Being recognized in the industry as a leader is an effective long term marketing tactic and should be effectively used in your marketing mix (it should not be the only tactic that you use, but rather combined with other tactics). If your goal is to improve your sales/bottom-line for this quarter or next quarter this is not the right marketing tactic.

Being recognized as the market leader provides you the following:

• Allows you to influence potential customer/prospects towards your product.


• Allows you to influence the trends in the industry


• Customers/Prospects come to you with their problems, which if your company can solve, keeps you ahead of the competition.


• Makes it so much easier to open doors - if you are startup trying to get to set a meeting up with a CEO, it is very difficult. But if you are recognized in the industry, the CEO will make time to meet with you.

How do you effective become a market leader/recognized expert in your field:

• Conferences: Attend relevant conferences in your industry, present on current topics/challenges, be on discussion panels. Do joint presentations with other industry leaders or partners.


• PR: Be available to the media for discussion on current trends.Any PR from your company should have quotes from you on the importance of the topic of that release.


• Social Media: Leverage social media to respond to current trends. Leverage LinkedIn both to answer questions in groups in your industry as well as to keep you with your contacts.


• Speaking Engagement: Present at webinars (ideally with Industry analyst) or other speaking engagements.


• Customers/Partners: Make sure you meet your customers, partners, prospects at the highest levels on a regular basis in person. A phone call or email is not a good substitute to get to know them and letting them get to know you and building strong relationships in the industry.

How does this help bring in Sales:
- Customers/Prospects would come to you with unique problems.
- Open doors: For example if you need a partner product to add to your solution to present an end-to-end solution to a customer, you would be a position to easily call into partner executives to facilitate this.
- Facilitate introductions between your sales prime and executives you meet in the customer/partner site to look for long term opportunities.

To reiterate, this is just one of the marketing tools in to your tool box.

About the Author:

Along with being a guest blogger at Entrepreneurcommunityonline.com, Pooja (CEO Blueknee Marketing) specialize's in developing marketing strategy, competitive analysis and pricing strategies.

You can follow my regular blog at http://blog.blueknee.com or contact me via email at pooja@blueknee.com.