How To Market Something That’s Been Done A Million Times Before?
People ask me with alarming regularity variations on the same question. It’s, “how do I sell something when other people are already doing it?”
This is something that I’ve had to deal with many times with various freelance clients and it’s something that I give basically the same answer to all the time.
Let’s say you’re starting a dropship store or you’re reselling stuff from China. Maybe you’re starting the next SEO company, doing Facebook advertising or whatever.
It doesn’t really matter what you do, but there are tons of people who want to get started in business with something easy, repeatable and low on the research required scale. Whatever your plan is, if you feel like you don’t have a unique angle for your business and that everyone can do it, this topic’s for you.
I say, “Feel you haven’t got a unique angle” because here is the reality: you need a unique angle.
You Need A Unique Angle
Whatever your business idea, I want you to sit down now and ask yourself this question;
“Why will anyone buy from me as opposed to my competition?”
I know that when I was younger, this was a question I hated being asked. Whether it was because I believed that people would come to me because I offered a good service, because I thought I was technically more competent than my competitors, or because I thought “why wouldn’t people buy from me?”
The question always annoyed me because I didn’t have a straight answer. You need a very simple and very straight answer to this question.
That will become your angle.
Your angle doesn’t have to be the most terrifying thing in the world or the most complicated.
Angles Can Be Very Simple
Angles can be very simple. There are multibillion dollar supermarket giants who compete on price. You can switch on your television right now and see supermarket chains competing over who has the cheapest lettuce on the stores’ shelves. Plenty of other companies compete on price.
Other companies compete on luxury, which works in exactly the same way but obviously the triggers and the clientele are reversed. Luxury products are available only to a few people; there are limited editions and they charge a lot more. If you are not part of the target market, forget it. (At least that’s how luxury marketing should work. A lot of companies get this wrong.)
Start with very simple things when you’re deciding your angle.
Who Are You?
A lot of guys and girls want to build businesses where they extract themselves from the equation. This is a very good idea in the long term. You want to build a business where you don’t have to be all-hands-on-deck twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
However, your identity is tied to your business. Your success as a business person is dependent on you recognising your strengths and playing to them, and recognising your weaknesses and avoiding them.
Plenty of guys want to be the adventurer digital nomad type entrepreneur who makes money through video advertising and travel blogging and all those things. However, many of those guys are not going to succeed. They are not adventurous enough. They are not blessed with funds to travel the world endlessly. Some of them aren’t even interesting enough. They will go broke.
Many people think that they can start a little niche online store selling widgets of all kinds and that people will buy from an anonymous site that is built on a template from ThemeForest and has no contact information or anything. It’s not going to happen.
Again, if you’re workshy, if you are not part of the target market you are trying to sell to, or if you are overly concerned with being anonymous, your business will suffer.
It will also suffer in terms of marketing as well because people buy from a person. They buy because of a relationship. This is unavoidable.
As a general rule, your angle can be very simple if you include your identity within it.
I know of people who literally brand themselves as the “Product X” guy. They put their videos together, demonstrate that they know all about one product in extreme detail, and then sell the product. They have authority, they build a relationship with the reader/customer, and they demonstrate that they can provide customer support and all those good things. That is authentic, simple brand building and it is all you need to do as far as creating an angle was concerned.
There Is Always An Angle
There are companies that have been in business for hundreds of years and there are companies that have been in business for longer than America has been a country, or for longer than trains have existed. If you were to take a pessimistic view of those businesses, you’d think “how could they still be in business, and how could anyone create a competing business?”
There is always a new angle to target. There are new markets opening all the time, there are new ways that people get into a target market and the interest in target markets grows and falls over time.
Five years ago, there weren’t any people interested in fidget spinners. They are a new craze, but in essence all they are is a cheap, plastic kid’s toy. Now, God only knows the market for kid’s toys is saturated. Yet you got a simple design, simple manufacture and so multiple companies have sprung up overnight to take advantage of that.
Five years ago there weren’t any “digital native” kids buying products online. Now there are. There are children who will soon be adults who are part of this new generation that have grown up without ever knowing the world without social media and the Internet general.
That generation requires a whole different set of marketing, and is a whole different niche, to say, the seventy-year-old’s who are using the Internet for first time in their lives today. Both of those are huge new target markets, and both of them are interacting with the commerce marketplace in ways we’ve never seen before.
What Does That Mean For Your Business?
There’s no excuse for not finding a unique angle. It doesn’t matter what you are selling, who you are targeting, the angle is probably obvious and staring you in the face.
Even something completely saturated like WordPress themes for twenty-five-year-old men who want to start e-commerce businesses has new angles available to you every day.
Something as simple as a WordPress update means that there are new features which have never been explored before. Something as simple as a new interface with a plug-in can mean your site looks and works entirely differently.
I wrote a while ago about Amazon Web services which is a completely disruptive technology. Very few people are ahead of the game on that one, but it has the potential to erase hosting costs, integrate videos for webinars or video blogging, make email marketing costs next to non-existent and many other things besides. These are just examples I’m coming up with from the top of my head. If you dig deeper, or go in to a particular market, then the angles are obvious.
Final Thoughts
You should not be thinking “my business is the same as all the others!” because that is lazy and you are going to fail. Instead, and this is a two-step solution, what you need to do is think:
· Who am I and what am I doing differently?
· What are the newest opportunities in my niche that nobody is exploring?
Those two things are going to provide you with more angles than you could ever target. If you can’t think of enough angles to target, then you need to research more, because they are there.
Even for angles that aren’t unique, you are unique. How you deal with the changes in your business market will be different to how anyone else would adapt to changes.
For instance, I’ve given you the example of Amazon Web Services. If I were running a web design business, I could look at the AWS page and think of ways that the services could help my business. If I were to ask another web designer, he’d probably think of different uses of technology, or a different concerned with the technology.
So creating a unique angle is about what your business does differently, and finding the obvious.
So, to finally summarise, your ability to brand around unique angles is dependent on two things:
· Firstly, it’s about finding the obvious. What are the key issues for your niche, and how are they changing over time?
· The second part is thinking about you or your business, and how you deal and adapt with those changes.
That should erase all of your targeting problems.