Aqua Pebble

Oct

16

Going after what you want– Part 4

October 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Writ­ten by: Lee on Octo­ber 16, 2009.

successNow that you have an idea of your UBP, know what you want to achieve and under­stand your tar­get market’s needs and wants…how do you get what you want?

To start with you need to assess the mar­ket or audi­ence that you are tar­get­ing. From your research you will know whether there is a lot of com­pe­ti­tion or not. If there is, it may be time to nar­row your mar­ket to a niche (or two). It is really hard to stand out in a large crowd (but not impos­si­ble) and much eas­ier to stand out of a small crowd. An exam­ple would be if you are look­ing for a job in sales and apply for all sales jobs against a per­son spe­cial­is­ing in say phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal sales and applies to that niche. You have a lot more com­pe­ti­tion in all sales com­pared to spe­cialised sales, though in some cases the stan­dard of com­pe­ti­tion in a niche may be higher as people/companies/blog are focused and have more time to improve their knowl­edge and skills.

Now that you have decided whether you are tak­ing on a big mar­ket or smaller one you can turn back to your UBP.

Our per­cep­tion is our real­ity and you may have found that when you listed per­son­al­ity traits that how oth­ers see you is dif­fer­ent to how you see your­self. This is worth not­ing as it can help you when reach­ing out to your tar­get audience/market. When you are aware of how oth­ers see you, you can work on putting the cor­rect image across. Some­times how oth­ers see you may be sur­pris­ing in a good way (espe­cially if you have a low self image) or it may shock you and even upset you. The great thing is that you can work on this and it is bet­ter to know than be in denial (or at least I think so).

You have listed what your tar­get audience/market needs and wants, you now need to turn to your UBP and tick off which of those you meet and note those you don’t. Some peo­ple talk about strengths and weak­nesses, how­ever for me that is rel­a­tive. What is a strength for some things is a weak­ness for others.

Can you do some­thing about what you don’t have? If so then it would be a good idea to get started, in a job sit­u­a­tion you can list it as some­thing you are work­ing on or busy study­ing, for blog­ging you can start with what you know and build from there. If you can’t you need to con­sider how crit­i­cal it is, if it is not crit­i­cal or really impor­tant it may not mat­ter much, but if it is, then you may have to rethink your goals. An exam­ple would be you want to be a suc­cess­ful singer. You may be tone-deaf (like me) and will never be able to achieve this as you just don’t have the abil­ity and no amount of train­ing will give you the ability.

As for brand­ing your­self you will need to take the ticks and make a state­ment about your­self like I am x, y and z and when peo­ple need x, y and z I am the one whom they come to or employ or get to present or what­ever it is you are brand­ing your­self for. It is impor­tant to then con­sider how peo­ple per­ceive you and ensure this is in line with what is needed to be a suc­cess brand.

Once you have all this fig­ured out you need to do some more research on the best ways to reach your tar­get audience/market. For jobs it may be through agen­cies, send­ing résumé /C.V. to prospec­tive employ­ers, attend­ing net­work­ing events, etc for blog­ging it may be social media, PPC, SEO, direc­to­ries, RSS feeds to name a few. For busi­nesses it could be sales and adver­tis­ing and there are many medi­ums. If you are brand­ing your­self this depends on what you doing it for.

When you do reach out it is impor­tant to empha­sise what you have that ticks the boxes, come across in the cor­rect way: essen­tially have the right image. The right image does not mean beauty and pol­ish­ing, but hav­ing the right image that your tar­get audience/market relates to. Now the impor­tant thing is to be your­self – that after all it is what makes you unique – just empha­sise your strengths rel­a­tive to what you want to achieve.

From every­thing I have said through this series you can see that I walked you through under­stand­ing yourself/product, set goals for yourself/product, under­stand your tar­get audience/market, under­stand the gaps and assess whether they can be filled and then once you have yourself/product pack­aged you reach out to your audience/market.

Remem­ber to keep knock­ing on doors; things don’t always fall into place imme­di­ately. Not every one has luck or has an oppor­tu­nity fall in their lap. What I can say is that if you are not on the path you def­i­nitely won’t find any­thing and nobody/nothing will find you. You need to help your­self to move forward.

My last note is to men­tion that this series has been one of the hard­est to write. Delv­ing inter­nally to write how you do things in your mind is a lot harder than I ever imag­ined when I started out.

Thanks to every­one who has fol­lowed this series and if there are any gaps or advice you would like to add, it would be wel­comed as we are all here to help each other to make a dif­fer­ence (bit by bit)

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For more infor­ma­tion to hire Lee-Ann as a mar­ket­ing coach, for work­shops, talks, writ­ing or any of her other ser­vices visit the ser­vices page.

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Related posts:

  1. My first Social Media pit stop was @twitter
  2. What do they want? – Part 3
  3. How to Dis­cover your Unique­ness — Part 1



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