could be perceived as competitors in that niche market and define the differentiator from there. Whatever type of differentiator is chosen, it's vital to make certain the prospect clearly can understand the value of it by itemizing the benefits it brings to them. This is often overlooked and equates to unrealized sales. Be humble, work smart, keep it simple. Karl Augustine
About The Author Karl Augustine Author of "9 Deadly Mistakes To Avoid When Starting An Online Business". Publisher, "Starting Smart" bi-weekly ezine for new and semi-seasoned Internet marketers. http://startingsmart.9mistakes-online.com
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Selling to X marketers seems a much more difficult matter, for they don't use the same promotional tools, or at least not in the same extent. You will need to be somewhat of a Guru to start selling to those people! No doubt there's lots of common between those two branches. After all "the money is in the list", and the really big profits come from back-selling to people who have already bought from you, are satisfied, trust you and therefore are willing to buy from you more. This part of your business will be fairly similar, no matter if you send to marketers or non-marketers. There are also important differences of course. If it wasn't so our distinction would have little meaning and so the this article would have no meaning. But those differences are very visible. let's start with the language itself. If you are an N marketer and are successful, have a list of many thousands happy clients and so on -- then you will be soon called a "Guru". If, on the other hand, you're enormously successful in selling let's say 2' x 3' stainless-steel widgets (or ebooks on painless, well-fed & lazy slimming for that matter), which of course means that you are an X marketer, then, even if you have thousands of faithful clients with deep pockets, instinctively reaching for their credit Platinum cards whenever they hear your name... Well, you will of course be admired and envied, not to mention rich, but you won't be called a Guru! You might be called something like "a Great Salesman", which is not too bad of course, but it's not the same,is it? Another difference is that in N marketing you don't usually speak much about "niches". Selling memberships in credit based opt-in lists from some external point of view can be seen as much "niche marketing" as selling, let's say... polishing-wax for pet anacondas. Not true? But I personally have never heard this term used in this context. The most important differences are however in how X's and N's find their clients in the first place. Or sometimes how they let themselves to be found by them. This is not just a play with words, as search engines do exactly that -- they let people find your offer, don't they? There are of course many different types of search engines and similar systems ("normal" search engines, Pay Per Click search engines, directories etc.) but from the viewpoint of the potential client they basically do the same thing. And for the X type marketer they are nowadays one of the very few available means of promotion. Of course it's in large part because they are very powerful tools, providing you with highly targeted hits. If you're able to get high position on those search engines that really matter (and don't get bankrupt on the way, as they tend to be costly) you're almost there. Add some off-line promotion and you're on your way to become The Great Salesman. (Of course all other aspects of your business also must be done right.) If however you have decided that selling to sellers doesn't sound so absurd or pointless as it is often presented, then your options are much more numerous. Which is a good thing of course, though your competition also has the same options, so it's not an unmixed blessing. You must show your offer to marketers, so you need to show it where marketers are looking for offers. Why should they be looking? There are two main reasons. The first reason is that they simply are forced to look at your offers. How? Why? By whom? It's simply that many, if not most, of the methods of online promotion available today base on the principle reciprocality. Which in this context means: "I will take a look at yours if you agree to take a look at mine". Yes, of course, you don't always have to actually look at those offers. Often you can pay the service to show your offers to others and ignore theirs. Still, the people who will see your offer will be those who want to show theirs to the world. (Of course they don't necessarily need to be commercial offers, they can be sites devoted to hobbies, charities, private or group obsessions etc. But they all want to SHOW people something rather than SEE somebody else's offer.) Does anything positive result from this fact? And, to pose a much broader question: does the marketer trying to sell to sellers (N marketer in our terminology) have any advantages over the one trying to sell to non-marketers (X marketer)? My answers would be: YES and YES. Why? There are a few reasons. Some of them pretty trivial though not without importance, like the fact that marketer usually is much more exposed to contact with offers from online businesses. Marketer also has some needs that can possibly be satisfied by buying things online. Two sorts of needs in fact. Firstly, the same needs that everybody else has. Secondly, specific needs related to Internet marketing. By being rather more exposed to Internet ads and offers than an average person, more used to it and understanding it better, marketer would probably buy more things online. But the other type of needs is far more important here. Now for the second type of needs. Marketer will need marketing tools, resources, information... These things change and develop in an enormous pace. This is of course a truism but it's absolutely true. If you're able to quickly find new promotional tools, opportunities and/or information on Internet marketing, you will be in position to sell (more or less directly, we will not plunge here into discussing downlines and referrals) these information - for after all it is exactly information! - to other marketers. I personally see no reason why marketers should be less receptive to this sort of information than average person. In fact they are probably much more receptive, as they know perfectly well how much in their personal lives depends on those tools, information and opportunities. It is probably not true that whole 95% of people trying to earn online is not earning any money, but it must be obvious that most marketers still have not found their way of doing business online and there's no reason to believe that this situation ever radically changes. So it's not only information on new available services and opportunities that is sought after, and therefore sellable. In order to be successful in this sort of business, where there's so much available information, potential chances and risks, and so little road-signs that can be fully trusted, one needs to find their own way. Way of doing business online. Human life being as short as it is, with most often very limited finances (or you wouldn't spend your time in front of the monitor with uncertain result, would you?), people who still haven't found the right method and attained real success in online business will need a "recipe", or, perhaps better, a successful person to help them -- a teacher, or even perhaps what the Americans call "the mentor". (There's this old joke about some American children asking their parents to pay them tree-climbing lessons, but Internet marketing without qualified help is a dreary and very risky thing to do.) If you already are successful, then being the N marketer you have serious advantages. One of them, perhaps the most important, is that you only deal with one (big, that's true) issue: online marketing. As X marketer you would need to handle both marketing itself and the market niche you're in. This fact has some further interesting effects. For example this that by attaining success as N marketer you're becoming a Guru, or "almost a Guru", and this time I'm using this term without irony. What I mean is simply that you've become an accomplished expert in your field, which of course is Internet marketing. While if you attait even the biggest success in selling widgets online, you will be a "Great Expert In Selling Widgets Online". Which means that you will be generally seen as a crossing between "widgets expert" and "marketing expert". Nobody will be certain how good you are in any of those two parts of your activity! Effect of which will be that your success will be much harder to duplicate! You will have much more difficulty in teaching people your tested business methods. If they are not going to sell widgets like yourself, nobody can be completly sure it's the best marketing practice that you're teaching. And the widget niche may be too small to accomodate many new players. It will be a totally different matter with general marketing knowledge that you obtain practicing N marketing. One special advantage that N marketing has is something that I personally call "self-propelling money machines". So far they are not very numerous, at least those that work smoothly and bring tons of money without constant need for adjustments and pushing. But there are some, pretty successful. And their will be more. What are those self-propelling money machines? They are smart combination of promotional resources with selling. One could say that they are resources that sell themselves, automatically. The simpler form cosists of just two main parts: the Lead Generating Module (more often multiple Resources) that are constatly being sold by something that can be called the Selling Module to the leads they generate. One program that I remember that worked like that was CommisionSpyder. In another, more advanced, version is probably best represented by the new "Explosive" ebook by Stephanie L. Woolford, a very successful online marketer. (This ebook can be for example found on http://ebiz-guru.com.) Here one can three conceptual modules: the Lead Generating Module, the Selling Module, and an ebook (that can be either free or paid) that ignites the whole process. I'm not sure I managed to describe the idea clearly enough, but it can be understood when seen in action. Ebooks are supposed to be the almost-perfect business and in near future they may really become that. If we assume that this statement is true, we can say probably risk an opinion that X marketers have greater chance of publishing a competent book on topics related to their chosen niche they know lots about, while N marketers seem to have much greater chance of publishing purely marketing ebook, "viral" ebooks, and ebooks of the sort mentioned in previous paragraph included. 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