“How do I stand out in such a saturated market?” This is a question I get asked over and over again. The short answer is….stop doing what everyone else is doing. The long answer? You need to understand and progress through three levels of content in order to separate yourself from the pack.
Level 1: How-to Marketing
When you start your business it’s important you establish yourself as an expert who can help your ideal clients. In order to effectively do that, you need to consistently and frequently put out how-to content. By sharing strategies, tactics, and information you show potential clients in your market that you know what you’re talking about and that you can be trusted. This type of content let’s followers know that you understand how to take them from where they are to where they need to go. How-to content builds both credibility and authority by giving your market transactional value and quick wins.
When you share how-to content you demonstrate your knowledge and step into the role of a teacher. By offering this kind of value for free, you build rapport, reciprocity, and relationship.
This first level of content is important. It never stops, but it isn’t enough. Thousands of people put out this type of value. While people will come to you to learn tips, tricks, and strategies, how-to content won’t keep your people around, although it is an important place to start.
Level 2: Hope Marketing
Hope marketing is level two when it comes to your content pyramid. If how-to marketing is what people come for, hope marketing is what keeps people engaged. Hope marketing isn’t tactical, it’s personal. It’s sharing pieces of your story. It’s sharing the stories of those you’ve helped. It’s inspiration, motivation, and aspiration. It’s showing your followers what’s possible, and helping them believe in what’s possible, even when they want to call it quits.
Elevating your marketing to the hope level is what makes your market both like you and want to be like you. It builds an empathetic rapport and strikes a chord with your market, tying your people to you.
Through telling stories, sharing testimonials, and posting inspirational content that motivates them to see that they can overcome obstacles, you establish yourself as a trusted mentor and friend, and set yourself apart from those who only leverage how-to marketing.
Level 3: Conviction Marketing
As your businesses grows, you begin to identify the gaps in your market, and you start filling those gaps, getting clear on who you want to be in your market and what your market needs most, you will begin to see a core set of deep beliefs bubble to the surface.
These core beliefs about what your market needs and deserves, when thoughtfully articulated, will become the convictions you bring to market. Sharing these convictions will be the highest level of distinction you have amongst your peers.
How do you become a category of one? By understanding the gap, filling the gap, and sharing your convictions in a meaningful way. Conviction marketing isn’t simply blasting your opinions about everything that’s wrong in your industry without offering an alternative or a solution.
Having an opinion about what’s wrong is unbelievably different from committing to do what’s right. When you voice your convictions, and have an offer and results that show you can back your convictions up with action, then you move from teacher, to mentor, to visionary…leading the way for a legion of bought-in raving fans.
Standing out isn’t difficult. It simply takes consistency, repetition, hope, conviction, and the willingness to step into the gap. That may take time, but the more action you take, the more you become a consumer in your own space, the more quickly those deep convictions will rise to the top, and the more easily you’ll be able to distinguish yourself from the rest of the world around you.
