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0:40 – Be a Market Leader
1:14 – Advantages of Market Leadership
1:15 – 1st Advantage: Set the buying criteria
1:58 – 2nd Advantage: less sensitive to market change
2:54 – Strategies to become a market leader
2:58 – Strategy 1: Produce content regularly
3:37 – Word of caution!
4:50 – The key is to have a Unique Selling Proposition
5:23 – Content-ideas
7:35 – Start the PR machine
8:23 – Consistency is a must
8:59 – Tip of the week
Hi everybody welcome to the HVAC Business Growth podcast. I’m your host, Nick Bielawski. We have a great episode lined up for you today.
The topic for today’s podcast is on market leadership. I think this is a good addition to what we spoke about earlier—last week actually about 2013 Pep Talk.
The idea of market leadership is really that you just don’t want to be floating along. You just want to be a market leader and you want to be the premium source for business services and information in your market. Ideally, you want to be an influencer in your particular market. So, whether it’s local or whether it’s national or whether you’re actually niching to something like hydronicating, residential air conditioning or whatever it might be, the idea is to be an influencer and to be a leader in your market.
So what are the advantages of market leadership?
The first thing that I can see is that you actually get to set the buying criteria for your niche. You can make them realize that you are the best solution to their needs.
To begin, this often involves a little bit of education and the upside to it though is that they can actually make some better decisions and they can work out the decisions to go in your favour So I said that as a tremendous advantage to practising market leadership. But setting the buying criteria can only happen after the fact though. You can’t just waltz in to a market and tell people what to do. You have to create some content and get a little bit of trust in the market and then you can start setting the buying criteria for people.
The second advantage of market leadership that I see is that you’re actually less sensitive to change in the market because in a sense, you’re actually running your own show. Your own marketing and positioning actually dictates how busy you want to be. The market doesn’t dictate how busy you are. So I think it’s a really powerful position to be in.
These are just 2 of the advantages that I see for practising market leadership. You might see more advantages than I do.
You might be thinking now “Oh God I’m actually going to be practising market leadership and this is sort of floating along and business is just running on the tide of the market.” The good news is, if you’re not practising market leadership, you can be up and running in 90 days and get some really good results. So, 90 days is just a rough number here, you can be up and going a little bit quicker. Some markets can take a little bit longer to penetrate.
So, how do you actually penetrate a market and become a leader? Basically, what you need to do is produce content and education material on a regular basis. How regular? Daily is best. Just like what I said in the social media episode, you need to give this some daily attention. And the good thing is that the social media side of things actually integrates really well with market leadership. If you’re using Facebook or Twitter on a daily basis and actually providing some good information to your Facebook fans or Twitter followers or whatever other platform that you’re currently using, then, that’s market leadership in my book.
One word of caution is that progress is really slow at first and it can be hard to see results for the uneducated people. I’d like to think to think of it like tennis ranking. Let’s say you’re currently ranked number 200 in the world and in 60 days you improved your rank to number 70 in the world.
It sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
But unfortunately, the general public only sees the top 10 or the top 20 players and they don’t see the up and coming talent from outside of the top 20. So in 60 days, you’ve made some real progress but it seems that you’re only getting a small return on your investment. If you’re number 70 in the tennis rankings, you might have won a couple of small amount of games but you’re not actually doing well in the Grand Slams. But in 90 days, you can actually make a real impact with some commitment.
The hardest part is actually getting started in this so in the tennis example that we just talked about, you can drop your ranking down from 70 into the top 20 but all of the progress has actually come earlier; all of the momentum was actually gained in that initial effort that you put in.
A key part to actually being a market leader is that you need to have a unique selling proposition.
Have you actually listened to episode 6 yet about unique selling proposition? If you haven’t, you need to do that now—after you finished listening to this podcast, of course!
You need to have a unique position in the market because leaders actually take unique positions and followers actually copy other people and don’t offer a unique voice to the conversation at all. We need to look at producing some content and actually getting your ideas out there.
Let’s just brainstorm a few ideas for content. You could actually start a podcast like this one that I’m doing now. There is plenty of work involved but it’s definitely possible. Other thing that you can do is to create blog posts. So if your business website doesn’t have a blog, I suggest you put that really high in the to-do list for this week.
You can also create some articles which are generally a little bit longer than blog posts and are more research-based. They can be really good. You can also get other people to write articles for you. We’ll go into that in another episode.
You can create some research papers. So, if you’re discovering things in your business or there are things that you’d like to actually research, you can commission the research to happen and then publish the results and make it available either to the consumers (if you’re in the residential market) or make it available to your fellow competitors or fellow businesses in your industry.
You can also create catalogs or magalogs. You can operate your own magazine. Videos are fantastic and you can also do interviews as well.
One approach that I really like from a content point-of-view is actually to take the news reporter type of approach. What you can do is actually tell the market what is actually going on in your market—very much like a news report. You could actually tell your market about any new system. You can actually tell your market that Bon Air has actually released a new ducted heating system and then you can introduce the new features and the benefits from there.
So this news reporter type of approach, again, ties in really well with the social media side of things that we’ve discussed in an earlier podcast where you can be letting your market know via Twitter, via Facebook by sharing links and sharing information with your market. So, the news reporter approach ties in really well into market leadership.
So now that we’ve got some ideas for content, what we need to do now is to start the PR machine. This is where I think you’ll get a really good vision and see how things will come full circle.
I want you to get out there and launch some new products, launch new services, engage the market, release the information that you’ve created either via videos or via interviews and I want you to give things away freely and don’t actually hide any information that you’re producing. From here, create your press releases and let the local media or the national media know about what you’re doing. It obviously depends on what sort of content you’re producing and how wide you want to distribute it.
But the real trick with the publicity side of things is to actually be consistent. Being consistent is really the secret that actually make this whole thing work. In the online marketing circles, they have almost games, I guess you could say, with a market leadership 365. So that means they’re practising market leadership 365 days of the year. So, they’re not taking a break from it; they’re not getting a little bit of momentum up after 3 weeks and then giving it up. They’re actually being consistent with it on a daily basis.
So now it’s time for the hvacbusinessgrowth.com tip of the week.
So this week’s tip of the week is basically to know where to start with this market leadership. So I guess think the best place to start is—provided you’ve got a unique selling proposition—creation of videos. Videos are a fantastic place to start. Most people have an iPhone or some sort of recording devise where they can record a pretty good standard video. You don’t need to go out and get professional level cameras or anything like that. We can just start with an iPhone.
So what I want you to do is actually start by writing down 20 frequently asked questions that you get asked a lot in your business. Hopefully these are questions by the customers or just questions that you see in your market that are getting asked a lot and don’t really have good answers to them. So what you’re going to do is actually answer 8 frequently asked questions with a short video. This video is going to last from anywhere around 30 seconds to 3 minutes.
On YouTube, most people have really good attention span from the 30 seconds and into that 3-minute range. If starts to take longer than 3 minutes then you start to lose a lot of people so that length, I reckon, is fantastic.
So what we’re going to do is put these videos that we produced onto YouTube and then embed them into your own site. Out of the 20 frequently asked questions videos, I want you to release 1 video per day and announce each video on social media. I’m talking about Facebook or Twitter or whatever other channel that you actually use—maybe Google+ as well. Then, let the local press know that you’re actually doing a series in your market. This applies if you’re doing residential promotion. You might even let the industry association know via their website or their news service if you’re working in the industrial sector.
Basically, you’ve got to produce the content and then go about spreading the news to the best of your ability.
So that’s the tip of the week—to get started with videos.
So that’s all we’ve got time for today. Thanks for listening to the HVAC Business Growth Podcast. If you have any questions on the show, just leave them in the comments on the website. If you want to leave some positive feedback for me, head over to iTunes or, again, go back to the website and just leave a friendly comment and let us know what you thought about the show.
Thanks for listening. I’ll see you next time.