When you’re in business for yourself, I submit you have to know three things to be successful:

- Who you are
- What you have to offer
- To whom you offer it

When you think about it, get one (or more) of those things wrong, and you’ll do nothing but struggle. Everything else is, as they say, just details.

For the moment, we’ll skip the ‘who you are’ part and talk about the ‘what you have to offer’ and the ‘to whom you offer it’ parts.

Anything you decide to offer is the ‘right’ thing if you’re offering it to people who want it. Conversely, anything you offer is the ‘wrong’ thing if you’re offering it to people who don’t want it. To make matters even more entertaining, this ‘right’ thing and this ‘wrong’ thing are sometimes the same thing, just offered in a different way or for a different reason.

Recently, I was talking with a good friend and client about the idea of emphasizing benefits versus features of any product or service. We agreed that benefits connect so much better with clients and customers because the overriding question everyone wants answered by anyone attempting to sell them anything is: What’s in it for me? Answer that question in a way that solves a problem or meets a need and you’ve got a sale.

Then she dropped a bomb on me. She said, “You know how you’re always talking about how WordPress is so great because it allows me to be my own webmaster? Well, that phrase – ‘be my own webmaster’ – strikes terror in my heart and I don’t hear anything you say after that. You sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher to me.”

Whoa! Really?

She went on to tell me that, to her, the phrase ‘be my own webmaster’ meant doing things she didn’t understand, having to learn a bunch of new stuff she didn’t have time to learn and suddenly being saddled with a whole lot of extra stuff to do that she knew nothing about, leaving little, if any, time to work in or on her business. My benefit was her barrier.

She wasn’t itching to be her own webmaster. She wanted a way to connect with her target market, help people get to know, like and trust her and convert them into clients through a process of self-selection. In other words, she wanted a way to build a platform, get her message out and attract her ideal clients to her in a non-sleazy, no hype way. Big difference in benefit. Same product/service delivered.

This phenomena is probably my strongest argument for niche marketing. The bigger the group you target as your market, the more diverse and plentiful the problems and needs you’ll have to address to get the sale. This is why I say when you market to everyone, you’re really marketing to no one.

Of my target market, only a percentage ‘want to be their own webmaster’. But all of them want to connect with their target market and attract their clients in a non-sleazy, no-hype way. So I have to pay attention to how I offer what I offer. So do you.