Market the impact of your skillset, not the skillset itself
As a business owner, you have a clearly defined skill set. You have skills and resources that you can bring to the market to help people to do something, to achieve something, to solve a problem, and resolve pain. The impact of your service is special and unique.
When you first launch your business, you will likely have been told that you’ve got to talk about what you do in order to cement your expertise and build authority within your niche. But that’s not what you should be doing.
Go against the grain with your content and marketing by the impact of your service
Your audience, the people that you want to sell to, are not even slightly interested in your skillset. Yes, they want to know about how you can help them but, they don’t want to know about what you do. I appreciate that sounds like a contradiction in terms, and to a certain extent it is, so bear with me.
People don’t want to hear about what it is that you do, they don’t want to hear about how you do it, and the technicalities of what you do. If you’re a web developer nobody wants to hear about how you build websites, if you are a beautician, nobody cares about how you apply nails, if you are a hairdresser, nobody cares about how you cut and style hair, and if you’re a builder, nobody cares about how you build houses.
I could go on. I could go on forever with examples but I’m sure you get the pattern that is emerging here.
Your audience isn’t people within your niche.
There will be people around you that are in your niche, people that you look to and that you learn from. But, they’re not people that are going to buy from you. They may want to collaborate at some point, which is totally cool, but they don’t want to buy from you. They just don’t.
The people that want to buy from you, your potential customers, don’t want to think about the thing that you do.
The impact of your service creates stories
If you’re a web developer, your audience doesn’t want to know about how to build a website. They don’t want to know about WordPress or ASP.NET (or whatever framework you use). They don’t want to know about HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
What they want to know about is how you can help them solve a problem, how you can help them sell their services, how you can help them connect with their customers, and so on. They don’t care how it’s done, whether it’s a website, a landing page, or magic beans planted in a field. They do not care. All they care about is how you can help them, not the technicalities of it. That and how you can make them feel better.
It’s the impact of your service that sells it
When you take your product to market, whatever it is, you need to identify the problem that it solves and the pain that is associated with that problem. Because that’s the thing that they want to hear about, how you resolve that pain. They don’t even care about the problem itself. They just care about how it makes them feel and how you can make them feel better.
When I first started my web development business, I was told that I needed to show off my technical expertise and that I needed to create content that showed how well I understood what I do. It showed my skills, knowledge, and expertise.
I followed the traditional route, much to my detriment
I wrote tutorials and guides, and they actually were quite successful. Incidentally, I wrote some really in-depth guides, some how-to guides about how to build some stuff for the online world. And those guides got a fair amount of attention. Just not from people that want to buy websites from me, the attention that they got was from other web developers and people learning web development (and eventually Microsoft who asked me to write some guides for them, but that’s another story altogether).
The attention that I wanted was people that wanted to buy websites. I wanted to build websites for people, I didn’t want to just talk about websites I wanted to build them. And, well, it didn’t work.
People that wanted to buy a website didn’t want me to build them a website because all of the technicalities of my content made their head spin. They didn’t even want to think about it, let alone learn about it and understand it.
When I changed tactics and started to share the impact of my service things changed drastically
It was only when I started writing about the way that my customer’s lives were improved by having websites that I started getting more attention from the right people.
One of my early customers was a beautician. I ended up working with a few beauticians at that time as a result of that relationship and what it taught me about the world of beauticians.
And they came to me because I started talking about a beautician and how I’d help that beautician improve their life by making it easier for customers to connect with them and book their services. This, in turn, made it easier for them to sell their products as well.
Even when the customer has your solution they still only care about the impact of the service
The system required very little maintenance on their part, which was a massive benefit to the beautician who was not remotely interested in learning any new technology. The ease of the system made her and her customer’s life infinitely easier. They didn’t have to think about anything technical, so they didn’t have to learn any systems or anything like that. I built them something that landed those appointments in the email inbox, and they could just run with it.
When I started talking about that and how their customers found it really easy to use, and how their customers were talking about how wonderful a system it was. Then I started to gain the attention of more beauticians.
The impact of the service is enticing
What initially attracted her to my brand was the fact that I shared lots of stories in my blog about the impact of my work, that made sense to her. She was someone who had no interest in technology and could only just use her phone. Any talk of the technicalities of web development would have gone straight over her head and put her off. Because she understood what she saw when she read my blog, she felt comfortable asking me questions about what I could do to help make her life easier. In all the time we worked together we talked very little about websites themselves.
The value of your service is measured by its impact
The point of my ramblings about my web development business is that when you offer a service or product, people don’t actually care about your service or your product. They don’t want to think about those things. That’s why they want to pay you, to do the thinking for them. Those people just want the problem to go away. They want the pain that that problem creates to go away.
When you are creating content it is important to remember to stop talking about what you do. Nobody cares. Start talking about the emotional impact of what you do, start talking about how much better your clients feel after implementing your solution and start talking about the emotional journey that your customers go on from before they get your solution to after they’ve implemented it. That is what is going to catch people’s attention. It is what is going to get people to buy from you, that is what people want to see and want to hear about.
The customer pays you to make a problem and its pain go away
They don’t want to think about what you do. You already know they don’t want to learn about those things, they just want the problem to go away. If they wanted to learn about those things, then they wouldn’t need you. They wouldn’t need your product or service, they would figure out how to do it themselves. But, they don’t want to do that. So the last thing they want is to read blog posts about how you do what you do.
If you are a person who is a videographer, your audience doesn’t care about how you can use Adobe Premiere Pro, or you can use After Effects, or your fancy pants camera or any of those things they could not care less. All they care about is can you create the video for them. That is going to solve their problem and make their pain go away. That’s it.
Understanding that the impact of your service is the golden ticket changes the game completely
Marketing a product or service is, in a nutshell, communicating that you can make someone’s pain go away by telling people the story of how customer X was suffering because they were in pain, because of this problem. They had lived with this problem for some quite some time and it got to the point where it was overwhelming. Then they got in touch with you, and you provided them with the solution and the support required to implement that solution. So now they no longer experience the problem and the pain that comes with it. They are no longer plagued by that negative feeling they are free. They are happier, they are better. Life is good.
That’s what people want to hear about. That is how you sell your product or service. That’s how you connect with people in their hearts and in their minds. They don’t want to hear about the technicalities, they don’t want to hear about how you do what you do. They just want to hear about how that benefits them.
Understanding the impact of your service is not difficult
One thing about impact is it is quite easy to figure out what it will be and the scope of it. To do that you need to wrap your head around the problem that your service solves. As well as the problem itself, you need to understand the pain it causes your ideal customer.
There is a couple of things to unpack there, 1) what problem does the product solve? A question that can be answered by checking out this blog post, https://mybizacademy.co.uk/all-products-are-designed-to-solve-a-problem, and 2) exactly who is your ideal customer and why does the problem affect them in the way that it does? This is a question that can be answered by consulting your ideal customer profile. If you don’t have an ICP in place, or don’t know what one is, then you can have a read of the following article/blog that I wrote on that very topic https://mybizacademy.co.uk/ideal-customer-profile-understanding-and-implementing
If you go through all of that and you are still struggling to get your head around it all then feel free to drop me a message on my company website and I’ll get you booked in for a 1:1 session to help you get yourself on the right track https://mikethebizguy.co.uk/Contact