“If you build it, they will come.” Really? This famous saying may apply to ghostly baseball stadiums, but it’s hardly applicable in the world of online marketing.
Many businesses unconsciously follow this business model as they’re setting up their website.
They build and optimize, design and promote, but they fail to perform the most important step of all: differentiation.
Several years ago, I attended a workshop on defining your business and your target market. The workshop leader described how as a young writer he found himself writing a lot of annual report copy, when all he really wanted to do was to write technical manuals. He really hated writing annual reports and perversely that was the majority of his business.
An older writer had taken him under his wing and when he described his problem to his mentor, his mentor laughed and said.. “Well, if you don’t want to write annual reports, why are they on your website?”