One-size-fits-all marketing is never going to make you stand out from the crowd, nor is it going to allow you to easily and consistently engage with your ideal customers.
Your marketing needs to offer the same level of ‘customer journey’ as consumer marketing does. Quickly and consistently resonate with a specific customer and attract them to want to know more.
Why you may ask?
Because it allows your business to much more easily develop increased opportunities for targeted, relevant, and timely engagement with your potential customers.
The challenge for many small business owners and consultants is aligning their content strategy with their sales and other business activities. Hold on a moment! Content strategy? OMG!
I see so many offering services within crowded markets where their marketing content is very similar to many others in their sector. Add to that fact that many only share or publish their content sporadically and without any thought to strategy, its pretty much guaranteed that your content, your launch news or your latest offer won't really get seen by the people you want to attract and work with.
This is where the need to really niche your service offering comes to the fore.
Even if your content is reserved for a monthly blog and weekly social media posts on just one social channel – you should definitely have a strategy and book in regular time to deliver on it, or work with someone who can do that for you of course! There is no point in reactive or ad-hoc content being created and shared without any thought to how that aligns with your business goals and those ideal customers that you want to work with.
And its key to differentiating in what for many is a crowded market.
So, for example, you offer HR Consultancy:
To who?
Is it sector-specific?
Is it also discipline-specific as HR, like marketing, covers many different elements?
An HR Consultant I worked with was new to setting up her own business. Like most of my customers, she had a wide commercial knowledge, loved some aspects of her specialism more than others and had worked within one particular sector (manufacturing) for a significant part of her corporate career. So we focused developing her niche and her marketing messages to offer HR Consultancy specialising in Industrial Relations & Employee Engagement for the UK wide Manufacturing Industry.
So you could focus on an industry or niche even more to give you your own clearly defined market, and offer certain disciplines specifically for that industry.
Creating your niche in a crowded market will guarantee your marketing efforts become a key tool in growing your business.
I know you already have a very full to-do list so what I am going to say next is not going to be what you want to read! Successful marketing is not a half-hour job done once every couple of weeks or just whenever you have spare time.
Ideally, it takes an in-depth understanding of your target audience and regular time invested each week, (or month if you prefer to create content in batches) with everything that is published being designed to attract, inspire, excite and entice your ideal customers to want to know more and sign up to work with you because you offer exactly what they need.
And this works because you know:
Who you are talking to
The challenges they have and how you can help them overcome those
The topics and focus of your content to resonate with them
And remember that all your customers went on a journey before they were your customer. From discovering who you are to building that all-important know, like, and trust; to signing up for your services and eventually becoming a brand advocate for your business.
These steps are how marketing content can positively impact the overall customer experience that you offer and ultimately your bottom line.
If that resonates with you then let’s have a chat.