Myth #6: It Worked Before. It’ll Work Again This Time
If a great product sits in the woods and no one knows it’s there, does it make a sound? No matter how good your product or service is, no one will buy if if they don’t know it exists, and if they don’t understand and believe that it can meet their needs. Customers and prospects need to find out about your offerings and they need to learn about them in the right framework. They need to understand that your offerings can meet their needs–when and where they need those needs met.
The world is changing. We’re deluged with an explosion of new media and messages, a changing economy and a brand new set of business assumptions. In just the last several years, we’ve seen an incredible boom market, a strong bear market, the impact of unfathomable terrorist attacks and a new type of economic recovery.
One thing is certain. The business conditions your customers are facing and the strategies they must deploy to be successful in their environments have changed dramatically. Shouldn’t you also revisit your assumptions about reaching your customers?
Start by taking a close look at the top issues that keep your customers awake at night. How are these different from last year? What can you foresee as future challenges, and how can you help address these? Next, look over your shoulder to see what new innovative solutions are available from your competitors. How will you get differentiate your offerings from theirs? More importantly, how will you get your message heard above the noise level? Finally, take an honest look at your own marketing strategy. What’s working that you should definitely keep doing, and what are you doing mainly because it’s always been done that way before? Where could you use a new, innovative approach? How can you take a tried and true strategy and evolve it to be more effective in the future?
To quote Will Rogers, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”
