The Marketing Edge - Secret For Business Success

[Kevin Dervin]

[This post was inspired by the marketing lessons I learned from reading The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson]

What side of the Marketing Edge is your business on?

What's the difference between a successful small business and a struggling one? It’s not as big of a difference as you might think.

You can take two small businesses that by all appearances are exactly the same. They provide the exact same service with the same level of experience and professionalism. Yet one business is very successful and the other struggles to keep the doors open.

So what is the difference? What makes one business grow and prosper while the other struggles to attract clients consistently? What is one business able to do that the other is not?

It is not a matter of marketing intelligence. It is not a matter of skill, talent, or luck either. Every business has pretty much the same opportunity to create their level of success. It's just that some take the opportunity and some do not.

The opportunity to create business success takes more than marketing "know how." If that's all there was, then everyone should be realizing tremendous success. There’s a never ending supply of marketing “know how” available through books, marketing audios, web sites, seminars, workshops, etc.

The Marketing Edge is what separates most successful small businesses from struggling ones. It is your willingness to take regular and consistent action on doing the things, particularly the simple things that you can be doing. That is what successful businesses do. They do the marketing actions that they can do consistently.

Successful businesses do what unsuccessful businesses do not do. It's not necessarily that they're applying bigger and better marketing ideas. Instead it usually comes down to the fact that they're taking action consistently.

You see here is the deal when you're talking about an edge. Every edge has two sides to it. On one side of the edge is "doing". But, on the other side is "not doing." And the struggling businesses tend to not do the things they could be doing.

Applying the marketing edge means consistently doing the things that you can be doing. The marketing "know how" is all out there for you to absorb. It's taking action on the simple things that you can over time that will produce the results you seek.

• It's taking the time and effort to actually define your target market.
• It's taking the time and effort to clarify and articulate your uniqueness and differentiation in the marketplace.
• It's taking the time to create a core marketing message that actually grabs attention.
• It's creating a simple process to ask for referrals from every new client.

Be willing to take regular and consistent action on doing the things you can do. It's not more marketing "know how", but getting into action. That's the marketing edge and the key to greater marketing success in your business.

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