I often talk about niching down and why your business needs to niche. We go into detail about how to find the profitable niche that's right for you and how you decide the playing field and determine who the players are.
The riches are in the niches
That's still true but I have an apology to make, a confession. Niching down on its own isn't enough.
Once you have a focus and you're very specific on your niche, clear on your targeted audience, you're halfway there.
You'll learn that it's not about having hoards and hoards of clients. It's more about having the right clients. The narrower the audience, the better you can get to know them on a deep, personal level instead of spreading yourself thin and ‘dilution is not the solution’ as they say.
It's time to answer how niching down isn't enough.
Your specific niche is the start. How urgent and important the pain or problem is that you solve for your niche is really where the riches are. This is where you can take your service from something that would be 'nice to have' to your audience saying 'I need this in my life'. (And if you've ever watched a ShamWOW commercial you'll know exactly what I mean).
In my Clients Like Clockwork® program, I take clients through a module on how to create utterly irresistible offers. How to wrap your service offering up in so much value. The important distinction to make here is to find out how valuable the value really is for your clients. This is because the irresistibility of your offer is directly tied to the value you are able to present. And for your offers to be truly, utterly irresistible you must create a sense of INTERNAL URGENCY.
Your aligned clients should immediately recognise that you can solve their problem or scratch an itch that they simply can't reach on their own. The more immediate and more troublesome the itch, the more valuable your offer will be and the more eager your clients will be to bite your hand off and put an end to their discomfort.
How big and important is the pain or problem for your niche?
There are many ways you can dig to find out what your niche's biggest pain points are. You could start by a simple Google search, your service area plus the word "struggles" and see what it brings up.
Let's do a search. I've Googled "hiring a web agency struggles" and this is what's come up.
"They use a lot of jargon, you don't get the support you need when you go live, they don't take the time to understand your business."
The list goes on and that was in the top third of the page, I haven't even started to dig into the plethora of articles or "people also ask" section.
The time you take gathering intel to understand exactly where your clients' itches are is going to help you put together the perfect treatment.
This is a great opportunity, not only so that you can put together an offer in a way that your client will care about it, you have a raft of ideas to help with defining your unique selling proposition and creating content to squash any objections your niche audience might have.
There are plenty of other ways to gather intel and find out your niche audience's biggest pains and problems. It's the second part of niching down and finding the riches in the niches.
As business owners, we want to create the kind of service or experience that makes our aligned clients sit up and say "this is exactly what I need" or better yet, "it's like you read my mind".
Get to know your aligned client really well
I've briefly touched on gathering intel, what you want to do is take all of that and what you're learning about your niche and create a Perfectly Aligned Client Avatar. I often get a lot of resistance with clients when we set out on this work but as everyone always comes to realise, the elbow grease you put in now with your PAC pays dividends in all sorts of ways. Most importantly the PAC avatar helps you to shape your offers, market and sell exactly what your aligned clients need most.
Let's get what the Perfectly Aligned Client avatar is exactly and get that out of the way. This is an avatar, a profile that represents who your aligned client is, this single person who needs what you've got and they're aligned, as in you will love working with them. This is going to give you focus, every time you sit down to write content, an offer, a promotion you'll have this avatar in front of you so you can speak to them directly.
If you'd like to work with me on this, I've created a cheat sheet for you to get working on your avatar. Grab the free download at https://www.workwithsian.com/pac
Remember, I've spoken about this before, if you're selling to everyone you're selling to no one which means your message won't be clear, it won't be relevant and dilution is not the solution. Use the avatar worksheet to get hyper-focused. This is actually going to help you to stand out and resonate most with the aligned clients you want to speak with.
The idea behind the avatar worksheet and this exercise is to put yourself in the shoes of your clients. You want to understand what they like, what they don't like, their opinions, aspirations and very importantly their frustrations and fears. This doesn't need to be complicated and it's easier than you think.
When I ran branding and web projects back in my agency days, this was an exercise I'd go through with clients so we were designing for their audience. I've taken everything I've learned from decades of doing that and simplified it for you here and made it more specific to creating offers, messaging and education-based marketing.
You can do a bit of research, speak to a few people, do some questionnaires, root around LinkedIn groups, look at your competitors and their reviews. There are many ways to do some online investigative research and I highly encourage you to do that.
What it boils down to when you've done the research, you've worked on your avatar or profile, I want you to be able to answer one question, "what keeps them up at night?"
When you think you've hit that nerve and you've found the one big thing, it's time to validate. Speak to some of your audience and make sure that what you've uncovered, what you've come up with truly resonates and there's nothing better than doing that in person, on a call or an online meeting. I know what you're thinking but the success of your offer, your messaging, your marketing is just on the other side of your comfort zone.
That's why we dedicate a whole week to this inside the Clients Like Clockwork program® because with the best marketing in the world, won't matter if your service and your offer isn't solving the biggest pain or problem for your niche.
Once you've put in the work, it's plain sailing from here on out and I can't wait to see your business thrive.
On a parting note, even if you've been through this process in the past, we have all been through so much change lately it's a good time to refresh your aligned client avatar or start over. Who knows what opportunity you might uncover.
📝 If I can help you with uncovering your niche and working on how you can dominate by narrowing down, DM me on social media or email me hello@workwithsian.co.uk and let's talk.
