Want to supercharge your business efforts? Identify and target your fringe audience. Study your market and piggy-back on the competition. Why spend your time and money paying for market research and developing a “new product” when you can assimilate the expertise of your competitors and piggy-back on existing products or services? In many markets, people are slow to change buying behavior. The public tends to have greater confidence in known providers of goods or services than new “faces”. They are wary of new concepts. Here are 3 suggestions for a “newbie” entrepreneur who wants to supercharge the start of their online business:
1. Seek out a competitive market niche and identify your key competition. It is easier to sell “stuff” where there are large crowds. Seek out a niche market where there is lots of competition; where AdSense keywords are expensive! Only the best “business people” survive in the “pay per click” world. If people are bidding up the price of a search engine keyword, they must be making money.
2. Understand how your competition markets their “offerings”. Target the most successful products and services that “feed the fringe” of your competition’s marketing plan. These “benefit boundaries” are identified by studying the themes and keywords your competition uses when they sell their “stuff”. As some associated keywords grow less frequent in their marketing message, an outline emerges that is a descriptive boundary where product or service benefits offered by your competition disappear. Market your product or service to this to smaller target audience; the boundary or “fringe” portion of your competitors’ marketing plans.
3. Piggy-back your “offering” on the successful products of more experienced, better positioned entrepreneurs. By offering increment improvements to an already established and field-tested “brand” with a collateral or specialty product or service, you spend less time developing a niche market and more time establishing your own business “authority”. It is easier to design an “add-on” for a popular web-browser than it is to build a “new web-browser interface with special features”. Re-inventing the wheel is appealing to one’s ego but oftentimes is a strategic mistake.
As you develop “fringe” products or services, you build brand recognition, credibility, marketing confidence, and knowledge of your niche marketplace. Build brand recognition and reputation BEFORE you introduce that trend-changing “killer app” or commit your resources to a full-frontal assault on the competition! Experience in the marketplace is rarely mentioned by gurus but it has always been, and, will remain, a fundamental part of all successful business ventures.