Do you believe that survival in this competitive business world requires following the latest industry marketing trends to get increased conversion? Do you think that it will provide you with the desired results? If you follow this way of thinking you are sadly mistaken!!! Believe me, you are not going about it properly!

And if you read further, I’ll tell you exactly why.

You Probably Believe That Your Business Will Grow if You Follow Your Competitors

As a startup and entrepreneur, you want to grow your business. So, if you do what your established competitors are doing you will succeed, right? You firmly hold onto the belief that following the industry marketing trends will enable you to hold your position in the business world.

You are right, but only to an extent because there are other important things that you have to consider. You cannot just blindly follow your industry trends with the goal of growing your business because in many cases it just doesn’t work!!!

What Your Competition Does May Not Work for You

Why doesn’t it work? Because you follow industry trends without knowing your customers needs and wants, which even though you are in the same field, can function differently internally and you really don’t know if YOUR associates and customers would be happy.

Knowing your Customers

Well, today the most important factor to consider is your CUSTOMERS.  Before doing anything, you first have to analyze your customers. You have to get into the demographics; what their age is, how they look, their likes, their dislikes, their thinking patterns, their purchasing habits, their hobbies, their professions, etc. You have to build a customer persona in your mind. You have to deeply analyze the customers’ persona in order to provide them with exactly what they want!!!

Satisfy Your Customers

What you have to do is to SATISFY your customers which has become very challenging these days because they have so many choices. The customers are well, informed and tech savvy. They have access to all sorts of mobile devices and content. You need to be totally hones and transparent.

The Right Way of Doing It

So, my basic idea is that you first need to deeply understand your CUSTOMERS! You have to understand their psychology in order to present your product/service in the manner that strikes them. After that, you have to see what is the industry marketing trend? But again you don’t have to follow it blindly! Considering your customers’ psychology you have to see what industry trend would appeal to your customers and which would not!

You have to properly analyze what your competitors are doing and compare your product/service and see whose offer is closer to the target customers conversion needs. If you can meet their needs the way they want it, you will achieve the success you are looking for leading to increased conversion and sales!.

Believe me, if you do that you are going to have increased conversion and sales!!!!
Haven’t I explained much of what I believe? Do you realize now that what you exactly need to do in order to offer customers conversion what exactly they need?

How I Came to This Conclusion

I am in the video production industry. All our competitors focus on increased landing page conversion rates, website conversion, high SEO, and ultimately higher sales.

Obviously we have the same goals. But HOW we achieve the goals is what makes the difference. We didn’t understand this few years back. We thought that we should follow what our competitors are doing exactly. We had the firm belief that if we would follow our competitors, then we can take the leads and convert them into our customers conversion.

So what we did was, we provided our visitors with knowledge, information regarding creating explainer videos, such as why startups and entrepreneurs needed it, the business benefits that it offered, and the effect it had on a viewer’s mind. We had this information on our website, and we also made a video regarding this that we uploaded on our YouTube channel.

We were proceeding in the right direction,  to the extent that there were many people at that time that didn’t know anything about explainer videos, so we were giving them solid information about the process. We were satisfied that we were following the industry trends and we had confidence that we would get LEADS!

But something went wrong! We were not getting leads. We were actually clueless at that time as to what went wrong. We faithfully followed our competitor’s actions, but why weren’t we getting the leads? This made us worried. We were really concerned with this issue. We had to come up with a solution. We had to identify exactly where we went wrong!

One day, we get an email from a web visitor. He inquired about something important to him that we had not even considered previously.

Here’s what he said:

“I appreciate that you guys are providing me with all the information regarding the benefits of having an explainer video on my website. But I want to say ask something. I didn’t get any pricing information and how the process of production actually works on your website. That basic information should be available on your website! Waiting for your reply.”

Now this email made us think about our situation! Our team read this email again and again. Every time we read it, we felt that this was the main reasons behind our failure to attract the leads we thought we would!

I then imagined myself as a visitor to our site. I thought that it’s good that I get information on the website. But what next? If I get interested in the company portfolio and want to get more information, what would be I seeking for? Pricing!!  I would be looking for pricing in order to see whether it falls within my budget and how long the steps in the production process take. This could influence a customer to take immediate action.

After analyzing all this, we decided to add  pricing and process information on our website which increased conversion.

After this experience, we realized that the one thing you need to do is study your customer. What do they want and how do they want to receive the product or service.

Roll up

As entrepreneur or startup, if you believe that by simply following industry trends you will succeed. But industry trends are not best practices! You need to identify and profile your customer and then communicate with them on their terms.

Blindly following what your competitors are doing will get you mediocre results. You need to be our front and proactive,  fully understanding your customers’ demographics and then telling them, in their language, how your product or service solves the problem or fills their needs!

Let me know what you think of this blog in the comments section and if you really find it helpful,  feel free to share it with your friends and acquaintances on social media.