The Oversaturated Same Old Same Olds
If you are new in the marketing world, and you hear about SEO, Facebook, or Instagram ads for the first time, you feel like you reinvented the wheel. You realize that you can boost your online presence just by paying for some cheap ads or writing a couple of blogs per week. Magic, right? Not really.
While yes, digital marketing is effective and gets you in front of more eyes reasonably quickly, the problem is that everyone else is doing the same. Because of this, ads are everywhere, and there are just too many articles on the same topics. It is next to impossible to stand out in these circumstances, especially if your brand is a new name on the market. So what to do?
Enter Category Design
Instead of trying to have the best product on the market, category design is all about reinventing the whole thing. Category design is not about redesigning the existing, the point is to create your own categories.
If you have your own playing field, and you play your own game, you are automatically one of a kind and the best in business. This is the ultimate marketing. Instead of chasing the big names in the industry, you beat the competition the first day you start your campaign—because you don’t have any.
What’s unique is that even if others enter the field, they are the ones falling behind, as you are setting the trends. If you continue doing things right, they will never catch up. In fact, competitors will be reluctant to enter the race in the first place, and you will create a monopoly of your own.
Different Is The New Better
While this sounds quite hipstery, the subtitle above is very important. If you are competing in a global market, the whole world is your competition. Outranking everyone is very hard, and consistently paying for ads can be risky if you are not sure what you’re doing. Conventional marketing, on the other hand, is more expensive and not for everyone.
That’s why you should embrace disruptive marketing methods such as category design. This type of marketing will let you create your own rules and continuously shift them along the way. This is what being a trendsetter is all about. Is it risky? Of course. But it can pay off tremendously, immediately boosting your brand and putting you amongst the spotlights.
You Set The Tone For The Rest
Because you create the category, your business is in the best position to harvest all the benefits. That’s because you set the trend, and everyone else is chasing you. That will give you the biggest piece of the cake. Not only that, but it will also establish your position strong, making it much harder to the competition to take over your throne.
Attracting Different Audience
You are selling that difference, and your target audience wants your product because it gets them instant recognition. Having an apple on the back of the phone is not only about the best camera or a stable OS, it is about the status that follows the brand. If you design your own category, by thinking different, your target customers will follow along. In fact, they will not only be your customers but become lifelong fans.
Leave No-one Intact
By creating your own rules, you are going to turn some heads. Whoever encounters your brand and products will have an opinion, and a strong one. By being disruptive, the idea is to leave no hearts cold. You want a reaction, and hopefully, you will get more positive than negative, creating more and more fans. But, creating enemies is also a part of the process. You will always have those sworn iPhone haters that will never get the phone, even if it is the only one in the world.
Never Stop Separating
Don’t be fooled to think that your job is over once you release your products. No, it just starts there. While you separated yourself by creating a whole new category, if you become lazy and stale, your competitors will catch up and might take over.
Therefore, continue improving the category design experience and keep increasing the gap. That will help you establish a monopoly of uniqueness, and it will be next to impossible for the competitors to close the gap.
The idea is to remain disruptive and continue the niche trajectory you selected on the start. While it might be tempting to start including more features and products that will broaden your inventory, making you a jack of all trades, don’t do that! If you spread wide, you will lose that competitive edge your category niche gave you early, and that is something that is extremely hard to get back.
Keep Up Through The Storm
Once you create your strategy and start implementing it, patience becomes your biggest ally. You are creating something unique, and that makes your brand very hard to compare with others in the field. Therefore, don’t panic if things don’t go your way immediately. People will need time to get to know your new category and to realize what is different, and how they can benefit from it. If you’ve done things right, they will eventually figure things out, and realize that your new category is providing an unmatched amount of value, and how it is nothing like in the field. That’s when you will convert those customers into loyal fans that will buy from you forever.
Have A Clear Goal
While it might seem like the category designing is all about you and your brand, it is still a customer-centric experience. You need to develop a category that will fit your desired customer persona and target audience, which is the whole point of doing this.
If you already have a customer base, make sure that category design is aligned with what you have. Disappointing your base is never good, and you must do your best to give your most faithful customers more of those things they like the most about your brand.
If you are just building things from scratch, you will have more freedom when creating a customer persona. Just make sure to do it with many details, as it will be much easier to align your future efforts if you create a customer persona right.
Focus On The Content
At the beginning of the article, we told you how modern digital marketing methods make it quite hard to stand out, primarily because everyone is doing the same thing. While it is true that we are now advising you to create content, the situation is not the same.
When you design a new category, the content you create about it automatically becomes unique, and unlike anything else you can find on the web. This is actually necessary, as you need to present the potential customers with more details about your category. By educating them through useful content, you will buy their trust and also build an audience and a presence.
Conclusion: Category Design Is Not For Amateurs
While all from above sounds great, the truth is that category design is very risky. There is a reason why people go the same old same old way—it gives them expectable results. Yes, the results are nothing spectacular, but they usually show, and the risk is reduced.
Category design, on the other hand, is something entirely different. You are immediately taking risks and disrupting the market, hoping it will pay off in a significant way. While yes, this can happen, more often than not, people don’t make the right moves and fail to harvest the full potential of getting the right kind of unique exposure.
Therefore, you need to partner up with category design professionals. Category Design Advisors will help you design and implement an entirely new category. Through our experience, we will give you valuable advice that will help you establish a presence the right way, immediately making you a leader with a unique niche and a brand that is totally nothing like seen on the market before. Contact us now, and let’s see what we can do to boost your visibility.
Author website: https://info.categorydesignadvisors.com/what
About author: Peter Goldie has a track record of creating & launching market dominating products and is now a player-turned-coach, helping companies with the emerging discipline of category design. For the last decade he’s been an angel investor and advisor on business, strategy, product, and marketing
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