How To Position Yourself As The Expert And Authority In Your Field: Strategy #3 – The Personalisation Strategy

This is strategy number 3 in a series on how to position as the expert and authority in your industry.

The first strategy was the Beacon Strategy.

The second strategy, was the Ratcheting Up Strategy.

This strategy is the Personalisation Strategy.

Let’s do a quick recap as to why expert positioning matters …

Positioning as the expert and authority can help your business:

• Be the first, “go-to” choice for prospects in your industry
• Generate inbound leads – people reaching out to you to ask if they can work with
  you
• Make more sales and get more clients – more people coming to you for help
• Make more premium or “high ticket” sales – higher priced coaching, event,
  program, or service sales
• Get better “gigs” – from speaking gigs to writing opportunities for magazines such
  as Forbes or Entrepreneur
• Generate new and better opportunities to partner with strategic partners (“JV
  partners”)

Strategy #3: The Personalisation Strategy

In the Ratcheting Up Strategy, we focused on a particular capability of yours – and then scaling out that solution to another similar market segments as well. That’s called a “horizontal positioning” strategy, since it’s taking the same skill or expertise “horizontally” to different market segments.

Of course, you can do the opposite – stick with one target market segment, and add other services and capabilities to help serve them. That’s called a “vertical positioning” strategy, since it sticks with one market segment and serves them more deeply.

And that’s also the Personalisation Strategy: pick a single, specific market segment, and personalise your services to meet their particular needs.

Let’s look at an example.

Say you help clients with their digital marketing – running lead generation campaigns using Facebook ads.

If you position generally as a lead generation specialist, then you will have a whole boat-load of competition.

But if you can tailor your service to a specific industry segment – like say real estate agents – then you can tailor your advice and services specifically to their needs and wants, to stand out as a first choice for them.

You could, for example, develop specific facebook ad campaigns to build lists of potential sellers and potential buyers of houses, and to promote specific flagship sales to particular market segments – like wealthy professionals and business owners.

Even better, once you understand the specific needs of real estate agents, you can offer other services related to their business. For example, they might also need to improve their SEO, write better copy in their marketing materials, update their marketing software tools and capabilities, or respond to specific legislative requirement or competitive threats. You can add in other tools as is helpful, like Google display network ads, LinkedIn ads, and YouTube ads.

By understanding the very specific context and challenges of your chosen market segment, you can help them even more deeply, and with a wider range of problems.

To apply the Personalisation Strategy,

1. Pick a specific industry sector that you like, and/or you have a background and experience in
2. Pick a specific starting point for your service to that sector, based on your strengths and capabilities (for example Facebook PPC lead generation, or business growth consulting)
3. Understand and serve the needs of the industry sector deeply through market research and conversations and consultative sales calls with potential buyers in that industry sector
4. Market your services to solve a specific high priority problem for that industry sector
5. Over time, broaden out your suite of services to meet additional needs for that industry sector

How could you use the Personalisation strategy in your business?