Access to their attention. Access to their interest. Access to their trust. Access to their awareness and felt needs. Access to their willingness to engage and be vulnerable. Access to their purchasing commitment.
So, what do you do when consumer access has been partially or fully denied to you? One thing you don’t do is more of the same! Come on…
Many entrepreneurs and especially smaller, more tactically-minded business owners don’t really grasp what I stand for (by the way, what do you think YOUR business currently stands for in the mind of the marketplace?)
Let me clarify, in hopes that those of you who don’t “get” me may have a small epiphany.
First, recognize that the vast majority of information marketers out there teach “one-trick” or a “bundle-of-trick” pony-type tactics.
No disrespect intended here. But tactics can’t build a sustaining, ever-growing, rock-solid, meaningful, and enduring business. Tactics are a form of promotion. Tactics can produce significant, short-term profit. But sooner or later those promotions saturate, dry up, and become marginalized because far too many other entrepreneurs start using them.
To build a rock-solid, long-term, enduring, and valuable / sustainable business takes an integrated strategy, business model, constant awareness of marketplace needs, wants, the key perception of where you stand positioning-wise, niche-wise, and differentiation-wise.
You need a game plan capable of promoting proaction to the market and consumer shifts. You need constant awareness of direct and indirect competitor positions; alternative product or service positioning; value propositions others use; strategies being applied against you; marketing approaches competition is winning with…
When I interview prospective clients for consulting engagements, many have never really shopped, monitored, studied, analyzed, dissected, or carefully examined their competitors’ approaches, messaging, positioning, and brand identity. Or, worse, they don’t look at what indirect competitors are doing. Even worse—they don’t realize who their most disembodied foe is: consumer indecisiveness, equivocation, attention, and decision-making overload.
Consumer attention deficit is probably 10 times more prevalent than in years past. You can’t give an Adderall or biofeedback or other prescriptive to the overloaded, overstimulated, over-prevailed upon, over- intruded-upon consumer. Nope, that won’t work!
Do you even know how to detect consumer attention deficit or “Access Denied”, let alone how to treat and cure that disabling business’ affliction? If so—please—share your secret with me in a private email. I’ll reward the best answers with two hours of my time!
But, most of you are stuck and don’t even know it. The business can actually be creatively stuck—and still content—with a fraction of the economic fulfillment and wealth-creating yield their opportunity and investment is capable of delivering. But that’s for another day.
Today we’re here talking about “attention deficit” in your market’s mind—for BOTH you and the entire product / service category proposition you represent. We’re talking about Access Denied and the severe repercussions that prospect “status” creates.
What’s a tactical-minded entrepreneur facing “Access Denied” to do?
How about being real!
How about deciding not to be an elongated promotion just waiting to explode?
Rather, how about deciding (from this point forward) that you are building, nourishing, and nurturing an ever-growing, constantly fortified, robust, and enduring REAL business.
One that represents “true value” for your market—on terms THEY define.
Also, one that’s creating great real value in terms of net worth for you and your family?
Because once you learn how, you will be able to penetrate the noise and catapult over the “mental moat” consumers have built to prohibit you, and people like you, from scaling their defensive mental walls, barricades, thickets, and minefields (also called “review sites, direct-to-consumer websites, alternative products or services” and so much more).
How about understanding the rules and precedents for being truly relevant to your market? How about mastering the capabilities for being interesting, fascinating, uniquely appealing, highly educational, unparalleled in your memorable mannerisms, communication and positioning persona?
About now, you’re probably waiting for me to drop some life-changing, fate-altering product or program offer on you that I’m flogging.
Not today, my good friend. Not today!
I ask you that—today—become somewhat your “day of reckoning” with what you are really creating or destroying in your enterprise. Will it (and you) be around in a year, or five years? If you’re unsure, how CAN you secure that outcome certainty?
I have a few ways for you to get started and perhaps propel you off the block—to get your thinking into gear and laser-like focus.
These recommendations utilize resources I provide—but they are all GRATIS!
No-cost. Free. Free. Free! My gifts to you. My investment in your future success. My attempt to extricate you and your business from the jaws of defeat. “Access Denied” is at the cancerous root of all business destruction. Tactical dependency is the final, terminal blow to sustainability.
You must, must, must learn strategic integration. You must, must, must master long-term positioning. You MUST have a strategy and game plan model that produces an unequaled quality and quantity of predictable prospects and has a meaningful conversion and revenue-sustaining element to it that keeps going and growing for years to come.
Not for weeks—or a couple of months, that most tactics deliver. And certainly not for JUST the period of some promotional launch.
I urge you to do the following for me—but really for your OWN business longevity and the restoration of the future of YOUR business existence.
Review the Maven Marketing document.
Review the interview of Steven MR Covey on The Speed of Trust and share with your entire team. Study Steven’s “13 Characteristics of A High Trust Individual and Business,” and carefully evaluate how many you currently fail to represent.
Next, download the 200 question, self-revealing assessment we put clients through. New clients find most questions surprising and challenging. But once they comprehend the profound implications, they get excited!
Look forward to poring over every concept I share with my co-author(s) in our upcoming book, Relevancy Rules, which exposes, examines, educates, and explains why mastering and commanding your constant Dynamic Understanding of relevancy IS the key to overcoming consumer attention deficit – and is the key to Unlocking Access in the mind and heart of your consumer that has been locked away from you…
…and will remain so—until you find the right combination.
Separately, monitor what other quality entrepreneurs in business do differently—both in social media and on their websites—as they communicate to their prospects and buyers through resources and services they render online, to positioning and contribution elements they offer above and beyond the competition—including YOU!
See what access vehicles, what engagement approaches, what preemptive and proactive conduct your competitors exercise and demonstrate—that you don’t.
Study at least five top-selling, nonfiction business books to grasp their premise; things you’ve previously not allowed yourself to absorb, acknowledge, consider adding, and integrating. Use the authors’ ideas to replace / improve lesser-performing selling, marketing, advertising, and promotional approaches you keep going back to doing—that keep you stuck in status quo thinking / actions.
Allow quality thinking time to allow you to reflect and reset after any meaningful interaction with team members, vendors, competitors, prospects, buyers, and advisers.
Ask other people who are more successful than you what THEIR business model is; what their marketing building strategy is. Ask them what they are building in the form of their business vision, and how they plan on driving its sustenance and on-going growth.
Much more will follow on this ever-multiplying, problem / opportunity as well as the question that asks: are you a one-trick pony destined to be a supernova hurtling to ultimate ruination, distraction—and crashing onto the rocks of rejection that consumers who denied you access helped stoke?
Or are you someone who grasps the seriousness and implications of the futility in continuing to pound the same ways at the door of the consumer, when that door has over 10 different safety locks on it designed purposely to keep you and your business and offers out?
Much will follow on this ever-multiplying issue as I refine and expand my thinking. I will share with you strategies, not tactics; windows of opportunity, not black holes; ways to go around—over, under, or through the doorway or the window, or—the walls of resistance that consumers construct to stop your potential impact in its tracks.
When you think of Access Denied, it has so many facets, implications, and elements within the ultra-volatile sales and revenue cycle you are probably unknowingly engaged in.
You’re at war with an enemy who means you no harm… yet wishes you no good. The only way you can win that war is IF you understand the rules of engagement; if you understand the password—or equivalent—in terms of marketing positioning engagement (MPE) that breaks through all forms of Access Denied.
If you’re not relevant, then you’ve lost 80% of the battle before the war even begins. The first stage of transcendence is to gain command and control of the silent battle being waged against you by consumers, competitors, and alternative means of achieving the same result as your product or service.
Recognize—finally—that inertia, uncertainty, distrust, ambivalence, pre-purchase dissonance, and a host of other intangible factors are holding your efforts “hostage” in a commerce purgatory that you aren’t even aware you are chained to.
In order to break the chains, you need to breakdown the problem—then break away from doing what ends up being only shoveling and digging yourself deeper into the abyss.
If I sound onerous, sobering, and outright scary—GOOD! You need to have your state of awareness and focus reality checked / shifted and totally reset differently.
If you want me to do it for you—I’m game! And it won’t even sell you anything in the process. But it takes YOU being fully committed to embrace the installments of instruction and understanding.
That’s it for today. If you’re in, respond and let me know you want it.