Get a leg up by perusing your top three competitors across all the platforms on which they play! Here’s a systematic way to collect priceless data from competitors in your space.

Pick three brands already successful in the market you want to reach. Pick companies that are where you aspire for your brand to be within a year.

Not 10 years. Not 5 years. 1 year from now. Do NOT choose the BIGGEST player in your industry unless you can honestly catch up to them within a year.

As cooperative capitalists, we understand that making a list of your competitors may feel adversarial, so let’s dismantle that before we begin by stating that this process is designed to help you WIN with your audience, NOT win over the audience of your competitors.

Collect the answers to these 11 questions for each of the three brands in a spreadsheet or document. Your choice.

Here’s an example we performed for a past client who said ‘Storybrand’ was one of their top 3 competitors:

Finally, Assimilate the data you collected to form a plan to alter your path for the better.

With all the data you just collected organized and in front of you and your top executives or advisors, look for what I call ‘patterns in the matrix‘.

Look for where you can outshine the competition and make sure those strengths are accentuated in your marketing and offers.

Look for where the competition outshines you and glean insight into what you might want to consider modeling or improving for your content, products, and offers so you can continue to delight and deliver on the value you deliver.

Here’s a list of just some of what I consider when performing this process for our clients.

• Where do you have a competitive advantage? What’s better about your offer? Is that accentuated in your marketing?
• Where can you play a bigger game? Is there a wide open field on a particular social media platform?
• What is revealed when examining fee structures? Is there an opportunity to make an offer at a particular price point?
• How high or low touch is the delivery of their process? Is there a concierge version to offer or something more DIY?
• Are you catering to a different personality style or sector of the market? Is that clear and are you on the appropriate platforms for the audience you want to reach?

There you have it! That’s how you perform Competition Telepathy.

If you’d like the insight without all the work, you can schedule a time to talk with Travis about the Foundational Marketing Package which includes our team doing Customer Telepathy, Content Telepathy and Competition Telepathy and assimilating it all into a suggested plan of action for your brand.

You Are Not Alone! We’ve been there too.

Don’t get us wrong, we are a stand for having an awareness of trends in marketing so that you can grow, but beware of causing Operational Whiplash.

One of the biggest complaints we hear from passionate teams is that brand leaders come back from conferences and masterminds with new ideas to implement just before the last big idea has gone live, or has yet to be optimized.

Has that ever happened to you?

Imagine the frustration of completing all the painstaking details to get a marketing initiative up, running and gaining traction only for an executive or brand leader to come back from an event that caused marketing envy.

All of a sudden directives change radically and the team is thrown into the chaotic state of Operational Whiplash!

Your team may feel like your money and their efforts are wasted.

One team member of a client of ours was in tears when the evergreen quiz funnel that was declared essential got pushed aside without being completed so that the whole team could focus on a documentary launch that some guru promised would be a money-making slam dunk.

“Here we go again.” was becoming the team mantra and that’s NOT how we want your team members to feel!

Bouncing from one marketing initiative to another. UUUGGHHH. We feel your pain.

How can your team have clarity on which funnels work to which traffic source when there’s no system to track progress and assess the ROI after ad spend, COGS, and team time?

Worse still, marketing efforts become random and incongruent which fails to create the cohesive, layered experience an audience needs to develop a relationship that leads to sales and brand loyalty.

It is possible (and we’d argue easier, more efficient and less expensive) to create layers of measurable funnels that tie together, endearing your brand to your audience while qualifying buyers and clearing out those who are clearly not your target market.

Please stop implementing the disjointed, perpetual-promotional roller-coaster approach to running your business. Why? Because you’ll fail to get the learnings you need from optimizing one funnel before you’re, as Jay-Z puts it, “on to the next one”.

When you architect a funnel using the statistical learnings from the previous funnel, you grow a self-assessing Superfunnel that morphs to meet your audience’s needs.

As passionate marketers ourselves, we are saddened by the industry’s lack of commitment to provide support in building measurable funnels that interconnect and are easy to optimize.

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

Launchr supports brands in growing from six-figure to seven-figure businesses by prioritizing marketing initiatives, the right way. We get all “Art Of War” on creating and delivering efficient systems for sifting through ideas to sort out which one’s have the highest potential based on the 5 most important business areas.

The Quarterly Scorecard clearly identifies which opportunities are worth exploring and which should be put in the ‘parking lot’ for execution in the future.

Stop guessing. No more chasing fruitless failures. Focus on the initiatives you’ve vetted through a proven process!

Here’s the closest thing we’ve found to a crystal ball that can reveal the best next moves in your business to elevate profits while tailoring your marketing to meet your audience’s needs. It’s called the Quarterly Scorecard and it goes a little something like this.

1. Start by scheduling an all-hands-on-deck meeting.
Notify your team that they’ll be asked to share their ideas. Don’t surprise them. Get their brains brewing up ideas beforehand. Cooperative competition breeds out-of-the-box ideas, so consider a bonus or incentive for the originator of winning ideas.

2. Prepare a spreadsheet to organize, evaluate and prioritize ideas.
Or, make it easy on yourself and use the Quarterly Scorecard that we’ve used to move our clients from six to seven figure businesses for the last decade. It comes pre-loaded with the tabs you’ll need for the process.

3. Ask the entire team for any and all profit-generating ideas (no matter how random or off-the-wall).
List them on the Quarterly Scorecard, taking the time to collect all of the following:

4. Release all team members from the meeting except the brand leader(s) and the executive team.
Assign 5 votes to each person remaining. We use Post-It notes as vote indicators. Each person posts their votes to the ideas they believe in most.

IMPORTANT: People can cast their votes on 5 different ideas, put all 5 toward one idea, or any combination that reflects how they would prioritize the expenditure of money and team time on the ideas generated. The five ideas scoring the most votes are then transferred to the Big Ideas tab in the Quarterly Scorecard.

5. Rate each Big Idea based on its potential to cause growth in 5 areas: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.
(Shout out to Dave McClure for distinguishing these crucial areas!) Assessing based on all five factors gives you initiatives across the board rather than only in the top of funnel sections of your marketing. Most brands screw this part up, focusing only on acquisition and failing to build connection for ongoing sales!

6. Finally, evaluate each Big Idea using three crucial questions.

A combined score is generated for each opportunity that makes your next moves crystal clear.

7. Create and Assign Action Items.
All that’s left to do is to task out the to-do list for the winning projects and you’re ready to work the best of your Big Ideas. Here at Launchr.co we use Asana (our fave task management software).

Brands don’t fail from having too few ideas, they die from exhausting their resources on too many!

You can END ENTREPRENEURIAL ADHD and get laser focused on what works!