Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve shared several ways that you can create a unique offer unlike anything anyone else in your field is currently offering.
We’ve talked about how you could…
- Differentiate yourself from your competitors by “niching down” and serving a more narrow, highly specific audience with a more narrow, highly specific problem
- Differentiate yourself by sharing the “origin story” of how you discovered the strategies you now teach, how they changed your life as an educator, and how they can change the lives of those educators you now train
- Differentiate yourself by having a different process or methodology for how you go about doing your training, consulting, and coaching work with your audience
- Differentiate yourself by paying better attention to your audience’s “dream outcome” and offering hyper-focused solutions (that no one else is offering) to help them achieve that outcome
- Differentiate yourself by helping your Ideal Clients get the results they want faster (decreased time delay) and/or easier (decreased effort and sacrifice)
The truth is, if you do ANY of the things on the above list (not to mention some combination of them) and do it well, you’ll have more business flocking to you than you can handle in no time…because doing so will set yourself apart as a “category of one” in your field.
But today, I want to offer you another little trick to help set your offer apart…
Give it a catchy name.
The Power of a Name Shouldn’t be Underestimated
Now, I know that sounds like a little thing. And in one way, it is.
After all, just because you call your offer one thing as opposed to something else doesn’t change the substance of what you’re offering in any way.
But here’s the thing…
People gravitate toward offers with catchy names. It’s something about human psychology. When we can hang a name on a thing, it makes it stand out to us. It makes it memorable.
But beyond that, there’s a second, even more powerful reason to hang a unique name on your offer…
It sets it apart from what anyone else in your field is offering.
The Power of a Name to Differentiate Your Business from the Competition
Here’s an example: Maybe you and another consultant in your field offer very similar trainings to your audiences.
But if the other guy’s pitch is just to “hire me for my consulting work” and your pitch is “hire me and I’ll teach you my Terrific Test Scores in 10 Days Blueprint,” which one stands out the most?
The second one. 100%.
And once you hang a name on your offer, no one else can steal it. It’s now your intellectual property.
So, the first step is to identify what that unique thing is about your product or service that sets you apart from everyone else in the market. Hopefully, you’ve got that nailed down now.
Now it’s time for step two: coming up with the name for your service.
It has to be descriptive of what you do, of course. But it also needs to be impressive-sounding and memorable.
Tips for Finding the Perfect Name
Certainly, you can use your brain and come up with a name for your product or service without any help. But here are a couple of tried-and-true tips others have found effective.
- Make the last word of the name a “container word”–a word that shows that your service contains a certain amount of cool stuff inside. Common container words used as the final word in a service name include: Blueprint, Bootcamp, Intensive, Masterclass, Program, Experience, Summit, Accelerator, Fast Track, Shortcut, Sprint, System, Transformation, Game Plan, Framework, Deep Dive, Workshop, Reset, Solution, Hack, or Cheatcode. There are many more possibilities, but that should give you the idea.
- Then, if possible, use alliteration (the same letter to start multiple words in the title) or rhyme (two or more words in the title that rhyme)–This makes your offer title catchy and memorable. So, if you teach hands-on science instruction, your offer might be the Hands-On, Minds-On Masterclass. If you teach classroom management strategies, your offer might be the Better Behavior Bootcamp. If you show teachers how to better teach mental math, your offer might be the Mental Math Mastermind. See how that works?
Now, I know from working with some of my coaching clients on this that you might be tempted to pooh-pooh this idea of coming up with a catchy name for your program.
And I know that it seems like such a little thing that you might prefer to just skip it.
I implore you not to.
The power of a name is often underestimated. The right name sets you apart from all of your competitors and makes your approach memorable to those looking to hire someone in your field.
So yeah, maybe it’s a little thing…but it can pay off BIG!
OK, we’re almost through our series on creating killer offers and almost through with our entire series on positioning.
But I have one more trick for making your offer “so good people would feel stupid saying no.” And I’ll share that with you in my next post…
See you then.
To Your Success,
Willy
