Taking the pain out of innovation. 3 ways to show up differently in your market.
Innovation doesn’t always have to come in the form of a grandiose statement, it can often be quite subtle.
When it comes to capturing value, be that through a new business model or a new marketing angle, people get hung up on the notion that the idea has to be a complete game changer.
It has to be a divine like gift from the Gods and change the way things are done forever, else it’s not worth anyone’s time.
But that’s just not true.
Originality is rare. When we think we see something new, innovative or original in actual fact it’s usually just something that previously existed but it’s been reimagined and repurposed within a new context.
Does that count as an innovation?
If you’ve provided something new, regardless if it’s had a helping hand from several different sources, then yes my friend, we have ourselves an innovation.
But what are the ways we can innovate and bring about something new in the marketplace if we’re looking for the most effective results in the shortest amount of time?
Basically, can we innovate simply, quickly and effectively?
The answer is yes. But it takes a little creativity.
Taking a new angle or approach
There are several different ways we can add our own unique spin on things to create something new overall fairly quickly and some of these ways ocurr when we simply make a small perspective shift. Here’s a few examples of things you could shift to innovate:
People
- For example, within the red ocean of software engineering education, Vanessa Van Edwards was able to make a breakthrough with her unique insights as an educator when she chose to provide education on emotional intelligence to the engineering crowd.
- By taking a blue ocean, innovator’s approach she had less competitors and could carve out a niche for herself.
Presentation
- In the land of business news and insight standing out as an individual against the bigger media giants like CNBC and Bloomberg is difficult.
- But Professor Scott Galloway was able to carve out a cult following for himself on the web with his unique blend of dry humour, historical perspectives and personal experiences.
- His uploads even managed to be picked up by media company Vice.
Proposition
- Within the busy world of digital marketing, there are several different ways an agency may break down their B2B services.
- For instance within lead generation, you could further specialize by choosing only to provide paid Facebook lead services.
- But niching down one or two more levels more provides not only hyper specialization, it also gives you the chance to compete with far less competitors once again.
- So to innovate on your value proposition as a digital marketing agency, you could go from the broad service of lead generation, all the way down to lead gen & retargeting for webinar funnel based leads for non English speaking audiences.
Of course this is just a selection of factors to change but as you can see, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and spend countless hours fretting about how to be innovative.
Innovation sometimes just means different and different can be simple.
