Summary
Many of us drive forward on our businesses and plans spurred by ideas of profits and success. But our focus should always be first and foremost on maximizing relevance for our customers. By helping them to solve their toughest problems, we make ourselves invaluable and the profits inevitably follow.
Read on to learn more on how you can help to stay relevant in an ever-changing and chaotic online marketplace.
Transcript
To succeed in business, your #1 objective can’t be money, acclaim, or even success itself. Those are surely nice byproducts of the work you put in, but I would argue that your primary focus must be relevance. You need to demonstrate that your service or good that you provide can is directly applicable to what is going on in the lives of your prospective customers
The Relevance of Relevance
Business owners and entrepreneurs aren’t the wealthiest members of our society because of some innate greediness or willingness to cut the rules. Their success stems from their relevance to their user base. As I’ve often said before, the money you make can be thought of as a reflection of the number of people you have helped.
Relevance is likely even more important than working hard. Nothing great is accomplished without effort and determination, but you must have an end goal that is worthy of you investing your labor and time.
Money, is of course, a very powerful motivator to help you drive toward success. But you will likely find that far more will come in the end if you have set out to not just manipulate or tweak existing products and services, but have earnestly strived to create something that helps people live better lives.
You will want to instill a restless curiosity and hunger for new information in yourself. You need to continually seek to find innovative and new solutions to vexing problems. By identifying new ways of responding to challenges, you will dramatically increase your value and relevance as a thinker and entrepreneur.
Common links
There are common linkages among very successful people that shows just how important it is for your work to be relevant. Some of the most surefire ways to make a lot of money and a lot of value for others include helping others to maximize their health and their earning potential. After all, our health and wealth are very important considerations. This is why those in the health field, like surgeons and dentists, tend to do very well. The same goes for the financial services industry, in where there is a very relevant premium for robust knowledge of how to help others to maximize their savings and protect their investments. The same is true for the newer technology giants that have dominated earnings records over the last decades. There’s a reason why Bill Gates continually is ranked as one of the wealthiest people in the world. The modern personal computer has enormous relevance for almost everyone in the world.
Do Both
This is the reason why it’s a false choice to think that you have to do good or do well. By creating value through your business activities and solving problems, you may find that you ultimately can make a far bigger impact on peoples’ lives than you would have a chance to do through any other way.
A focus on relevance is especially key when it comes to online businesses. With so many competitors and other distractions out there competing for the eyeballs and wallets of your customers, it can be tempting to focus on the superficial or gimmicks to help you stand out from the crowd. You are far better served by continuing to hammer away at your core competency and figuring out how you can help your users to reach their goals far faster and better than they can find elsewhere in the online marketplace.
Evolve to Stay Relevant
With technology and the online market always evolving and changing fast, it is crucial that you invest time in staying relevant as well. What served you well when you first began to attract clients may not continue to work as times and conditions change. Don’t make the mistake of fighting yesterday’s wars. Instead be sure to stay up to date on the latest trends in your field through wide reading, networking, and traveling to conferences and other opportunities to meet new contacts face to face.
Stay Connected
The importance of personal connections can’t be overstated. Even in an impersonal and dispersed marketplace, having a trusted connection can make it much easier to maintain loyalty to your business. With all of the data and options that your customers have at their disposal to make decisions with, give yourself a leg up by delivering impeccable service and forging a connection.
Focus Your Message
Another step you can employ to increase your relevance is to more specifically tailor who your marketing and outreach efforts focus upon. By trying to appeal to every potential customer and demographic out there, you are setting yourself up for a failure by spreading your efforts out too think. Dig into your data and capabilities to determine what part of the populace most needs your ideas and you can have the best impact focusing on. Rather than developing marketing campaigns that try to appeal to everyone, focus on seniors or retirees or particular regions. This will allow you to ramp up how specifically you can help them to live better lives through your service.
Get comfortable with the idea of reinvention and continual personal growth. The artists and leaders who we tend to admire the most don’t generally stay frozen in time with a particular style or approach. They continue to reinvent their brand and what they do to stay on the cutting edge of new trends. When you look at companies or brands that ultimately fail or whittle away, they tend to be the enterprises that have not made changes while the ground shifted around them.
Fortunately, there are countless of examples of companies that have made big shifts to maintain relevance with their core audiences. Look at a business like Netflix, which was initially focused on mailing DVDs to customers to solve a very specific problem, which was that customers did not like paying rental fees for keeping their videos overdue. In time, however, Netflix’s customers had different needs that they needed met. In order to maintain relevance for this crowd, Netflix made a shift to focusing on streaming content in which users could access content online. In time, their needs shifted even more, as users began to crave the ability to “binge” large amounts of content at once, with needs that were too fast for many traditional entertainment studios. As a result, Netflix made a shift to producing its very own entertainment content. That agility and commitment to keeping up with new trends should be emulated by every business.
You can do all of this! When you find yourself feeling like your business is falling behind the times and the pace of your competitors, it is likely an opportunity to step back and consider doing things differently. Just because your business is online or has a heavy online presence, it doesn’t mean that you should neglect the obligation to go out into the real world and see what is working in your area of expertise. Visit physical stores, arrange to meet with customers or prospective customers in person, and keep a running list of ways that you could tweak or update your business to keep up with changing conditions.
You can also learn more by visiting tonyneumeyer.com and registering to receive free trainings articles and more. Also subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow me on Facebook. You can get your copy of The 7 Minute Millionaire and check out my other books at https://tonyneumeyer.com/books/.
