#002 | Step 1: Targeting

There is one question I ask website owners, and their answer tells the state of their brand and website effectiveness: What do you do?

The Big Mistake

Most websites for nonprofits and solopreneurs showcase what they have to offer. Few present solutions to problems. This is the big mistake nonprofit and solopreneur websites make.

Nobody Cares About What You Do

The truth is nobody cares about what you do. They care about what you can do for them.

People don’t visit your website to learn about what you have to offer. They visit your website looking for a solution to a problem they have. This means that you can instantly connect with a prospective customer if your message makes it clear that you know what their problem is, and you have a solution. This is why it’s important to get your message right.

Get Your Message Right

Crafting an effective message with a Problem/Solution approach is a process that translates what you have to say into what someone in your target niché wants to hear. When your message is right, visitors to your site describe the experience as feeling like “they read my mind.” This “they read my mind” website experience only happens IF your message connects with a specific needs a site visitor has.

In this issue I will outline a Get Your Message Right framework. Here are the five (5) steps in the Get Your Message Right framework:

1. Choose A Niché
2. Map Problems, Solutions, and Benefits
3. Market Research
4. Craft Your Elevator Pitch
5. Craft Your Messages

Next, I’m going to summarize each of the five steps. Here we go.

Choose A Niché

A niche is a segment of a market category. For example: cellulite treatment is a niché of the broader health and beauty market category. Another example of a niché: nonprofits.

Then Choose A Sub-Niché

Choosing a niché is not enough. After you choose a niché, you must focus your niché by choosing a sub-niché.

Choose a sub-niché based upon your super power. A super power is something you do really well. Let’s say you have years of job experience preparing and filing taxes for clothing stores, then focus your tax consulting business on the clothing stores sub-niché. This sub-niché path looks like this: Accounting > Tax Preparation > Tax Preparation For Clothing Stores.

Here are a few other sub-niché examples:

• Cellulite treatment for women who just had a baby.
• Nonprofits with 5+ employees.
• High net-worth women (+$5 Million) over 45 suffering from menopause.

Niché’s Are Not Logical

Logically, you may think: Why would I focus on a sub-niché like “Cellulite treatment for women who just had a baby” and miss out on all the prospects in the broader “health and beauty” category? I hear this all the time, and I thought this myself when I started my business. The answer is because focus gives a niché super powers.

Sub-Niché Super Powers

A niché has these super powers:

• You have a limited amount of money. Marketing to a focused niché means you can get more reach on a small budget.
• Focus makes your message more relevant and specific to your niché.
• The goal of your marketing messages is to make people in your niché think, “they read my mind.” Focus instantly connects your message directly to people in your niché.

Next Issue:

In the next issue I will complete Step 1: Targeting and share how to:

• Map Problems, Solutions, and Benefits
• Craft Your Elevator Pitch
• Market Research