In my last post, I shared one of the most important lessons you could ever learn about marketing…
“Don’t be better; be different.”
The truth is, as long as you offer something that’s essentially the same as your competitors and you try to somehow do it incrementally better, you’ll never differentiate yourself enough to grab a bigger share of the available work in your consulting field.
Instead, you need to find ways to distinguish yourself from your competitors.
How to Differentiate Your Business–The Unique Mechanism
This is where the marketing concept of “unique mechanism” comes into play.
A unique mechanism is the thing about your offer that’s different from everyone else’s offer and gives your Ideal Clients hope that your solution will work for them, even though they’ve tried other solutions before.
Of course, in order to come up with a unique mechanism you can use in your business, you first need to be aware of how others in your market are trying to sell their products or services to prospects so you can choose a strategy and language that will allow you to compete.
Luckily, if you’ve been following along with this series of blog posts about positioning and done the competitor research I’ve assigned, you’ve already done the necessary legwork to find the gaps in your market where you can establish your unique mechanism.
So, armed with that knowledge, let’s talk about how to differentiate your business from others in your field. Here are three approaches that have worked for many consultants in a variety of fields:
Approach #1: Differentiate by “Niching Down”–One of the easiest ways to grab a bigger share of your market is by simply getting more specific about who you serve and how. The truth is, most educational consultants use vague, generic language to describe what they do.
If I read about another consultant offering to provide “practical, research-based strategies” and “best practices,” I think I’ll throw up. Most consultants’ workshop descriptions and keynote descriptions are full of such mindless edu-speak, and reading them, you’re left not really knowing what you’re getting if you were to hire them.
Instead, get hyper-specific. If your expertise is really working with high school Civics teachers (a specific “who”) to help them teach their students to become more knowledgeable and empathetic citizens (a specific “what”) through real-world problem solving and service learning approaches (a specific “how”), then you need to say exactly that in your marketing.
The more specific you get with your “who,” “what,” and “how,” the more your Ideal Clients will understand that you are exactly the PD provider they’ve been looking for. If you used the same vague edu-babble that all the other social studies consultants use, your Ideal Clients would never be able to tell you from all the others in the field.
Now, let me address the elephant in the room. I know you’re thinking, “Yeah, but if I get really specific, I’ll lose clients because they’ll know I’m offering something that’s not for them.” Well, yes, you will lose out on some clients, but the only clients you’ll lose out on are the clients who you wouldn’t have enjoyed working with anyway.
But when you get really specific with the language of your offer, you’ll attract exactly the right people–the ones who’ll love to work with you and who you’ll love working with. And there will be plenty of them out there to fill your calendar, I promise.
Approach #2: Differentiate Through Your Story–Another way to differentiate yourself is to think about the “origin story” of what you’re getting ready to offer to your prospects. How did the idea for your offer come about?
Think about your “before” state (before you found or created this product or before you discovered the principles behind the approach you now use in your service) and then think about the “after” state (your current state where things are so much better than they used to be—thanks to your product or service).
Write down the story of the transformation that took place in your life and work between your “before” and “after” states. This is the journey you now hope to take your Ideal Clients on if they hire you.
For example, let’s say that during your teaching years, you became interested in learning about human psychology and the psychological “triggers” that drive people to act the way they do. And let’s further say that you then came up with a way to incorporate these psychological triggers into the way you structure your lessons and assignments in your classes–an approach so unique and effective that your peers kept asking you to show them how you do it. And that, upon realizing that other teachers could benefit from this approach, you decided to become a consultant to share the approach more widely. [Note: I just totally made this teaching approach up to use as an example, but it sounds cool, right?]
If you had a unique origin story like that, one of the best ways to market yourself would be to simply tell the story of how you came to do what you do. Since your story is unique to you, it would automatically set you apart from everyone else in your field.
Approach #3: Differentiate Through Process–Another way to set yourself apart from others would be to emphasize how you do things if your approach differs from others in your field.
Maybe your presentation style is unique (super high energy, with music and movement and mini group “projects” built into your workshops for small groups to complete, for example). Maybe, in addition to full group workshops, you offer small group coaching via Zoom calls for each grade level group or content area as a way to help all the teachers find specific applications of the material to their own situations. Maybe nobody else in your field goes into teachers’ classrooms and does model instruction using the teachers’ own kids and then offers debriefing for the teachers afterwards–but you do. Basically, any methodology that you use that’s different from anyone else in your field, that would be something for you to highlight as a differentiating factor.
So, those are three ways to come up with your “unique mechanism” that sets you apart from everyone else in your field.
You can use any of the three. Or, even better, some combination of two or even all three of these. The more ways you make the differences between you and your competitors clear, the more you set yourself apart and attract exactly the right people you’d love to work with.
Do this right, and your Ideal Client Avatars will land on your site, read your description of what you do, and say to themselves, “Wow, there’s nobody else out there doing that! That’s the person I want to work with!”
Now, we’ve only scratched the surface on ways to set yourself apart from your competition, so make sure to catch next week’s blog post, where I’ll share a formula you can use to identify even more specific ways to differentiate yourself.
Till then…
To Your Success,
Willy
P.S.–I know that sometimes, when I talk about the topic of differentiating oneself from the crowd in one’s field, I have consultants who just don’t believe that it can be done.
They’ll say things to me like, “Well, there are only so many ways to teach Algebra effectively. I can’t reinvent the wheel.”
If you’re also not sure about how this would work in your situation, feel free to run your questions and concerns by me. I’d be happy to trouble-shoot and problem-solve with you.
Just reply in the comments, or hit me up at willy@edconsultantmarketing.com.
Willy
