Positioning, Differentiation, and Homogenization
The Impact on Inbound Marketing and Social Media Management!
Positioning and differentiation are two of the most important concepts you will come across as an inbound marketing consultant for social media manager.
Your understanding of these fundamental marketing principles will assist you in building your inbound marketing consultancy. Additionally, they will help you understand your clients; and, the businesses and/or professional practices of your clients.
In order to offer something truly remarkable, we must be remarkable ourselves, and that means personally and professionally. Additionally, we need to define and distinguish ourselves and our work in the marketplace; and, to do that, we must be remarkable.
As many marketing experts have so aptly pointed out:
Good is no longer good enough.
In fact:
Great is no longer good enough either!
You must be remarkable, consistent, and determined in your inbound marketing efforts…and your social media strategies.
Dan Kennedy states that, “Positioning is controlling how your customers and prospective customers think and feel about your business in comparison to other, similar businesses competing for their attention.”
Brian Tracy states that, “Positioning refers to the way your clients think about you and talk about you, and your company, when you are not around.” Tracy goes on to explain that, “The position that you hold in your client’s mind determines all of his reactions and interactions with you. Your position determines whether or not your client buys from you, whether he buys again from you, and whether he refers other people to you.”
In other words, everything you do when it comes to your client’s inbound marketing requirements affects the way your client thinks about you, your inbound marketing and social media strategies, and your inbound marketing consultancy’s brand…your Internet image.
Brian Tracy and Dan Kennedy differ somewhat, with Kennedy conflating the definitions of positioning and differentiation somewhat; and Tracy offering distinct definitions.
In the end, it all comes out in the wash!
Why?
Because you cannot have one without the other and be succcessful, positioning and differentiation are like the Ying and Yang of marketing.
Tracy maintains that, “Differentiation…refers to your ability to separate yourself, and your product or service, from that of your competitors. Differentiation is the key to building and maintaining a competitive advantage.”
Ultimately, it comes down to how you read their individual definitions, with careful attention to the context in which each definition is offered.
Positioning and differentiation are two halves of the same whole, an advantage you and your inbound marketing firm has over your competitors in the same marketplace; the unique benefits no one else can provide your clients.
However!
When all you have to offer is what everyone else is offering, and you have made it all about the price, you have little chance to be remarkable.
In fact, even if you are? In all liklihood, you won’t get hired because you have defined the parameters before you even open you mouth.
Unfortunately, we are witnessing the homogenization of inbound marketing and social media management!
We are also witnessing this trend throughout much of the business world today. As a consequence of this trend, the homogenization of inbound marketing, we are witnessing less of a distinction between inbound marketing consultancies and social media management firms.
What defines good enough…much less remarkable?
Is it true that good enough…isn’t good enough?
Additionally, what qualifies one entity to “certify” another at this point? And yet, we see this movement to be “certified!”
Interesting!
I call this trend “Follow the follower!”
Worse yet?
We are also witnessing the commoditization of inbound marketing, along side its homogenization.
Listen to Dan Kennedy talk about price lists some time if you want a real education on commoditization.
He is dead on the money, pun intended, on this point.
When you make the conversation all about price?
You become nothing more than a discount operation in the eyes of your prospective clients!
Instead of being about what makes you separate and distinct?
Your positioning and differentiation?
Instead of what makes you remarkable?
You are nothing more than an inbound marketing or social media version of K-Mart!
Why K-Mart?
Because they went bankrupt!
And making the conversation about price before you know anything about your client is bargain basement mentality; and, all your competition has to do is chop your price…and you rapidly fade away!
How can you possibly know how much to charge an inbound marketing or social media management client when you have yet to establish your client’s needs?
Or, for that matter, if you can help them at all?
In many instances, the business building and marketing strategies of today are not based on a follow the leader approach, an approach most refer to as modeling.
Modeling is a strategy that makes sense, at least to a point.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants!”
However, as noted above, we seem to be witnessing a “Follow the follower” mentality, everyone lock-step behind the next…and the result is lackluster at best.
I suggest that inbound marketing is perhaps too new, as a marketing discipline, to have many giants worth modeling…much less available for a perch on their shoulders!
Sadly, many of the companies at the forefront of the industry, those worth modeling at all, do not have extensive experience in the trenches, building inbound marketing and social media strategies for businesses and professional practices day in and day out, belly to belly, one at a time…over a period of time.
Ironically, many of the leaders today are primarily thought-leaders, with little in the trenches experience with local, “offline” businesses…consulting one on one.
Frankly, this takes getting out from behind the monitor and the desk and talking to business people in the community. What Dan Kennedy would call a No B.S. education, one based on real world experience and not on theories and concepts learned from an info course or on a website.
The best experience you will ever have, the fastest way to mastery of your craft, inbound marketing consulting and social media management, is to get out and rub elbows with business owners every day!
If you build the kind of site I see online today, the one-size-fits-all type of inbound marketing website…with services and prices posted like some sort of as menu?
You are one step away from becoming K-Mart!
If a client finds you at all, they will simply go down the menu and circle what they want, scratching what they don’t want, and that will be that.
Sadly, it will not be based on positioning or differentiation!
It will be all based on price before you even have an opportunity to establish why you may indeed be different and remarkable.
Why?
…because you are simply K-Mart!
That will be 12 blog posts please…to go!
Hold the fries!
Please let me know what you think!
Also, check out the contest on the home page…we are running out of time.
Subscribe and get a free copy of the Inbound Marketing A though Z available September 8, 2010!
John Zajaros
The Ultimate Internet Image
Lakewood, Ohio 44107
Skype: johnzajaros1
216-712-7004
PS, For more on this topic check out The Homogenization and Commoditization of Inbound Marketing (Part I) and Homogenization, Commoditization, and Mediocrity in Inbound Marketing (Part II).
Exactly! I’m glad you and I see the same way on this. There are too many theorists and not enough No B/S., nuts and bolts, inbound marketing consultants and social media managers in the field every day who also take the time to help others build their businesses.
Mark