Professional speaker marketing tip
Most professional speakers, consultants, coaches, and solopreneurs have a hard time moving into a niche or declaring a specialty. Most want to attract as much business as possible, so they go for broad marketing across all topics, categories, and industries, trying to attract all audiences for all that they can offer.
If you fall into this trap, your marketing messages get spread so thin that soon, you’re spending more and more time, effort, and money on marketing and getting less and less return. Does this sound familiar?
The truth is that successful experts know who they are – they “move aside” and specialize in a niche. They focus more energy on marketing their “flagship” services to a very specific target market.
Why? Because – unlike Wal-Mart or Citibank, your business can’t be all things to all people. “Move Aside” is about finding your niche, and claiming your expertise in a narrow area of specialty. In plain English, this means you want to become the “Go-To Guy” or “Go-To Gal” for your specific audience – the exact opposite of a “jack-of-all-trades and master of none.”
Perhaps you want to be known as “the consulting firm that knows the insurance industry inside and out” or “the restaurant marketing coach” or “the manufacturing turnaround expert.”
Maybe you want to appeal to corporate executives with an elite image or appeal to family business owners with a homespun image.
The people you speak with will have a very different reaction to these two mental images of your products/services:
- “I think you might be a good fit...”
- “Finally! You are exactly who we’ve been looking for!”
Let me give you an example that will make this point very clearly.
In my hometown in suburban Philadelphia, there’s a real company that lists among its services “Carpet Removal, House Cleaning, Odd Jobs, Catering.”
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I want a caterer, I’m looking for someone who does professional catering all the time. I don’t want to have to worry about “Did they wash their hands after the carpet removal job and before serving the guests at my daughter’s wedding?”
In fact, even among “serious” catering companies (the ones that don’t do carpet removal) if I’m looking for a caterer for a wedding, I’ll probably be drawn to “Wedding Bells Catering” much more so than “Sam’s Catering” or “Good Eats Catering.” In today’s marketplace, specialists rule.
Create your own special niche. Developing a specialty can go a long way to attracting more substantial clients. Being known as the “experts” in a particular field gives you the opportunity to stand out from the crowd. This is the edge that will tend to draw prospective clients to you. The bottom line: more speaking gigs, more consulting offers, more coaching clients, more revenue, more referrals, and taken together, just a whole lot more fun in running your professional practice.
The fact is that the marketplace values clarity, focus, and direction.
Once you become known for being great at one thing, your company can spread its wings and start to attract more business across the board through a powerful “Halo effect.” If you get known over time for being great at one thing, in the future, people will begin to naturally assume you’re great in a variety of other ways, too. However, if you try to say you’re great at everything on Day 1, nobody will believe you!
The only way to know if this will work for your business is to try it! You’ll be pleased with the speed and magnitude of the results.
What do you think? What's YOUR success story with moving aside? Agree? Disagree? Please use the COMMENTS area below to jump into the conversation...
My advice for both emerging and experienced professional speakers is to "invest in the relationship" with meeting planners and conference producers. What do I mean by that and why is it important for your success?