Case study: Business success requires creativity, flexibility and marketing

It's always exciting when you are presented with a seemingly insurmountable problem that threatens your business, only to have it turned into a new opportunity for success.

We're going to explore a real life example of this and use it to highlight one, super important point from the perspective of marketing your business: know your market.

More often than not, thinking creatively about your online business, your offering and who your target market is can help you to understand where the opportunities lie. Armed with that knowledge, it is a lot easier to target the market, position your brand, and drive growth and success.

Bad business news

The amazon sales rank tracking and analytics service, RankTracer was left in a bind when Amazon introduced its own Point of Sale tracking service for authors. Until that point, RankTracer had been succesful in attracting thousands of authors to its service because it was the only service in the world that provided actual sales figures, based on analysis of the Amazon sales rank over time.

With Amazon now providing that information direct to authors for free, RankTracer seemed like it might be pushed out of business. It was definitely a blow.

After thinking about the problem for some time, the people at RankTracer realized that, in fact, their service was not going to be made obsolete. If anything, the increased awareness of the importance of monitoring sales might even help. All it was going to take was a bit of creative repositioning.

Business analysis

One of the key selling points of RankTracer's service was that customers could track any product sold anywhere in the world on Amazon. This meant that you weren't restricted to tracking your own books (like you are with Amazon's service). Instead, you could gather sales information on your competitors at the same time. This is invaluable market research information.

Market analysis

However, RankTracer had never fully realized the potential of this key fact until they were put into a corner. The ease with which they had attracted authors and small publishers to their services meant that they had never had to fight for new markets and aggressively grow the business.

Now that authors could track their own titles directly through Amazon, that market had slowed down. But, the main point is that authors are not the only market. What RankTracer had failed to do, right at the start, was properly identify who their customers were.

In this case, a huge swathe of marketers and market researchers, brand managers, and all sorts of other sales, advertising and marketing people are also potential customers because they all need to understand how their products compete in the market.

Repositioning for new growth

RankTracer is now in the process of redesigning parts of their site and service, adding new content, and generally gearing up to go after an exciting, new and untapped market. While success is never guaranteed, at least RankTracer is finally attempting to grow the business and reach out to new markets - something they should have been doing already.

Better late than never, right?

Article first published as Case study: Business success requires creativity, flexibility and marketing on Technorati.