Marketing in a crowded market 

The downside to being passionate about your profession or business is that you can get too emotionally attached to how wonderful it is. You may be blind to you own “purple cows”.

The next time you are in your car, I want you to think of cows and trees. To be specific, purple cows and ‘wrong trees’.

Many of you will understand instantly what I am alluding to; it’s the concept of your organisation standing out in a crowd, in the way a purple cow stands out in a herd of white cows.

The forest reference refers to your business marketing; you might not only be barking up the wrong tree, you may be in the wrong forest altogether.

Let’s keep the forest analogy going. Last week we spoke to a company that was consistently ranking on page one of Google for its search terms. Yet when we looked at the search terms, they were wrong. They attracted virtually no traffic because nobody searched for those term. They were ranking first for keywords their potential customers never searched. They were “barking up the wrong trees”, as the saying goes.

Sometimes you can do this yourself. Sometimes you can’t. The downside to being passionate about your profession or business is that you can get too emotionally attached to how wonderful it is. That’s where a third party can help, to enable you to take off the blinkers and see the true state of affairs. This is not just a negative. It’s also being able to spot new opportunities.  You may have unrecognised strengths within your organisation that can open up new revenue streams, with no extra funding and minimal resourcing.

Now back to the purple cows. The lesson is about being different. The lesson is to stand out in some way. It’s about finding a point of difference – or a series of points of difference – and really marketing them.

Seth Godin wrote Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable. It’s a very good read.

Or for a more personalised journey and one-to-one advice, you canspeak with us