Too often, the reason why businesses fail is because the business owner prefers to do the day-to-day activities of servicing his clients to the detriment of running a business. Many service professionals hate the concept of business development or rainmaking. They don’t want to be out there getting clients. They want to be working with clients.

Unfortunately, this mindset can only lead to frustration and chaos. You will never know where your next client will come from nor what your business will look like in a year or five years. You might dream big, wishing that you will suddenly get your big break and clients will flood your doors, but you don’t actually have a plan to make that happen.

In fact, when you look at your business objectively, you don’t really own your business. It owns you. What you’ve really created for yourself is a very demanding job that barely pays well given the number of hours you work. You must work to make money and if you stop working, your income ceases.

Developing a Marketing Mindset

Nothing happens until a sale is made. Selling is the process of getting prospects to exchange dollars for your products and services. Without selling, you have no income.

Marketing is the process of profitably finding and attracting qualified prospects to your business. I say profitably because most small business owners see marketing as an expense they have to do because everyone else is doing it, but they have no idea why their marketing doesn’t work as well as it should or even how well it is working. They know they have to get clients somehow, but they just aren’t sure what to do.

Rather than thinking of yourself as a consultant or lawyer or accountant, you must change your mindset and see yourself as operating a business that happens to market certain types of services. Developing a marketing mindset is the number one key factor to business success.

Putting an Effective Marketing System into Place

One of the reasons people like to buy franchises is because they already have effective business systems in place. How often do you hear of a McDonald’s going out of business? Not too often. That is because McDonald’s has spent years working out all the problems in their processes until they have a virtually no-fail business operation.

Yet few small businesses take the time to work out a system for running their business seamlessly and efficiently. They take on any client who comes their way, do things differently for each client, hope that client is satisfied, and then send them on their merry way. They have no idea how to continue to attract similar types of clients. They don’t have a systematized way to handle client work. And they don’t have a way to follow up with past clients for testimonials, referrals and repeat business.

The main reason they don’t take the time to put together and test efficient systems is because they believe it takes too much work. Who has time for that when they are struggling to keep their clients happy and pay the bills at the end of the month? Yet a bit of planning goes a long way.

If you can cut down your time spent working on client projects because you handle them the same way each time and are more efficient – and you ensure your clients walk away from you happy – wouldn’t that justify putting in that initial time spent creating your system? If it took you a few hours to create but you reaped the benefits of greater efficiency and time management for the life of your business, isn’t that worth it?

How To Get Different Results

The biggest mistake that holds service providers back is looking to what everyone else is doing and trying to copy them. If the guy next door gets a new sign or brochure, you want one. If you see he’s running ads in a particular newspaper, you run some too. If he puts up a new website, you start working on yours.

You structure your business just like your competitors, set up similar operations, and market yourselves similarly – and yet you expect different results from what they are getting! You’ve probably heard the definition of insanity – doing the same things over and over and expecting a different result.

If you really want to get different results, you have to do things radically different. But what if you don’t want to “reinvent the wheel”? Well, that wheel is the hamster wheel you work in every day in hopes that you will eventually get different results. Do you really want to stay trapped in the wheel?

You will only be able to take your business to a new level when you start looking at it differently. Study successful companies outside your profession or industry and look at what they do differently. What makes them successful? Then, apply those techniques to your business.

The concept of the USP started with adman Rosser Reaves back in the ’60s. He wanted a short sentence that would make the products he was advertising memorable to his audience. What he wanted to do was tell prospects the reason why his product existed.

You’ve probably heard the following USPs:

• Dominos: Fresh hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed.
• Palmolive: Softens hands while you do dishes.
• FedEx: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.
• GEICO: We’ll help you save you up to 15 percent or more on car insurance

Each of these highlights a core benefit of a product or service. Dominos revolutionized the pizza delivery business when they decided to guarantee they’d get hot pizza to you in 30 minutes or you didn’t have to pay. Since they’ve grown bigger, they’ve removed the “or your pizza’s free” benefit, but they still focus on delivery in 30 minutes or less.

If you order a pizza through their website today, you can even see the time line from when your order was placed, to when it was being made, to when it was put in the oven, to when it was given to the delivery guy. They keep you updated with a 30 minute tracker that even lists the names of who was in charge of which task. And the pizza does arrive pretty close to 30 minutes later. It’s a pretty cool technology to really stress that 30 minute delivery time frame.

In the case of Palmolive, they aren’t the only dish soap that will soften your hands while you’re doing dishes, but they were the first to stress that benefit and claim that USP. This is a great way to differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace: Stress a benefit that others do too, but no one is explaining to prospects.

Your USP must position you uniquely in your market and be beneficial to your prospects. It’s not enough to just be unique or different from your competitors. You must also position yourself in a way that’s beneficial to your niche. If your prospects don’t see your USP as beneficial, then it won’t do much for you, so look at your marketplace and your competition. What aren’t they doing for prospects? What aren’t they explaining clearly to prospects? Look for the glaring holes and aim to fill them.

So how do you go about creating a USP? Your USP is based on:

• who your target audience is
• what you’ll do for them
• why that’s different from what others are offering
• why that solution matters to your target audience

Here are four steps to creating your USP:

1 – Brainstorm.

The first step to creating your USP is to write down whatever comes to mind when you think about your business. What are you most proud of? How do you enhance your clients’ lives? What do your best clients say about you? Where does your expertise lie? Try filling out the following statement:

“I help _____________your target audience______________
who are struggling with__your target audience’s problems______________
by ______________________ your solution______________________.
For instance, _____give an example of a success story__________________.”

2 – Shorten and clarify.

For your USP to be effective, you must be able to explain it in a short sentence or two. To that point, you’ll probably need to sit down and write a few pages about what you do, who your competition is, what market you’re in, what your prospects want, what needs aren’t being fulfilled, and even the history of your business. The goal is to eventually craft a concise statement that addresses prospects’ needs and clearly explains why you are the go-to company for a specific niche audience.

3 – Be able to prove what you say.

Bragging won’t sell your services. People are skeptical and to them, you are an unknown. They don’t know your reputation or success record. For all they know, you could be blowing a lot of hot air and wasting their time.

Instead of bragging, get good client testimonials that describe how great a job you did, how easily you solved their problem, how clearly you explained the steps in the process, how frequently you were in contact with them, and ultimately, how much time or money they saved by working with you. People are much more likely to believe what other people say about you than what you say about yourself.

4 – Test your USP.

The only way you’ll know if your USP resonates with your target audience is to test it. That means getting it in front of your potential prospects. Don’t bother asking friends for comments. They aren’t your niche prospects. They aren’t looking to hire you. And when they view your USP, they are looking at it in a vacuum, not the environment where you’ll actually use it.

Instead, try putting it on your blog or website, in your newsletters, or in your ads or mailings. Another great place to test it is by running a pay-per-click campaign with Google Adwords. You can run a campaign with a few different variations of your USP for a week or two to collect data. Then compare which ad campaign is getting the most click-throughs. Once you find something that’s working, you can try the USP in your offline advertising.

While crafting your USP, look at both your prospects’ biggest frustrations and what your competition is saying. Your USP should address those concerns and explain why you’re the best company for the job. Because you understand them. Because you’ve been in their shoes. Because you have the passions, skills, knowledge and success record they’re looking for.

Stop Bragging and Let Go of Ego

Most small-business owners tell prospects how long they’ve been in business, how many years of experience they have, that they provide exceptional customer service, that they pride themselves on doing good work, and so on. In other words, they brag about all the positive features of their company.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but bragging about your accomplishments won’t net you more clients. Instead, look at your business critically … and from the perspective of your prospects and clients.

When you have your own business, it’s really easy to get caught up in your own ego. It’s easy to think that your prospects should be as excited and enthusiastic about your business as you are. And it’s easy to think that when prospects go with another firm, that they’re rejecting you, personally.

Start Educating Prospects About their Needs and Concerns

To be successful in business, you must let go of those beliefs when you’re marketing your services. Business is not personal. Your prospects are making the best choice they can based on what they know at the time and how that fits with their worldview. It’s up to you to show them why you are the best choice – not through bragging, but through educating them about their problem, key issues and concerns they have, and potential solutions.

One of the best ways to do that is to not assume things about your prospect. Being in the trenches of your industry day-to-day, you take a lot of things for granted. You keep on top of trends. You know the lingo. You’ve helped many clients solve similar problems.

Don’t Assume Your Prospects “Should” Know Something

Your prospects, on the other hand, don’t know any of that stuff. They don’t know the jargon. They don’t understand everything about the transaction. They don’t know what you will do for them. They don’t understand why you are the best choice for them.

It’s up to you to not only explain, but demonstrate, why you should be their top pick. Speak in plain English and be as clear as you can. This isn’t about giving a sales pitch or persuading them to buy something they don’t need.

Your marketing should clearly state your case: Why should they choose you? Why will hiring you be the best solution to their current problem? What do they get when they do hire you? What should they expect when working with you? What’s the intended outcome of working with you? In other words, “What’s in it for me?” By remembering this principle, you can avoid this classic small business marketing mistake and dramatically increase the effectiveness of your marketing.

To be meaningful, your differentiating factor (aka Unique Selling Proposition) must be:

1. Specific to a niche – You have to pick a niche and craft your message based on their concerns and frustrations. If you have multiple niches, you’ll have to craft a different marketing message for each.
2. In line with your strengths – You have to be better than most – preferably all – other companies in something that is meaningful to your niche.
3. Different from your competition – If everyone else is promoting themselves the same way you are, then prospects perceive you as “just like them.” Take a look at how similar businesses are marketing themselves – who else is out there and what are they saying? What aren’t they talking about?

The key to differentiating yourself is to put yourself in your prospect’s mind. They are thinking, “What’s in it for me? How do I benefit?” Give prospects a compelling reason to hire you over all the other options out there.

A lot of small business owners fall into that trap because they think these ways are how they can “brand” themselves, thereby setting them apart. While these things may be part of your “identity” or how you package yourself and your services, they are not, by themselves, differentiating factors.

What is a Corporate Identity?

Your corporate identity the combination of your logo, visuals (typeface, colors, imagery), and tone for your company’s image. Large companies have style guides that define exactly what you can and can’t do with their logo. If you are an employee and are going to publish something under their company name, they’ll have specific pictures or fonts you have to use – so all of their marketing and promotions look consistent.

What is a Brand?

Your identity is not your brand. Your brand is the perception your prospects and clients hold about you or your firm. A designer cannot design a brand. You must strategically determine who you are, what you do, and why that is meaningful to your target audience. Then, your identity and marketing materials communicate that message.

Your brand is the collective sum of how each person you come into contact views you and your services. It’s the positive feeling they get when they think about you. It’s how they expect to be treated when they call you on the phone. It’s the service they anticipate when they hire you. And it’s how they convey who you are and what you do to their friends, family and coworkers.

What is Branding?

Branding is about trying to shape the impressions people have about you and your company. It’s not about manipulating people. People are much too smart for that to work. No advertising or branding campaign will help you if you are nasty, unethical or incompetent.

Instead, branding is about understanding who you are at your core and explaining clearly why people should do business with you (or on a personal level, have a romantic relationship or be friends with you.) It’s about making sure that every interaction people have with you is consistent with that core message.

Brands take time to build. In most cases, small businesses give up long before they have a brand established. In service-based businesses, you build a brand by presenting yourself as a specialist in a niche area, you become a leader in that niche, you consistently communicate your expertise by educating your prospects with your marketing, and you build up your reputation as happy clients talk about and refer business to you.

Unfortunately, becoming a specialist isn’t as easy as saying I’m a “specialist” or an “expert” in a particular area. To actually be perceived as the specialist, you must really and truly master your area. You must be aware of all the pitfalls and mistakes and obstacles your prospects will face, and know the solution to whatever the problem is – or at least have a good idea of where to look for that solution.

Just as athletes train for their big match or game, you must keep on top of whatever is happening in your niche. That requires continual education and listening to what your clients are telling you. It also requires keeping on top of industry changes like legal regulations, economic downturns, and local issues that might affect your clients.

The benefits of being a specialist are great.

1. You differentiate yourself from your competition so much that you are the obvious choice for your prospects – which gives you greater freedom to choose ideal clients and even turn away business that might not be right for you.
2. You gain authority and respect among your prospects, clients and peers as someone who can get the job done seamlessly and by providing excellent client service to boot.
3. You get a stable of happy clients who provide testimonials about your service and refer more business to you.

Most people don’t make it to that level because they don’t stick with it long enough. They want instant success. They want to skip the long hours required to learn and master the trade and go right to expert status. Those who do stick with it reap great rewards.

Most small-business owners don’t go that route. They open up shop and then decide to specialize when they realize they need to narrow their focus to affordably market their services.

The Problem of Reaching Prospects Affordably

The purpose of marketing is to attract and keep clients. The problem is if you try to reach too broad of an audience, you will quickly spend your marketing budget for not much return on investment.

By narrowing your focus and specializing, you become much more familiar with what clients want and need, what motivates them to solve their problems, and how they go about choosing which solution to purchase. Once you know those three things, marketing becomes incredibly easy.

If your focus is too broad or you don’t know much about the problems, concerns and frustrations of the people who buy your services, where would you find them? How would you attract their attention? How would you persuade them to hire you? Your marketing activities would be a crapshoot.

You would spend lots of time, effort and money marketing to everyone when only a tiny percentage would even see your message, and of those, only a smaller portion might buy from you. And you would spend much more money trying to get a client than you’d make by selling your product or service.

By narrowing your focus and learning what clients want most, you can tailor your marketing to fit their worldviews. Because you specialize in a niche audience, you will know how to reach them and which marketing tactics you should use. Here are 5 key factors to consider when choosing a niche market.

1 – Are Prospects Easy to Reach?

You need to be able to reach your target audience by some means. For instance, if they share common demographics, look for publications and associations that cater to this group. Look for magazines, journals, and newspapers – can you advertise or get a mailing list? If you are targeting businesses, go to trade shows, conferences and professional organizations where prospects might be. If you can’t find an association or publication that targets this group, chances are they won’t be a good target audience.

• What associations and groups do they belong to?
• What events do they attend? What conferences and workshops do they go to? Where do they network? What religious activities or charities do they belong to?
• What publications do they read (magazines, newsletters, websites)?
• What are their hobbies, such as cooking, sports, gardening, or travel?
• What TV shows do they watch?

2 – Can You Narrow Your Focus?

It is better to start out as a big fish in a small pond, with the option to branch out as you become more successful, than starting with too many people. For your marketing to be successful, you must have the resources to reach prospects repeatedly over time. If you’re just starting out, pick a smaller number of people to target and test your marketing messages through your advertising, websites and mailings to make sure it’s effective at attracting clients before expanding to a greater audience.

3 – Who Can You Serve Best?

What strengths, talents, skills and knowledge do you have? What are you most passionate about? Now consider which niche audiences would most value them. When choosing a niche market, you should choose people you feel comfortable working with, who you like working with, and who you can best serve.

4 – What is the Competition Like?

Every business has competition – what other businesses offer similar solutions to yours? If you are competing with well-established businesses in a small marketplace, it may be difficult to attract clients. Research who your competitors are, what services they offer, and how they market their businesses to assess your potential opportunities. The best niches are underserved, which means you don’t have a lot of competition, nor do one or two large companies dominate the market.

5 – Do Prospects Have an Unmet Need?

Ask your prospects what they feel is missing from their industry. What frustrates them? What would they like to fix most – and why haven’t they fixed it yet? The best niche markets have a point of frustration or unmet need that none of your competitors are addressing.

While choosing a niche market will take initial research on your part – and once you do start to get some clients, you’ll probably need to refine your niche a bit – it’s an extremely cost-effective way to grow your business in the long term.

Marketing is really all about psychology and understanding your prospects and clients. What are their biggest needs, concerns, motivations and behaviors? How do they view life?

The better you can answer those questions, the better you can create marketing materials that your prospects want to read. They want a specialist. They want a trusted adviser who can help them solve their problems. But you have to earn their trust first – before they will listen to you.

So how do you present yourself as a specialist? You tailor your marketing to those specific concerns your prospects are having. If it reads like it could apply to “anyone who needs my products or services,” you’ll sound like every other company out there competing for their business. And if you are perceived as just like “every other company,” why should they pick you if someone else is just as good? Why shouldn’t they ask you to lower your fee?

When you own a niche market and serve it well, you are the obvious choice over all your competitors because you specialize in a particular type of client and become the go-to person for that particular expertise. Niches give you the best chance of succeeding because you master everything there is to know about the frustrations and problems of a specific type of client.

Segmenting Your Market With Demographics and Psychographics

The first step to narrowing your focus and becoming a specialist in a certain niche is to look for what your prospects and clients have in common. There are generally two ways to segment your market: looking at demographics and looking at psychographics. Both will tell you quite a bit of information about your prospects.

1. Demographics – These are the basic facts about your prospect such as their age, gender, education, income, job type, and marital status. How a 22-year-old fresh out of college and looking for an entry level job looks at the world is different from a newly retired 65-year-old business executive.
2. Psychographics – Psychographics are more about the character, personality or worldview of the individual. For instance, are they optimistic or pessimistic? Do they take control over their life or are they a victim? Are they open- or closed-minded? Where does their sense of self-esteem come from?

Psychographics play a key role in how your prospect will react when you work together. For instance if someone is the “take control of their destiny” type, they will listen to your advice intently and will have done whatever tasks you gave them by the next meeting. Victims, on the other hand, will be more likely to come up with excuses why something wasn’t done. It might be because their dog died or they came down with a cold or something “just came up” and they have to reschedule their meeting with you.

Demographics tend to give you an idea of where your prospects are in life and what major life events might be influencing their decision while psychographics give you an idea of what working with these types of people will be like.

Back in the 1960s, it was much more likely you could reach virtually everyone. The average home received 5.7 TV channels. There were only 8,400 magazine titles, and 4,400 radio stations. As a marketer, you knew that if you were to advertise on TV during prime time, there was a good chance you’d reach people likely to buy your product.

Now we have 100s of TV channels, over 17,000 magazines, over 13,000 radio stations, over 25,000 internet broadcast stations. There are over 120,000 books published each year. And Google has indexed over 8 billion web pages.

Prospects Ignore What Isn’t Relevant To Them

It’s impossible to remember every bit of information we are exposed to each day, so in order to cope, we ignore the stuff that isn’t relevant to us.

Think about the last time you bought a car. As soon as you bought it, you started noticing how many other people have the exact model and color as yours.

Or the last time you planned your vacation. Suddenly, it seems everyone is advertising and offering information about the trip you want to take. Planning for Disney World in Orlando? Everyone now wants to send you information about hotels and local attractions.

That information was always in front of you. You just didn’t notice it because it wasn’t relevant to you until now, when you’re actually planning your trip.

Interrupting Prospects No Longer Works

Because prospects are overwhelmed with information, with choices, simply trying to get their attention by interrupting them just doesn’t work. Mass marketing such as TV commercials, print ads, radio commercials and the like “interrupt” prospects from whatever they are doing and ask them to pay attention to their jingle or witty dancing animal or car going from 0 to 60 on a winding road.

That used to work, somewhat. But now that type of advertising is much harder and requires far more money to make it work. What works better is providing relevant information about what your prospect is already interested in – what he is already searching for answers to. It’s so much easier to get his attention that way.

Reach Prospects By Providing Relevant, Educational Information

Information is everywhere – and your prospects know that anything they ever want to know is a Google search away and it will only take a few moments of their time.

While this is great for informational searches, it means everyone is suffering from information overload. Yes, they can find answers to whatever crosses their mind at the moment, but the bigger issue they now have is how accurate and up-to-date the information they’ve found is. Does it tell them exactly what to do to solve their problem or does it only focus on certain steps and leave out others? What about issues they haven’t even considered searching for?

That’s what your marketing should focus on. To grab people’s attention and get them to keep reading, you need to provide not just information, but organized knowledge that educates them about their problems and concerns and is worth their time to read.