You’ve worked hard to define yourself and your business. You have distinguished your area of expertise and identified your niche – and business is good.
But, somewhere along the line, as you work within your niche, serving those specific clients who are benefiting from your services and products, your business may start shifting in a slightly different direction. Keep a look out for this shift in direction. It can be a very positive step – presenting more opportunities available than you’d realized.
If this starts to happen in your business, it maybe time to reposition yourself. If you’re noticing that your skills and expertise lend themselves beyond the niche you created, don’t be afraid to refocus your vision.
For example, a client of mine initially established herself as an expert in helping working moms and moms who wanted to start a business.
She noticed the same things coming up over and again in her target market – guilt, confidence, work-life balance. She did a lot of research and gathered a lot of information because she was coaching, mentoring, and advising her clients.
Although she was very successful and very satisfied with her business, she uncovered an opportunity for corporate work. Though she is still working within her area of expertise by offering workshops and services for working mothers, the corporate niche is totally different.
What she is selling to companies isn’t mom coaching. She’s selling them the end result of retaining working mothers. This is a really important distinction. She isn’t abandoning what she’s been doing with her coaching of moms, but the corporate client is really a new direction. In essence, she has two clients – the corporation who hires her and the end user, the moms that she’s already been working with in the other part of her business.
In this case, the opportunity to expand and work outside her niche led her to reposition herself to accommodate these additional opportunities.
In some cases, you might find that certain aspects of your niche aren’t working for you. This is another instance of the need to reposition your business in order to find a more suitable direction.
Another of my clients spent more than 18 months putting large tenders together to submit to government organizations, where a particularly strict type of bidding process is required by law. It’s very difficult to establish personal relationships that lead to a sale in that type of environment. Though he’s had some success in his business, he began weighing whether it was worth the enormous amount of effort he was putting in. All of the bidders are essentially on the same level, with no personal rapport with the potential client to help win the bid. He was essentially operating in a buyer’s market. And that is not where you want to be. To attract clients, you need to turn that traditional sales dynamic on its head so that you’re operating in a seller’s market. You want to be the one with all of the advantage, and position yourself so that there is no competition. In his case, looking to private companies with whom he can establish relationships would put him in a better position.
Look for markets where it will be easier for you to build those personal relationships, and where you can position yourself as an expert.
Whether you have noticed the opportunity for additional business, or recognized the need to shift from your current niche, repositioning is an excellent way to expand your options.
You can still work within your area of expertise, but by repositioning yourself, those same skills could be very valuable on a larger scale.
Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com
Do You Need To Change Direction?