Business owners usually want to know how to judge their market position before they make public moves to reinforce it. Beyond confirming it is within your current capabilities and that it has a credible opposite, how can you tell if you’ve come up with a good position?
When I talk to the owners of service businesses, I often encounter the same struggle. Phrases like, “I just need to get the meeting,” or “I can make the sale, I just need some more leads or opportunities,” or, “If I can just get some face-to-face time with the executive, I can close the deal.”
Isn’t it often true that when someone—whether a government official or a friend—is too eager to tell us what should have been assumed, we doubt them?
The long-term benefits of focusing on a clear, reinforceable position are obvious: We get to do work we love, that we’re the best at, for clients who appreciate our value and are happy to pay profitable prices for it.
Our immediate measure of the quality of our marketing is whether we are enjoying the process or not. We need to enjoy it, which means we need to feel confident in what we’re doing, embrace joy and celebrate our achievements, and set a measured, sustainable pace.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said that “action creates its own courage.” Moving forward makes continuing on easier. Taking action builds confidence, and getting what we want is its own motivation.
People reportedly spend about an hour every week just deciding what to watch on Netflix. And more than two hours every week deciding what to eat. And that was before the pandemic.
This is the first in a short series on moving your service business up-market through marketing strategy. If the Ever Given container ship fiasco taught us anything, it’s that getting stuck is a lot easier than getting unstuck.
“In advertising”—and I would add, in all of marketing—“there is also a first principle.” “To attract someone’s attention.”
The fact is, the more we say, the less our audience will hear. Every time we feel like we should add another offer, another product, another message, or another focus to our marketing, we should try to pause.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong had a decision to make. The Lunar Module’s onboard computer was guiding the craft toward a crater’s edge, and a field of boulders “the size of Volkswagens,” according to biographer James R. Hansen.
Abraham Lincoln told the story of an “automaton chess player,” a complex machine that, all the way back in the early 1800s, could beat human players at the game.
