How to get the right clients over and over again

One of the hardest parts about marketing is that a “hope for the best” strategy rarely works. It’s about being strategic about every part of your content, to build a message of trust, relationship and connection. This is important for every business owner but it’s especially important for a service provider who needs their leads and their customers to work with them, and trust them completely.

I’m a service provider, and most of the work we do is with other people providing services. Just like many others, working out how to define the niche, narrowing the arrow to make it really stand out amongst crowds of other strategists, coaches, experts and people parading as “thought leaders” was and is an ongoing iterative prcess that I’ve often got wrong in the past

I’m a sucker for not leaving anyone out! So my preference is to make it WIDE.

But that doesn’t do my business any favours. And it won’t do your business any favours either!

(This is the topic of a recent podcast of mine which you can listen to here ")

Our niche when we started our business will reshape, evolve and develop and sometimes completely change - because we change. If you’re still working off the same niche you developed ten years ago, and things are slowing down, maybe it’s time for a reset

To define our niche, we need to look at what we have to offer, and how we could stand out from others. I normally suggest getting paper and pen out for this, mainly because I’m generation x, and find I need to write it down with a pen for my creativity to flow.?

Spend time on each of the following four areas:

STEP ONE: Record all your experience

?First, write down all of your experience. Don’t limit yourself just to work experience. Think about your experiences in terms of places you’ve been, relationships you’ve had, defining moments of your life.?

STEP TWO: Note your expertise

?This might have some crossover with experiences, but here it’s really important to only talk about the areas you know you have a good level of competency, and know really well. Again, don’t necessarily limit yourself to work experience. We’re looking for potential combinations that you may not have considered before.?

STEP THREE: Brainstorm your interest and passions.?

These help define what you could incorporate into your content or may even help you define your niche by taking your expertise and bringing it to an audience who share the same interests as you do.

STEP FOUR: Write down all your weird

Don’t hold back. Find and note all the things that make you different from most. These help us find how we can stand out from other people in our industry. For instance a few of mine were my ADHD, my love of wearing fancy dress, and my habit of writing parody songs.

Using the information in all four areas helps us to find the best way for us to build trust with our ideal audience as it helps us more closely align our niche to ourselves.?

STEP FIVE: Highlight the best bits

The next step is to go through the brainstormed list and highlight all the parts that best represent who you are, that most shows your authority and expertise and also any topics or information you would feel interested enough to talk about for any length of time. (If we’re bored with our content, your audience will be too)

STEP SIX: Write your niche statement

Once you’ve highlighted these key areas, we use them to write a niche statement that tells us who we are going to serve or work with, what we will specifically do for them and what results we’d expect them to get from working with us. For example, you might have once said “I help you organise your systems.” A more specific niche is “I help small business owners create effective systems that give them at least eight hours more time a week.”

Use this structure I help xxxx, do xxxxxx, and this gives them xxxxx (you might need to use slightly different words but this structure works)

STEP SEVEN: Keep it to yourself but USE IT

One of the biggest mistakes service providers make is then repeat this niche sentence to everyone who will listen. It’s not a golden ticket to roll out everywhere to magically attract your ideal customers. In fact I don’t plan to ever mention my entire niche statement to anyone else besides my own coach, and to my clients when illustrating this point. While we can definitely use it to influence our content, and make sure everything we say in our marketing is on track, we don’t need to put this sentence everywhere. It instead helps us shape our decisions on our branding, content, messaging and marketing.?

For over ten years Rachel Klaver has worked with small business owners on their marketing, with a specific interest in content marketing strategy. She loves playing with language and shares her own marketing catchphrases such as "Be a kind spider" and "You have never killed a man with your face" As a small business owner, often low on time, and with a distinct aversion to admin, Rachel loves helping other small businesses catch the marketing bug. Her insights and personality shine through her weekly podcast MAP IT Marketing, her weekly column in NZ's national newspaper Stuff, and her content on any platform they let her have an account!

You can get in touch with Rachel HERE