Niches Messages and Creating A MOVEMENT
This week we are going to narrow down our target audience. By gaining an understanding of who we want and don't want to serve, we will weed out the energy drains and those who are not right for us. This means we can channel all our energy and resources to our ideal clients and customers who will benefit the most and become stark raving fans who will tell everybody they know about your business.
Doing this means you'll be able to laser target your marketing by getting your message in front of the right people, and you'll use language that matches theirs.
When you get this right, you'll also have an amazing support system who not just give you money, but encourage you when you think you can't go on, and help you be better at business. Working with them is easy and enjoyable. You'll say you have the best customers in the whole world, and when you mess up in your business, (and the day will come) they'll forgive you and try to help you out.
Awhile ago, I screwed up the code on my website. It looked fine, but the "add to cart" functionality was gone. I did this in the middle of a product launch btw where much warfare was happening over getting the blend out. When one of my wonderful customers said "Ahem, just so you know, we can't actually buy this" (she could've just surfed on to the next site) I figured it out, fixed it and sent out a transparent apology email to the list. I got back prayers, cards, funny videos to make me laugh, suggestions to take such and such essence, photos of kitties and words of encouragement. Now some of this is due to the way I approach email marketing, but some of this is just TRIBE.
I ended up having a fantastic product launch despite that, and having a customer who cared enough to talk to me about my coding mishap saved it.
Then there was the weekend that 3 different people decided they needed to meet me in person, and drove 4-8 hours to do so. I ended up selling a bunch of stuff from my house, as well as having new friends!
Your goal is not sheer numbers. Yes, build a big email list, build a big Facebook fan base and/or Twitter followers, but make sure they are the right people. You'll never have to do a hard sell when you've cultivated the right audience.You can do really well with a small list, if you take care of them, you've chosen your niche and gotten your message across well.
If you don't yet have a business to focus on, some things to mull over... What types of people do you effortlessly gravitate to? What types of people gravitate to you? Who do you wind up helping? What deep need or desire does this demographic have? What are their biggest challenges and what solution would they pay for?
Narrowing down your niche does not always mean that you only serve certain people and exclude others. It can mean that if you'd like, but depending on your business, you can mass sell while you target. Apple is a prime example. They don't have dancing Grandmas in their iPod commercials, they have hip 20 year olds. Yet everybody and their Grandma buys Apple products. Who you market to is not necessarily the only demographic who buys your products. No one aspires to be the bland average, so if you water down your message to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.
Labels
I don't generally like them, but for our purposes, they are going to be useful. These are just ways that we identify ourselves, inwardly and outwardly. We are mothers, teachers, producers, Christians, writers, (scratch that, not everyone who writes identifies themselves as a "real" writer.) tennis players, you get the gist. So when you create your marketing you need to say who your service or product is for. It needs to have a strong "yes, this is for me" or "nope, ignore" response. Middle of the road does not get you sales, fans, or allegiances.
So back to the writer comment that I scratched out. We would have needed to go more specific there. Suppose you had a beginning course on writing, but your target audience is actually dabblers. They might not really consider themselves a writer, which is a situation you hope to remedy. You might say "aspiring" authors, bloggers, or just writers. Conversely you could put something out for professional or published writers. Just make it clearly identifiable. Don't make em work hard to understand if it's worth their consideration.
Don't go too broad
Woman, man, spiritual person, age range are all too vague to catch attention. You can absolutely use them in tandem with other labels. When you use multiple labels it should always be to narrow down, not broaden out. If you come across as the solution for everybody, you lose trust. I changed from spiritual entrepreneurs to Christian entrepreneurs for this class and could possibly take it a step further with Charismatic Christian entrepreneurs but am not sure that would be beneficial. The word "supernatural" is probably a good enough filter.
The more specific you are, the more effective your marketing will be. It's counter-intuitive, but it allows people to self-select and keeps you from having to really sell hard. It also helps you to know where to place your marketing and how to distribute it. If you don't pick an audience, you won't have one.
Problems
This is your clearly defined problem you solve for your audience. You want your client/customer to go "I'm that person and I have that problem. This is soooo what I need!" I sell flower essences, but what I am really selling is an easy solution to depression, anxiety, procrastination, stress and low self-esteem. Normally when I create an ad, I will zero in on only one of those things and the flower essences themselves are so specific in their action that when people read the descriptions they go "wow, that's absolutely what I need."
You'll need to be able to talk about their problems from the perspective of your potential client/customer to further get their attention. Now, you probably know more than they do, including the deeper issue that they are not even aware of yet. You can't go there. You have to stay with their surface stuff that they are fully aware of and want gone.
Someone once said "Sell them what they want and give them what they need." I think we were actually talking about someone who was selling a-z 'healing your digestive tract" type program. Some of the particulars were not good sales material, so we were discussing focusing on the pain points and outcome rather than the dietary changes required etc.
Specialists vs Generalists
Every piece of marketing material you do needs to focus on a specific target audience. You can market to more than one if you can't let go of having broad appeal, but you'll need to create additional materials, make sense? It goes back to speaking to their specific needs in their own language.
We're in a world-wide marketplace these days, so the time of being a generalist is over. You have to be ultra-specific because when you do, light bulbs go off in people's heads and they go "Oh! This is so perfect for me!" There are a jillion business classes out there but you picked us. I would guess that it had a lot to do with being on the same spiritual wavelength as you, and that you resonated with moving away from slimey sales tactics and making money at all costs while moving toward what you were actually put here to do. You are here and you all are copacetic together in my class because you share the specifics we were after.
You yourself are a specialist, even if you don't know it yet. You'll always have this particular bent to what you do, even if you were trained in the same facility/curriculum as a thousand other people. If you're a therapist, you'll find that you seem to attract a lot of those with a certain issue and you are really adempt at working with that. If you are a life coach, you need to stand out from all the others by specializing in one thing.
I notice my flower essences are a lot about maximizing your potential to go further in life. Lots of spiritual components as well. That's just me. Bach has a much different flavor to what they do.
You being a specialist however, does not mean you can't and won't do all kinds of things. But for the sake of marketing effectiveness, you need to focus on a problem and sell the solution.
Your Message
Your message, or your mission statement/offer to the world is a short summation of what you do and who you help. You need to be able to rattle this off on cue. It can be your tag line on a website, social media and so forth, as well as the answer to that conversational question of "what do you do?"
Your message helps you stand out in the marketplace, differentiates you from the competition, helps you understand your purpose and answers people's question of "is this right for me?" You need to craft a 1-2 sentence power pack of purpose that you can unpack further for those who are interested.
Your message is beyond your own needs and desires and ties in to how you serve. Your message should focus on outcome, transformation, what your audience can expect from you. Be courageous here, don't underplay it. Make a bold statement that you will have to push it a bit to back up. Don't promise what you can't deliver, but have the audacity to set the bar fairly high for your business.
"I create a product using the frequencies of flowers that heals negative emotional states." My tag line is "Effortless emotional healing for people and pets." My target audience is women from 30-70, who are into natural health care, self-improvement, and overcoming internal issues. The majority of them happen to be Wiccan or New-Agey although that is shifting.
For Dream Ventures, "I combine sound business strategy with prophetic insight to help Christian entrepreneurs launch and build their businesses." For a tag line, I have "Prophetic Profits Through the Business of Your Dreams."
Now you try! Just kidding, I have a worksheet to help you figure this out.
Creating a Movement
This is trickier. This is where people become very emotionally entrenched in your company. This is where they've caught your vision and want to partner and feel like they are a part of something much bigger than themselves, their issues, or your company. They are seeing world change coming out of you. It's up to you to provide this vision. How will your company change the world?
I know that seems like a huge question to ask, but it's not really. Any one of us can have a positive ripple effect. If you ponder for a long time on this assignment and cannot see the transformative aspect to what you do, then why are you doing it? How is this going to fulfill you if you are not serving something outside yourself? And the thing is, you aren't changing the world all by yourself, you're enlisting a passionate, highly motivated army to help. Think David and the Cave of Adullum gang. "And everyone who was in distress, everyone who was in debt, and everyone who was discontented gathered to him. So he became captain over them. And there were about four hundred men with him."
These people are either the makings of a rebel army or the start of something really good! It's up to you to point them in a positive direction. An unprincipled leader might have made those 400 men into a gang of rebels or cutthroats, but David did not allow this to become a rebellion against King Saul. This is where you seriously shine. The bigger part of your job is to take the malcontents in your market and redirect in a positive manner.
Remember last module where you use the leverage of how we are wired to move away from pain first and foremost and then towards pleasure? There's a clue to your movement in what your people are moving away from. There's always a rulership that the group doesn't want to be under. It's never an actual person, it's usually a system or paradigm, sometimes a company or institution, a societal norm, or even an internal saboteur. For Freedom Flowers, often it's Big Pharma. People don't want the pain, but also don't want the normal route of medication. We can never say such a thing or we'd get our heads lopped off but that is an unspoken and understood undercurrent.
Your rallying cry is pretty easy when the pain is all out there on the surface and your community already knows what they don't want. But if it's under cover, and people are feeling the pain but not able to identify the source, you will have to help them bring it to the surface.
An example of one of my created movements - oh boy did I go big or go home, I decided we were going to eliminate mass shootings after my cousin was involved. Oh boy, did people rally. They put it all over social media, they emailed their friends, emailed me, they are still emailing me... When you light a fire under people, make sure you have the ambition to lead the charge lol. Unfortunately, I wasn't up to how big this was gonna get, and I let it fizzle.
Here's the email, my most opened one ever, right here with the details of how I did it. Subject line: I need your help
The followup email a week later. My follow up to last weeks outburst.
I have the best customers in the world. The best.
Ok, so, I'm putting the worksheet right here so you can copy and paste, then post below, because I do want to see all your work. This is essential homework! You are going to save so much time, effort and expense by marketing to the right people!
Niche Worksheet:
â—¦ What are the defining characteristics of those you serve? Think about age, sex, career, location, interests, income level... What are the labels that would allow them to self-select?
â—¦ Who do you most love to work with? What type of person is energizing for you to work with?
â—¦ What are their biggest challenges? What problems do they have that they would pay to have a solution for?
â—¦ What do they want? What is the transformation, benefit, or outcome your product or service brings?
â—¦ Where do these people hang out? What groups do they belong to? What blogs, websites, Facebook pages or forums do they read or participate in? What products and services do they already pay for? These answers will help you find joint venture partners and places to advertise.
Movement questions: (It's ok if you don't have this part figured out right now. Just think about it... I don't generally include my movement creating vision in my one sentence what-I-do spiel.)
â—¦ What kind of movement can you create? This is connected to your deep why, your passion, it's probably somewhere in your vision exercise.
â—¦ How can you provide the bigger vision for your audience?
â—¦ What's the shared purpose in your community? What are you all moving toward and/or away from?
â—¦ How can you connect with your audience in a way that evokes the emotion of them being a part of something big and meaningful?
Now putting it together into the one power packed sentence, what is it that you do?
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