Do you find yourself offering an array of products and services, trying to offer anything that you can to everyone that you meet? I did certainly, when I started my business! I offered every ongoing service which i thought I possibly could perform-from design, to CD burning, to printing (from my home inkjet computer printer!), to typing and transcription.
Once, I even helped a grouped family pack for a move-I had the spare time in my plan, and it paid a few bucks! I thought that this strategy would bring me more business. It really kept me busy-thinking up new services to provide, finding clients for those ongoing services, and learning how to do them. But being active is different from achieving success.
Since I didn’t look like an expert in any of the services which i offered, I was not able to encourage my clients that I should be paid well for then. After a while, I decided that was not the best plan. But I was scared to provide fewer services-what easily couldn’t find enough work within a specialty to support myself?
What if I wasn’t the best in the field which i chose? What if I got uninterested only offering just one single service? Many of these anxieties made me hesitant to filter my offerings really. I argued about it with my business instructors and advisors even. Finally, I made a decision to slim the ongoing services that I offered in my marketing materials.
I started talking about just logo design designs and stationery sets in my own 20-second commercial, on my website, and in my marketing flyers. This helped my clients to focus on the services that I could best deliver to them-I closed more sales easily, and got more referrals from both clients and casual contacts. This sort of narrowing and concentrate is known as niching.
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It helped me to concentrate on developing clear marketing materials about specific services, and to create better procedures for providing them. Niching also helped me to focus on my very own business-it helped me to decide which products and services I can best deliver, and what I should outsource or simply not quote at all!
Next, I got really brave and narrowed things a bit more-I promoted only logo designs, and only to small businesses. At this point, things really took off! Not merely did the noted benefits increase previously, but also, now that I could really focus on my clients’ specific problems, I became an expert in their exact needs. I could increase my rates to reveal that targeted value. Narrowing your services in this way is called niching. By narrowing the types of services you offer, you niche horizontally. By narrowing the types of businesses to which you offer your services, you market vertically.