A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about identifying a niche you can compete in within your broader market and how crucial that is for the success of your young consulting business.
Because the truth is, if you try to sell to everyone, you’ll end up selling to no one.
In that post, I gave you some broad direction about how to go about this—specifically, my “niche it, then twist it” approach. But that was really a “30,000-foot level” look at the whole niching process.
Let’s assume that you’ve followed the suggestions from that post and started working to position yourself in such a way that your business can stand out as unique within your market. Great!
But my guess is, you still have a lot of questions about how to proceed. Never fear. In today’s post, I’ll dig into this topic in more detail and give you a seven-step process you can follow to really start sharpening your niche focus.
You may have already done some work on steps 1 and 2 below in your initial niche work. That’s good. If you feel like you’ve done those steps to your satisfaction, you can skip ahead to step 3.
However, if there’s any doubt that you have a solid handle on both your competitors’ positioning and how you fit into the landscape of your market, you might want to revisit steps 1 and 2 and go through this process from the beginning.
OK, with that preamble, let’s look at the process for not only establishing yourself in a niche, but dominating that niche, as well.
7 Steps to Dominate Your Niche
Before I launch into the process, let me just point out a couple of important caveats.
First, this process has some recursiveness built into it. That means that, for the process to work maximally, there will be times that you will want to loop back to a previous step. I’ll point out the more common feedback loops to be aware of as I walk you through the steps.
Second, in the big picture, this is not a process that you do once and you’re done with it. Rather, any time you feel that your niche positioning is “slipping” in some way, you should revisit this process and use it to check where that slippage might be coming from.
Perhaps your competitors have started to copy some of your approach and you’re losing your grip on your niche. Perhaps conditions have changed in the marketplace and your prospects are now experiencing new problems or are now looking for new solutions. Perhaps a competitor has begun offering a similar solution to yours but in a different format that prospects are drawn to (moving from a live presentation-only delivery model to an online course model or webinar format, for example).
To prevent such slippage in your positioning, it’s a good idea for you to plan to revisit this process regularly. You can, of course, run through the whole exercise anytime you feel the need, but for regular maintenance purposes, I suggest that you plan to go through the process once a quarter (perhaps January 1, April 1, July 1, and October 1) or on whatever regular schedule works best for you.
Now, on to the process.
Step 1: Competitive Analysis
The first step is to know who your competitors are and what they’re doing, in as much detail as possible. There are different ways to go about this, but they all revolve around keywords, since searching the Internet has become the primary way most of your prospects will be looking to find a solution to their problem.
One way you can start is by using a keyword research tool such as my favorite, Ubersuggest. This tool allows you to enter your primary keywords into the tool and see not only how popular those keywords are in search, but also which other websites are using that keyword and how highly they’re ranking. Using this tool, you can quickly identify who your main competitors are.
Your next step would be to look up your competitors’ sites and start investigating what they’re doing (or you could skip the keyword research tool and type your keywords directly into Google and browse the returns to find your main competitors).
However you get there, once you’ve landed on your competitors’ sites, take some really detailed notes. You’ll want to look at the copy on their sites and see what logical and emotional appeals they’re making to their prospects. You’ll want to look at their offers—what products and services do they offer, and how do they measure up to what you offer? You’ll want to look for things they’re doing that are unique and that you might learn from, and you’ll also want to look to see what they’re NOT offering that you think might be a gap you could fill.
Run through this process with as many of your top competitors as you feel you need to in order to get a good handle on what people are doing within your niche.
Step 2: Identify an Unsolved Problem
Next, ask yourself what problem or problems your prospects have. Really try to put yourself into their shoes and imagine what their lives are like as they deal with the problem.
This is a crucial step that many businesses skip entirely. They’re so busy figuring out what they want to offer that they never pause to consider what their prospects actually want and need.
Once you think you have a good idea about what problem(s) your prospects have, look back at your competitive analysis from step one and see what kind of job your competitors are doing at offering solutions to that problem (if they’re addressing it at all).
If you discover that your competitors are doing a poor job of addressing your prospects’ problem(s), that gives you an opportunity to step in.
With steps 1 and 2, you’re looking to identify a gap or “hole” in the market that you can fill with your expertise. This will become your niche.
And don’t worry at this stage if you feel like you’re doing a lot of guesswork. You’re just getting started, and you’ll fine-tune this in the next two steps. But for now, simply use your experience and your imagination to put yourself in your prospects’ position to see how well or poorly the businesses in your niche are serving them.
Step 3: Know Your Prospects
The third step is to really get as clear as possible about your prospects (also called your Ideal Clients). Who are these people? What problems do they have? What keeps them up at night? What drives them? What do they want to achieve?
You will want to write this all out in a detailed description, what some people call a Customer Avatar.
Now, before I go any farther, I want to warn you about a problem that happens to consultants all the time. Since consulting is a B2B (business to business) endeavor, you will need to be selling your services to the person who is actually going to be paying you for your work. For most educational consultants, that’s an administrator of some type—a principal, a curriculum director, even a superintendent.
Of course, the ultimate end users of your advice are probably going to be classroom teachers, and of course, your products and services will be developed to solve their problems and help them do their work better. But the person you really need to sell is the one in charge of hiring you.
So, when you’re going through this exercise, don’t just think about the teachers you will serve with your products or services, but also include those administrators who might be hiring you when you create your Customer Avatar.
Shoot for at least a full page of description that includes attributes of both the teachers who will benefit from your products and services and the administrators who will hire you. The more detail you can get down, the better.
Step 4: Communicate with Your Prospects
OK, by now you should have a pretty good idea about who your prospects are in the abstract. But step 4 is where the rubber meets the road. Now you actually need to talk to as many of these people as possible and ask them what they want and need.
Everything up to this point has been just a way to prepare you for this step.
The first sub-step within Step 4 is to take your Customer Avatar and try to find as many people as you can who fit that description. Start by simply brainstorming a list of people you already know who are at least close to your description. These are the low-hanging fruit.
Once you’ve done this, start looking in other places and continue to build out your list. Use the search functions of your preferred social media sites to identify connections who are similar to your Customer Avatar. Add these people to your list.
If you already have an in-house mailing list for your consulting business, look through it and identify the people on your list who most closely resemble your Customer Avatar.
Now for the next sub-step. Reach out to the people on your list and ask them what their biggest challenges are and what the perfect solution to those challenges would look like. You’re looking to identify unmet needs that your prospects have that also overlap with your expertise and skill set.
Of all the aspects of running a business, this step is the most important—actually asking your prospects what they want and need—but I’m constantly amazed that so few business owners and consultants never think to do this. They think they already know what their audience needs. In most cases, they’re wrong, but they won’t know it because they don’t ask.
Don’t make the same mistake.
How do you ask them? Any way that makes sense. Call them up if you have phone numbers or e-mail them and set up a Zoom call. An actual conversation will give you more information than any other approach.
For those you don’t know as well, send them an e-mail and give them a list of questions to answer. Or send out a survey with some carefully worded questions. The how isn’t important. Just do it and take good notes. This information will guide you in the next two steps of the process.
Step 5: Develop Products and Services to Solve Your Prospects’ Problem(s)
Now you know what your prospects want and need because you asked them and they told you. You can’t get any better market research than that!
Now your job is so much easier. All you need to do now is to create the products or services your prospects told you they needed.
If their needs overlap well with your expertise, then this step should be easy. But if the solution(s) they need are a bit outside of your expertise, it’s no biggie. Kick yourself into research mode and find the answers they need and turn them into a product or service.
So many times, consultants spend hundreds of hours creating a product or service that they think their prospects will want. And then, when they launch it, they find out that no one really wanted it at all.
But since you asked your prospects directly what they needed, you know that you’re on the right track and when you get the product or service produced, you know that there will be a market for it.
Step 6: Educate Your Prospects
OK, if you’ve followed steps 1 through 5, you now have a product or service that you know your prospects want and need. Fantastic!
But I want to offer another warning here. Don’t simply jump from production mode to selling mode.
People today, including your prospects, are used to a different kind of seller/buyer interaction than people a generation ago. Back then, it was all high-pressure sales tactics.
But the big movement in business in the last decade has been what’s called “content marketing.” In brief, in content marketing, you give your prospects tons of good, free content to help them with their problems. You build a relationship with them. You get them to know, like, and trust you.
And only then do you try to sell them a product or service. It’s a much softer sell than the old-fashioned approach. People expect you to provide them with a lot of value before you ask them to pull out their wallets. And if you provide that value, they will be more than happy to purchase.
You may be wondering how you go about educating your prospects. That depends on you and your skill set. If you’re a good writer, writing a regular blog makes the most sense. If you’re comfortable doing video, doing a vlog or having a YouTube channel might be best. If you like to talk to people but don’t really like to see yourself on camera, maybe a podcast is your best bet.
No matter what vehicle you use, the key is to communicate with your followers regularly and work to build a connection.
Step 7: Communicate with Your Prospects
You may notice that Step 7 is the same as Step 4. That’s because communication is the key to everything in business.
In Step 4, the main goal of your communication was to get direction from your prospects about what products and services they wanted and needed so you could develop those products and services.
The communication we’re talking about here is Step 7 is the kind of non-stop feedback loop type of communication you can tap into if you’re constantly interacting with your prospects on social media, conversing with them when they comment on your blogs or videos, or when they reply to an e-mail you sent out.
If you hear from your prospects that their needs have changed, you can loop back to Step 5 and create a new product or service to serve them.
And, of course, every time you run through the full process from the beginning as part of your business maintenance, you will be looking again at what your competitors are doing and checking to see if you’re still positioned in a unique spot within your niche.
Conclusion: Your Pathway to Guru Status
Most consultants I know have the ultimate goal of gaining “guru” status within their niche. They want to be the person their prospects think of first when they think about professional development.
But most of them simply wish and hope that it will happen. I hate to be the one to break it to them, but if I must, I will: there’s no magic “guru fairy” that’s going to fly over their heads and sprinkle guru dust on them.
Becoming a guru is hard work. You have to have real expertise in a niche. But even more important, you have to have a systematic process that you walk through regularly to ensure that you’re uniquely positioned in your niche and to ensure that you are providing solutions to your prospects’ needs better than anyone else in the niche.
The process I’ve outlined here will do that for you. Since 99% of consultants employ the “wish and hope” approach, if you follow the process outlined in this post, you’ll automatically put yourself in the top 1%–and that’s pretty much the definition of a “guru.”
