Last Friday, I posted the second in this sequence, following the development of a keynote I am preparing for the end of March. I asked the question: Where is your business location? This led me to think about the idea of a business niche.
The idea of the niche comes from ecology. An animal or plant will create a niche in the environment where it can thrive. Contrary to popular belief, competition is not the main influence on evolution. A niche is some part of the environment species adapt to, usually working with other species to create an environment where every species thrives.
Note the species work together to create their environment, it is not a pre-determined space. The same applies to businesses. It may be possible to find a niche but usually, businesses need to create their own niche through collaboration. A competitive minded business is likely to fail because it will miss opportunities to create a niche with other businesses. This is why location or context is so important.
Station 2: What?
The big mistake many business-owners make is to believe their offer is the same as their niche. It is a part of their niche but without considering the other 4 stations, they will be at an adaptive disadvantage.
This is what I said in my earlier draft:
The second question is: what? What are you doing? Now, you may find this the easiest question of the four to answer. You have an offer and you know your offer. You know it backwards, inside out. You are an expert in what you provide. But my question to you is: what makes it irresistible?
What makes an irresistible offer? Clearly the thing itself is important. If you deliver something that your clients or customers value, in time they will pass on the message to others.
But it’s also important to remember how you package what you offer; how you describe it because people outside don’t know the detail of what it’s like on the inside. You need to find some way of describing it. And that is the packaging of it, you don’t necessarily need to put it in a literal packet with writing on it but you need some way of describing it.
And the third layer in this is your marketing. Once you have an offer and it’s packaged, how do you get it out there in front of people? And this takes me to the middle point here.
Sharpening the Message
So, you’re a life coach and agonise over your competition? Of course you have competition! If you don’t have competition, you have no market. You can’t compete head to head with more experienced life coaches but you can specialise in a niche. Your business location is a part of that niche and we’ll look at other aspects over the next two weeks.
There is more you can do to make your offer distinctive at this station. Think about your packaging. Location: Sheffield’s Only life coach is probably not true but can you refine it further? Sheffield’s only life coach who works with people aged 80 or over, with people who have experienced an industrial accident and so on. We’ll explore this in more detail next time.
You have your offer and you have your packaging. The next question is how to market your offer.
Station 3: How?
This will be the focus of the second part of my talk, of which more in a few weeks time. It appears at this stage in the 5 questions sequence.
I mention this now because it’s part of the sequence. Marketing is important. For me it is the keystone; it is in the roof of the business, of the building that we are building here. We’re dealing with the four foundations now, so I’m going to move swiftly onto the others and I will come back and talk at much greater length about this later on.
Marketing drives any business, hence its central position but there are two more foundation stones, then we’ll return to this topic in much more depth. Your marketing is where you consciously design your offer using the four foundation stones.
How do you package your offer?