Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Niche Design: Differentiation, Language, and Building a Point of View
60 Plays1 year ago
Welcome back to the Attention Podcast, where you'll learn how to gain and retain the attention of your buyers to grow an audience. I'm Dan Sanchez and today I talked to Nick Bennett who is the Founder at Harness & Hone about Niche Design.
Resources Mentioned:
Agency Niche Design Playbook »
Timestamps:
[00:00:05] Newsletter disputes niche design's effectiveness for differentiation.
[00:04:03] Niching down in marketing positioning is key.
[00:07:50] Specialized marketing for specific industries is essential.
[00:11:18] Summary: Transitioning marketing strategy for higher education.
[00:14:59] Conventional marketing is going in the wrong direction.
[00:19:38] The focus is on thinking, not doing. Many successful audiences are built by addressing problems and providing insights. Example of Chris Walker's approach.
[00:25:56] Customer problem resonance is key for success.
[00:28:16] Languaging and point of view create marketing.
[00:31:29] Effective communication is essential for problem-solving. Building a POV involves framing and naming the problem, explaining its impact, and providing language to communicate it. This allows individuals to advocate for solutions within their organizations. Marketing's role is to make the problem visible to everyone who experiences it.
[00:38:49] Building bridges to the future, providing solutions.
[00:41:07] "Niche category design for solopreneurs, consultants, entrepreneurs."
[00:46:45] Build audience by adding value, be unique.
[00:47:39] Deployment plan and tactics for connecting with audience.
[00:51:27] LinkedIn writer helps businesses with strategic thinking.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to The Attention Podcast
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome back to The Attention Podcast where you'll learn how to gain and retain the attention of your buyers to build an audience.
How to Differentiate by Niching Down
00:00:09
Speaker
I'm Dan Sanchez and today I talked to Nick Bennett who is the founder of Harness & Hone about how to niche down
00:00:18
Speaker
properly or essentially how to differentiate, change the language and build an actual point of view that will help your podcast, your content, your social media, even your business stand out across the sea of competition. In this episode, you will learn
00:00:35
Speaker
how to niche down properly, not just going down by industry, but how to do it properly, you'll learn his three-step framework for developing a solid point of view and you'll learn how perfecting niche design can impact your audience growth. So, enjoy this interview and stick around for the end where I drop my own two cents on the things that impacted me most from this amazing interview. This was one of my favorites that I've had by far. It's very actionable for myself and I know will be for you.
00:01:05
Speaker
Here we go. Hey, welcome to the show. What's up, Dan?
The Power of Niching Down and Specialization
00:01:14
Speaker
man, when you reached out to me a week ago, I was pretty excited because I just revamped my newsletter. And I came out swinging on a topic around niche design. And I'd seen a couple of influencers talk about how they're kind of the term I use in my newsletter is ditching the niche, ditch the niche, because that's what they were promoting. They're saying like, ah, you don't need a niche down. That's not a good way to differentiate.
00:01:38
Speaker
Uh, people like Adriana Tika and Jay Klaus were kind of saying, uh, you probably don't need a diff, you need to differentiate, not an inch down. Nitching down isn't a good way to differentiate. And I was like, wait, what? How could they say this? These, these guys know what they're talking about. And.
00:01:55
Speaker
I disagree. So I threw it down in my newsletter. I was like, Hey, this is what they're saying. Here's their post and LinkedIn, uh, that we're saying it. I noticed a trends. So I, in my newsletter, I was like, here's their hot take, but here's my two cents. And I kind of went in the opposite direction being like, Hey, one way to differentiate is to niche down. And it's maybe it's not enough, but like, if you like, and I gave out the example of like, if you're a broad agency,
00:02:19
Speaker
and you niche, you're serving everybody with everything, and you niche down to maybe just doing a web design for hospitals and differentiate no other way. I'm like, that's kind of differentiated. So what are you guys talking about? Of course it's differentiated. You know how to do things. You know how to work with hospitals. You know how to approach them. And of course, with audience growth, which is what this show is all about,
00:02:42
Speaker
Absolutely matters the same principles that you would apply to designing something like an agency like the same principles of niching down apply to audience growth because what most people assume when they do in an audience like they do with starting a business is by a general by going after a broad audience you know is the best way to grow because then you're targeting everybody but as all good marketers know.
00:03:05
Speaker
Going broad does not help but going smaller is the way to grow larger so nick you emailed me Because you got fired up about the topic because this is of course like your whole your whole game now is niche design So tell me like when you saw this newsletter like how did you feel about it? What was your initial reaction to it?
00:03:26
Speaker
Dude, it's funny because there's so many people who think that a niche down is just one really specific thing. And it's just like, hey, how do we just slap a modifier onto the thing that we do? And boom, that's it. And if that's the way that you think about building a business and trying to build an audience and trying to attract people to want to work with you, yeah, you're probably going to fail. And you're probably going to have a lot of problems. And you're going to struggle to do that.
00:03:56
Speaker
And it got me just so fired up because I think even some people, like people I really love their content, like Jay Klaus, like he's designed a niche and he doesn't see the world through that lens. Like he is the creator for creators. He has a whole, and he solves a ton of problems for these creators. And he has a niche, but he doesn't see it that way because we look at it through this one lens of, can we stop a modifier on it? Like you said, four hospitals and call it a day.
00:04:21
Speaker
That's just not the way that it works for a professional services business or even for most creators.
00:04:28
Speaker
An easy example I give on this one is that if it's like beer, a lot of people look at beer and they'll say there's the overall beer category, then there's craft beer, and then there's IPAs within craft beer, and then there's juicy IPAs, or there's hazy IPAs, there's double IPAs. These are all niche down. Like every single layer deeper you go, you're niching down. And yes, you can slap a modifier on an IPA so people can look at it and know what it is and how it's different from the other thing that they're looking at.
00:04:58
Speaker
But the more complex your sale is, the more complex the thing that you do is, the more consideration that people need to make in order to want to do to work with you, it's going to require a little bit more than just slapping modifiers on what you do. Right. Because when we're talking about niching down or niching down, ultimately we're talking about the game of marketing positioning, right?
Competitive Advantage through Specialization
00:05:21
Speaker
What category do people think about when they think about your brand? You need to exist in a category. They're going to put you in a category. Are they putting you in the right category? And can you be competitive in that category? That's the overall game we're talking about. Even when it comes to audience growth, is the content you're putting out there, what category does it fit in? Of what kind of content you're delivering, whether it's on a podcast or LinkedIn or a newsletter. You have to know what position you've taken with your content.
00:05:50
Speaker
So you've said a few things and I'm like, Oh, wait a second. Like, what do you mean the hospital example I gave wasn't a good example of niching down? How would you approach that? Because obviously you specialize in marketing agencies. So I niche down by going down into industries, just as a quick example, from agency serving everybody to you could go down to just health care, very broad, but still niching down to in health care hospitals, and you could go farther still to like nonprofit hospitals.
00:06:20
Speaker
or I don't know, regional hospitals or whatever you could say. So how is that not a good way to niche down? So I tell people specialization doesn't equal niche. Specialization is a part of it. It's how you see the world and it's how you apply the thing that you're capable of doing. But you can't just say you're for hospitals because every other marketing agency in the world is capable of
00:06:49
Speaker
selling and serving hospitals. So it's like, well, what do you know about helping hospitals do this very specific thing that they don't know that a full service or full funnel, whatever agency wouldn't know. So we picked the specialization not to just slap the modifier on our homepage or our blog or like in the navigation dropdown that says industries on it, like we pick it so that we can communicate the problem that we solve in, in a way that shows up in their lives and in their work.
00:07:17
Speaker
And the things that they deal with every day, it's like, the problem shows up for hospitals in this really specific way. And we can articulate that. And when they see it, they know it. And they're like, you get me more than the full funnel agency does, or the full service agency does. So specialization is a part of it. But people stop there. And that's really more like the beginning.
00:07:37
Speaker
I see what you're saying, because I'm assuming a lot of things, if you're specializing in hospitals, that you've already recrafted your value proposition more than just your positioning statement. We're the agency for hospitals, right? That you've actually reworked the website to speak more to the things they care about, about patient care and ease of being able to schedule an appointment. Or I don't even know what they are for hospitals because I'm in some industry, so I'm trying to guess what that is.
00:08:02
Speaker
Um, but I assume like it's reasonable that if you're, if you're only serving hospitals or like the vast majority of your portfolio is hospitals that you're, you just by default have a specialized understanding of it because you're used to dealing with them. You used to even, you know how to sell them better because you've sold so many of them and you know, they ask these, the hospitals ask a certain kinds of questions, right? So you start to become better by default, but obviously you should lean into it more in your marketing copy and your content. Um,
00:08:31
Speaker
Though you and I know that we run into companies all the time that's creating content for like their, their, their company serves like something like hospitals, yet their content still like addressing a broad market.
The Problem-Focused Approach in Niching
00:08:44
Speaker
They put the modifier on the, they just say, put the modifier on it, but they didn't, they're still blogging about like logos and stuff. You're like.
00:08:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's the five content marketing tips for hospitals. And you could change out hospitals for manufacturers, for home services, for anything, for SaaS companies. And it would be the same thing. Like I say, it's just totally interchangeable. And you would assume, right, that when someone says, well, hey, we're for hospitals, how would, like now what? But the truth is a lot of people just call it there because they think that that's enough or they just kind of don't really consider the downstream things that they need to do.
00:09:22
Speaker
And they can't attract hospitals. They can't grow an audience of hospitals because they're not talking about the thing that they do or the problems that they solve for hospitals in ways that show up specifically for them. They're talking about in really general ways. You're struggling to attract new nurses to work with you or they're struggling to have patient satisfaction. I don't know, whatever problems hospitals have. So that's really the problem is that they're not
00:09:51
Speaker
They're not going that next level and trying to explain how it shows up for them because they're afraid that they're just going to alien a lot of people. And I think if we just say we're for hospitals, well now no one's going to consider us, but hospitals, but really, I mean, in the case, we just said, no one's going to consider you at all because now you're just in a slightly smaller category of marketing agencies that serve hospitals. And there's probably a thousand of them. Yep.
00:10:16
Speaker
And when you do this, right. And you talk about the way the problem shows up in people's lives. I'm sure this problem shows up not only for hospitals, but, uh, visiting nursing associations, um, whatever virtual doctor, um, things that are out there. Hospitals is one that I don't know enough about to give you a bunch of great examples, but I think the idea is that you're going to, people will reveal themselves to you. And this has happened in my own business. I went out there and said, I solved this very specific problem.
00:10:45
Speaker
for HubSpot agencies, cause that's just the world that I was in for so long. And then all these solopreneurs came to me and they were like, Hey, I don't have this problem and I'm not a HubSpot agent or I have this problem, but I'm not a HubSpot agency. What do you have for me? And then all these other agency owners were like, Hey, I'm not a HubSpot agency. I'm a, this type of agency. Can you help me? Cause I still have this problem. And it's like, it reveal people will reveal themselves to you. They don't care so much about the modifiers as much as do they suffer from the thing.
00:11:13
Speaker
Yep. That makes a lot of sense. So you would, so essentially what you're saying is don't add the modifier. What would you add? So what did you end up doing? Do you like end up positioning yourself around a problem more than a, a industry? Yeah. I see niche niche on the problem more than the vertical.
00:11:36
Speaker
And look, if you look at all my content, I still use the terms like most agencies or agency owners or HubSpot agency story brain. I use these, this language all the time because it helps provide context. You still need context in the way that you communicate, but you can't communicate just by using modifiers alone. Cause like we said, if you just slapped it on your homepage, no one's going to care or get it. And if you just add that to your, an existing blog article that you have and hoping that
00:12:06
Speaker
someone is Googling the term, uh, content marketing for hospitals or whatever, like you're doing like, then you're not going to get anywhere because you're not, you're going to still speak in generalizations and generalizations are the downfall of, in my world, all marketing agencies, but it's the downfall of anyone trying to build an audience or anyone trying to grow a business.
00:12:27
Speaker
It's interesting. So to kind of think of an example, and we're going to start with business, but I'm going to try to work its way over to content and audience growth, but just to make sure I understand this better. And I'm going to move over to industry from hospital to higher ed, which I know have more experience in and understand better.
00:12:44
Speaker
So on higher ed, instead of saying I'm the higher ed website builder, and I've built a couple of websites for higher ed institutions, instead of doing that, you're saying it would be better for me to talk about student recruitment or the lack of student recruitment, the problem of attracting today's modern student.
00:13:05
Speaker
Right. Which is what they're all going after. They're having a hard time growing because they're having like the old way of like buying SAT lists and then just sending them postcards and cold calling them doesn't work anymore.
00:13:16
Speaker
They can't figure out digital, right? They try Facebook ads and they fail at it. This is a normal problem in higher ed across the board. But I don't have to just say I'm the higher ed marketer or the web designer. I could position myself around attracting tomorrow's students. Or I guess the problem would be shifting. The problem is that you can't attract students.
00:13:44
Speaker
in a way that they want to be, or you're not communicating with students in a way that they want to be communicated with. You're cold calling them and they're sending them postcards. So the way that I would communicate a message like that, you would say, hey, most higher ed educational institutions have trouble attracting students today because they're sending them postcards, they're cold calling them, they're doing this, they're doing that. And that doesn't resonate with students, with people anymore.
00:14:11
Speaker
Right? Like you're using the modifiers to just frame what you're doing. That's all in to frame the problem and how it shows up for that very specific person. It's more of an exercise in communication than it is really like, you know, web marketing. That's where a lot of people kind of think this, everything starts and stops is that if
00:14:30
Speaker
we can just capture someone on Google because, because everyone thinks in keywords, right? If I can just slam enough keywords for called higher education inside my website, that someone who has this thing will eventually get to me and that's right. And then they don't go the extra mile to communicate in a way that actually resonates with someone and they just go all general. Yep. The problem is students expect more, right? And they're not delivering it with postcards and phone calls and student, student,
00:15:00
Speaker
What do they call them? Like college fairs, right? It's another thing that's dying. A lot of people are still spending tons of money on. So I would position myself around the problem of student recruitment and how they could do better with it. But as soon as I changed that position to focusing on the problem, now my business has opened up. I'm still niching down to a very specific problem. But guess who else shows up at the door now? It's not just higher ed.
00:15:25
Speaker
It's going to be trade schools. It's going to be K through 12 or anybody, even maybe even online courses, right? Cause they're looking for students. Anyone who suffers from the process is actually quite similar between all three of them because they all have an emissions process. They all have retention problems through their super long sales cycle of
00:15:47
Speaker
getting them to apply, completing their application, getting them to put their room deposit and then showing up and paying. It's like so many steps you have to get through to get people to enroll. Some are shorter, like for an online course, but some are long for higher ed. But if you start positioning yourself that way, you start to attract people with that same problem. And that's how that would work out. Exactly. We live in this world where conventional marketing wisdom has led an entire generation of people
Overcoming Conventional Wisdom
00:16:15
Speaker
in the total and complete wrong direction. They said market the benefits, not the features. And so everyone's out there just saying all the benefits about all the things that they do. Everyone sees all the tactics that people are doing, and they'll see you posting to LinkedIn all the time, not realizing how you're communicating. They just see people podcasting all the time, not realizing how they're communicating or doing weekly virtual events, not realizing what's going on.
00:16:42
Speaker
And so you see all these people doing the tactics and then still communicating in the same way, saying, look at all the benefits of the thing that I have. And nobody cares about the benefits of the thing that you have. If they don't understand the problem it solves for them, how it's different from all these other things that they're looking at. Is this problem even valuable? Let alone massively valuable. Should I throw money at it? Do I want to go to a future without this problem? Is it worth it? And then the more expensive and the more consideration the thing you sell,
00:17:11
Speaker
has or needs, the more valuable the problem needs to be and the more aspirational the future without it needs to be. Like if you're selling a $200 course or a $50 course, it's pretty lightweight. That's like when you're into the niching down part side of the spectrum where it's like, Hey, you can, you don't need a ton of the extra elements of the strategy. The more you do the better, but like you don't need a full category design strategy.
00:17:39
Speaker
But the more upstream you go in terms of time, money, and consideration, the more you're gonna wanna apply this type of thinking because you're gonna need people to want to spend money on it because you're gonna want people to aspire to go where you're leading them.
00:17:56
Speaker
This is really interesting. It's almost like therapy for myself because I've been struggling with this exact thing. Like many, many, many people have, which is why you've started specializing as you realize it's a common, common problem. But even moving out of sweet fish, I specialized in B2B because sweet fish chose B2B podcasting as a double niche, not just on industry, which is fair. B2B is very broad. It's like one of the broadest.
00:18:16
Speaker
industry specializations you could do, right? But they really specialized in what they execute, podcasts, right? So I was like, well, I guess I'll stay with an audience growth on what I do, but am I still B2B? I have a lot of companies that are reaching out to me that are B2C, real estate agents, all kinds of things that are, because they're doing content marketing and not growing an audience. They're literally investing tons of time, hours, money, and no one's watching their content. It's a massive problem across the board, whether you're B2B or B2C.
00:18:45
Speaker
Um, and now I find myself helping people grow their audience. I'm like, Oh, maybe I just need to be better and better specialized on the problem less on B2B necessarily because they real estate agents have the same problem and have the same solutions. Everyone does most like creators or people with a large audience that I speak with tell me they hate their audience because it's like very general and they can't activate them. And so it happens when you're chasing likes and reach is that you're trying to go.
00:19:16
Speaker
a mile wide and an inch deep. And so you have an audience that isn't really doing much of anything for you, or you can't do anything with it. You can't add a ton of value to them because they're all over the place. And so they tell me like, I don't, I don't like what I have right now. And it seems pretty common. And it's like, well, yeah, because you went pretty broad. And so you got a whole bunch of people over here because you got this one post to go pretty viral. You got a bunch of people over here because of this other thing. It's like,
00:19:43
Speaker
We got to hammer the problem because that's how you build an audience, like a meaningful audience and like a group of people around you that kind of all think and want the same things. And then you can build products to help them solve those problems. And then they want to be near you. They're happy to spend money with you.
00:20:03
Speaker
So it really becomes about, niching down really becomes about finding the problem that you're going to specialize in. For people who haven't found the exact problem that they're trying to conquer, how do you help them find that problem?
00:20:17
Speaker
Like they're serving a lot of different people a lot of ways. Even content creators who are trying to grow an audience, they're usually doing this with their content. Like I was doing this on LinkedIn for a long time. I was talking about marketing, all kinds of marketing things in all kinds of different ways. And it was back when I started on LinkedIn three years ago, I was putting out good advice, but it was all over the board, but there was so much attention on LinkedIn back then that my audience grew anyway. But nowadays it's almost like you have to find your thing. How do you recommend people find the problem that they're going to hone in on?
00:20:47
Speaker
Well, it's not about advice. That's the, that's why we're kind of in this place in the first place is that everyone thinks that they need to be talking about five steps to, you know, improve your reach or five steps to become the best this or that, because that's what gets a bunch of likes and gets a bunch of reach. And just because that's true, doesn't necessarily mean it's what you should be doing.
00:21:16
Speaker
Because the goal isn't like Sir Reach, like the goal is to build an audience of people who want what you have. And so I say, instead of telling people how to do, we talk about how to think. And if you look at some of the people who have built some of the most incredible audiences, especially on LinkedIn and in the B2B space, the majority of them focus on how to think more often than they do how to do. Like they're not dropping five step plans every day. They may every once in a while.
00:21:45
Speaker
You got to tell people how to do something at some point, but a lot of times they're talking about how to think. And so, but to your question, it's like, well, how do you come up, how do you get to the problem? So there's a few, there's a few ways to think about this. And there's really two types of problems in the world, or there's like two, two ways to like two categories of problems or things that you can do with them. You can solve an old problem in a new way, or you can solve a new problem.
00:22:16
Speaker
in a new way. And once you start thinking about the problems that you solve in this way, now you look through all of the customers that you work with because you have insights that nobody else does because you work with a variety of people in variety of businesses or whatever that nobody else does. And so you have the ability to collect insights in your place or in your category that nobody else does. Those insights reveal
00:22:44
Speaker
something that's missing from the marketplace, something that's missing from the marketplace leads you to the discovery of a problem. Problems create new markets and around and around we go. So I'll give you an example of this one. Uh, everybody knows Chris Walker, especially on LinkedIn and everybody knows Chris Walker, like in like the B2B agency space. So here's a really good, easy example. Uh, and he wasn't an agency owner at the time that this happened, right? So he found an insight years ago, and he's talked about this a million times. So you've probably heard him say this before, but years ago when he was,
00:23:13
Speaker
like a marketing manager for a medical device company. He found an insight called B2B buying happens in places that you can't track. And he did this just by interviewing customers and joining sales calls. That was it. So he didn't have anything, no one else.
00:23:28
Speaker
doesn't have access to, he just had it in his place and he was able to, he just knew to look for insights. Most people just don't think to look for him. So he found this insight and it led him to realize that something was missing from the marketplace and that missing was called the strategy aligned to how customers actually want to buy,
Case Study: Chris Walker's Problem-Focused Messaging
00:23:46
Speaker
right? Like he found he, it just, it takes you there. You've probably also heard him say that a million times. If you listen to him, that missing led him to the discovery of the problem.
00:23:57
Speaker
The problem is that you don't have a process to develop and grow revenue programs for today's buyers, right? Like, and now it has led them to create a whole new market called revenue research and development. And I'm sure revenue R and D is going to create a whole bunch of new insights, lead people to find something that's missing from the marketplace, new creates new problems, creates new markets. This is how we get everywhere. So he's just one really easy example because he's got a huge audience. And if you look at the way he communicates, he only talks about problems and very, very rarely.
00:24:27
Speaker
Well, you get like the five-step plan out of him. He does talk about it sometimes, but usually only in like very niche situations or small like, oh, in this case, do this, in this case, do this. But you're right, he does talk about it more broadly, more than anything else. He talks about how it shows up for the people he's most qualified to serve, B2B SaaS companies. So when we talk about like the niche, like he's built this business around the problem,
00:24:56
Speaker
And then he said, it shows up for companies in this really specific way. Well, the first time I ever heard him, his message, I was like, I'm not a B2B SaaS company, but the problem shows up in my life in this exact same way. How crazy is that? And I started getting these insights, being like, you know what? Niche, like this whole concept of niching will alienate people is just like conventional marketing wisdom. It's just untrue. And people are so afraid to do it because they think this is going to happen. But the reality is, is that the more specific that you can get, the more resonant you'll be.
00:25:25
Speaker
Yeah. It's interesting in finding the problem. I liked how you've positioned it because it gives me a framework now to try to help me identify problems. Is it an old problem or a new problem? And maybe it's an old problem that, you know, it's, it's people have solutions for it, but there's still better ways of doing it now. Right. And you have a new approach to it. It's a good way of thinking, where is this a new problem that's come up because we've all love mastered this new thing. And now like artificial intelligence will create its own problems.
00:25:53
Speaker
It solves a lot of problems, but it will create new problems that somebody is going to take up. Someone's going to take up some artificial problems in the future. That is probably being done now, and somebody two or three years from now will be known as, I help AI companies fix this problem. I'll give you a great example of a team of people who are building a really awesome audience based on problems that AI has already created. Jaya Kunzo and Melanie Diesel are building a membership called the Creator Kitchen.
00:26:23
Speaker
And they're building a phenomenal audience around this idea that you need to create things that AI can't. AI has commoditized information and access to information. And so if you want to be a relevant content marketer, they said, you need to create the things that only you can.
AI and New Niche Opportunities
00:26:37
Speaker
And you need to put your, they call it your digital fingerprints. You get your digital fingerprints all over the work. And how do you do that? And so they're building an entire platform on that. And they're using the problems that AI has created to fuel that cause.
00:26:52
Speaker
And then they're pulling people and they're communicating in a way that pulls people towards this future without these problems, right?
00:27:00
Speaker
So that's one way to think about it. It's still hard to find the right problem. I've even taken multiple swings at it. Yeah. I think sometimes there's probably a trial and error to it to some degree, because you think your customers are really wrestling with one problem, but that problem, it might even be true that it's their biggest problem. But if you're talking about the problem with them and it's not resonating, that might not be the problem you have to be the master in.
00:27:24
Speaker
Right. There's even my own my own stuff. I was like, really, the biggest problem with audience growth are people wrestling with what I called the quarterly conundrum. Like they're so focused on short term gains that they can't think long term. They're not thinking about them future themselves to three quarters away from now. So they don't take the action steps needed in order to start growing an audience. So that three quarters from now, they're going to be on a totally different place. So they're always like starving future self.
00:27:52
Speaker
to barely feed current self. And with cert term tactics, that hardly even work. But guess what? The more I've talked about that, the more people are like, eh, yeah, but I still have quotas to meet. So sorry, I can't really do anything about this. I'm going after the wrong problem. So even now, I'm starting to find that the problem that I'm starting to focus on is you're investing a lot in content marketing, but no one's listening.
00:28:14
Speaker
That's a problem because now it sounds like you're throwing money money money into dumpster fire and that's starting to get more resin that's starting to get more resonance because people are afraid of losing money and investment in something that they're already doing.
Crafting a Unique Perspective Around Problems
00:28:28
Speaker
So that conversation tends to go well, but I'm even still trying to finding it. I'm saying this.
00:28:33
Speaker
transparently so that people that are listening to this right now can realize, hey, like finding the right problem might take some time. Oh, definitely. You have to try to and that's one reason to be posting about it on social media and talking to your friends about it and trying to get feedback on it because
00:28:47
Speaker
The market will kind of tell you, especially if you're getting into sales calls and talking about the problem, because they'll tell you, well, they won't tell you, but you'll get it from their facial expressions and their enthusiasm over what you're saying, right? And whether you're winning deals based off of it. So the finding the right problem might take some time, but finding it is massive because once you find it,
00:29:09
Speaker
you can develop a whole content platform around it. It becomes much easier to grow an audience because you'll be attacking the same problem in different ways with your thinking. Where do you recommend people go from there? They find the right problem and then they have to do what? You got to develop a unique and different point of view about the problem and around the problem. The problem is what's going to fuel your entire platform.
00:29:40
Speaker
And the point of view is how is like, I've been talking, I've been saying, how do you communicate that thing to people? This is how you do it. It helps you organize the narrative. It literally is what creates the niche itself and organizes the narrative. It allows you people say, we need to just like, how do you get word of mouth to move? It's, this is where you create the words that you say to get them into other people's mouths. So they say them to other people.
00:30:08
Speaker
And when they say those words, they're marketing for you. It's why you see so many agencies like in my world, in the marketing agency space, there's so many agencies out there that communicate, we help you grow better with HubSpot. Why do you think they say that? Because HubSpot language grow better. And now everyone's going to say it. Story brand agencies, they all tell you, we help you clarify your message with story brand. Why do you think people say that? Cause that's story brands thing, right? They're marketing for these other firms when you use their language.
00:30:37
Speaker
Say, which we'll use Chris Walker as another example. I don't, people say whether or not he made up the term dark social doesn't matter. He popularized it and he used it and he owns that language. When people say dark social self-reported attribution, he used the term attribution, mirage, revenue, research, and development, all of these types of things they're marketing for him. And that's really the power of languaging is when you get people talking about it.
00:31:01
Speaker
in with their peers or with their friends on shows like this you're you're that's how you get the that's how you get word of mouth to spin and that's how you that's the power of a point of view is that you can communicate in a way that someone's going to receive it and that they can be able to talk about it.
00:31:17
Speaker
I love it. So it's interesting to me is that a point of view is not just your solution to the problem. It's creating language and bringing more clarity to the problem so that people can navigate their way out of it. Because oftentimes it's a problem because we don't know what to do about it. It's almost like being in a dark room and not knowing how to get out because you can't see the obstacles between you and the exit.
00:31:39
Speaker
So by bringing language, bringing clarity, taxonomies, categories, ways of thinking about the problem, you're actually bringing clarity and light to a situation. Like in a dark room, you're shedding more light, you're putting up more candlesticks for people to be able to navigate the obstacles of the problem. And it's currently a problem because we don't understand enough about it in order to even navigate our way around the obstacles to get to a solution.
The Art of Problem Communication
00:32:03
Speaker
So even describing it as the dark funnel, talking about the attribution mirage,
00:32:09
Speaker
These are all problem words. That's not even talking necessarily about the solution yet, right? It's just bringing clarity to why this isn't working. So a lot of the point of view, at least in, as we've been, you've been explaining it, I'm like, Oh, like a lot of the point of view really is the development and fleshing out of the problem and bringing clarity to why it's, why it's broken. Cause if you can do that, then usually the solution starts to become more self-evident. It starts to cue up the solution.
00:32:37
Speaker
And if you can communicate the problem in a really clear way, people will assume you have a solution. And if you can't, people will assume you don't. So when we talk about building a POV, there's really just, there's three main blocks, or I call them the blocks. POVs have simple structures, right? The first block of it is to frame and name your problem. This is the whole giving context part I talked about. This is when you can use your modifiers in the industries and
00:33:06
Speaker
Things like that to describe how the problem shows up in people's lives. This is how you explain it to somebody in just like a very clear way. We talk about the ramifications of the problem. When the problem goes unsolved, what is your life like? You know, people use the term like pain points. And then they say, well, we solve 12 problems. And it's like, we solve one massively valuable problem. It shows up in your life, life in 12 different ways.
00:33:33
Speaker
Right. And then we name it. We talked about like the giving it the language so people can communicate it. This is, this is over throughout the work that I've been doing. It's become very clear to me as to why so many people say that they are like.
00:33:47
Speaker
Our audience is CEOs or CROs or whatever. And they like this. They only target C-suite people and they don't target individual contributors or manager level or director level people because they don't know how to activate those people. They don't know how to give them, intentionally provide them with language to communicate the thing up the organization.
00:34:10
Speaker
So when marketing managers hear your message, you're like, Oh, I love this. Like we need to be doing this in our company. And then they go to their manager and they're like, we need to be doing this. And they're like, nobody cares. This is all I'm hearing from you or benefits. And I just like, it's, I can't advocate to spend money on a bunch of benefits. And, but nobody is connecting the dots as to why that's the case.
00:34:33
Speaker
And it's why, again, it's why companies like refine laughs have been so successful is because people then hear that message and they go internally and say, we have all these problems and this is how it's showing up in our lives. Oh, look at the way that people are interacting with our emails and they give you the lens on how to think about these things. And so that when you discuss it internally on your team meetings and your manager hears it, all of a sudden these problems are now visible to them. So I like the way you use the candle analogy. I tell people this every single day.
00:35:02
Speaker
The job of marketing is to make the problem you solve highly visible to everyone who experiences it. That's the job. And deploying the POV, that's kind of the third phase. We'll get into that in a bit. But that's what the job of the POV is, is to make the problem visible. So you frame the problem, talk about how it shows in people's lives, and you name it so that they can communicate it and talk about it with other people.
00:35:24
Speaker
Yep. So you talked about the POV block. I think you said it was a three-part series. Is that right? And you gave me the first part, which is frame and name the problem. Is there a second and third step there? Yeah. So the second block to the POV is to develop. The second block of the POV is to evangelize the future without the problem. Whoo. My brain just shut off there for a moment, man.
00:35:49
Speaker
evangelize the future without the problem. And so what that means is that now you have to describe to people the outcomes. What does life look like without it? And you have to talk about it like you're already living there. You have to explain and you have to call people over from the present to this future that you live in. Right? And we say like, what are the business outcomes of solving the problem?
00:36:14
Speaker
Or like if you're selling B to C stuff, it's just like, well, what, what does this new, what does this thing allow someone to do? Again, not benefits, not features talking about outcomes. And we have to make it desirable enough for someone to want to throw money, to throw money at it. So evangelizing the future is a really, really, really good one. And I love your platform because audience growth is about like individuals and people.
00:36:41
Speaker
And traditional marketing wisdom has people believe that the company, quote unquote, the company needs to communicate a lot of this stuff. And this is why you see so many people tinkering with their website message all day long, trying to get it right, hoping that this will solve their problems. And like, yeah, website copies, like a part of the whole thing in communicating all this stuff. But if you don't have a visionary out there publicly banging the drum,
00:37:05
Speaker
making this visible and showing people what a future without this problem looks like, no one's going to care. And it's why, again, legendary companies like Refine Labs have been able to do what they've done is because the CEO was out there doing the work. You look at legendary companies like Clary, their CEO is out there doing the work. There's a million examples of this in practice, but they don't just let the website do the work and kind of just wait it out. They don't just wait for Google to serve up your blog to people.
00:37:36
Speaker
hoping that you can compete for attention amongst thousands of other articles that are competing for the same thought. Yeah. This is a whole other podcast episode, but the power of personal brands and audience growth and building an audience, I'm trying to think of examples of people who build pretty large and very significant audiences without some kind of personal brand in the mix.
00:38:01
Speaker
the one exception that I can think of is when you come up with essentially fake personal brands with fake characters. You think of like Pixar characters, right? But what are they? They're little mini personal brands. They're just fictional ones. But like, I'm like, okay, people have built massive brands, obviously without a person behind them. You think of like Coca Cola, like, well, there's not a lot of
00:38:21
Speaker
personal brands in Coca-Cola, but they're still building this huge brand, huge, but it's not like an owned media audience either. So I'm like, wow. This is the incumbent thing. And this is where people get kind of like turned around is that they'll look at Coca-Cola or in my world, they'll look at these like monster agencies. I mean, they'll use even like VaynerMedia or they'll look at Grant Cardone's agency to like on the extreme end, they'll look at Refine. They'll look at, I mean, in the HubSpot partner directory, you'll see the big names in there.
00:38:52
Speaker
And they're like, well, they didn't do things this way. And you're like, right, because they came up in a time 10 years ago, or whatever it was, they came up in a time when you didn't need to do these things. Like, it was a different world. And they have a lot of momentum behind them that you don't have. I mean, even if you start in the last three to five years, you still don't have that momentum that they had
00:39:16
Speaker
10 years ago when the primary distribution channel for earth was Google and we're, we've started shifting. We're well in the shift that that is no longer the way I mean, and that's the premise of Chris Walker's whole thing is that it's happening in places that's outside of Google at this point. Well, they have a lot of momentum behind them. Yeah. They're facing a lot of headwinds too. That's slowing them down, but you can't look at them and say, Oh, okay, I'll just do what they did.
00:39:44
Speaker
It's just not the way it's, it's just not possible to do it that way anymore. To come back to the POV block, we talked about framing and naming the problem. We talked about evangelizing life without the problem. What's the third block? Build the bridge to the future. I say the only way to get to the future is to cross the bridge that you have built. So this is the solution part of the whole thing.
00:40:15
Speaker
And it's, it's funny cause people's their, their emphasis and unlike, how does the, where does the company really come into play? Your company's operating the toll on the bridge. You're helping people get across. You're providing the solution or selling the product or doing the coaching or the consulting or the service, whatever the thing is, you're operating the toll, you're collecting the cash and you're helping people get to the future. That's really what it is. And so we say it's like building the bridges is talking about
00:40:46
Speaker
is the solution. And so how do you provide this and doing really the same things? How do you frame that in the business outcomes of it? So when someone gets to the other side of it, now they've reached the future, you've been evangelizing, what are the business outcomes? Who are they going to become? What are they going to look like? What are they going to feel like? That's where people tend to start.
00:41:10
Speaker
Everyone likes to start at the end. And they just want to instead of talking about it and kind of communicating it in this aspirational and specific way. They're like, here are some benefits. It's the best. Please. Like, look at all of these other ones that do the same thing. And then they end up forcing people to compare because all they're doing is talking about benefits. And when you talk about benefits, it's hard to tell how the thing you're looking at is different from all the other things that you're looking at.
00:41:40
Speaker
People get frustrated, start comparing price. Now you're in a world where people can't command a premium price. You sacrifice margins and profitability. Now you take on more work than you should to be able to meet goals or do whatever. So you don't have to leave. It's like, it's a vicious, things start to spiral out of control really fast. If you skip these, if you skip to the end.
Applying the POV Framework to Various Audiences
00:42:02
Speaker
So this is a fantastic process. I'm like taking notes, writing it down feverishly because I'm like, dang, this is so applicable to what I'm doing. Probably applicable to anybody doing any kind of business anywhere. Yeah. How do you take this framework? Go ahead. Mostly that's where the larger, like they say it's like, hey, people tell me all the time, like this isn't just for agencies. I'm like, you're right. But I talk about how it shows up and how it applies to just agencies or solopreneurs, independent consultants, like
00:42:30
Speaker
I talk about how it shows up in their lives and how to apply this thinking to that situation. This is a niche within category design. Category design is for companies that want venture capital and they want to go public. So they have this on steroids that help get those companies there and apply this thinking in a lot of different ways and there's a lot more to it.
00:42:49
Speaker
Right. And then like I talked about the spectrum, then there's like the niche down people where people are just like, Hey, we just want to make some great beer. How do you apply the thinking in that context? And so the con, the world that I live in is like, this is the sweet spot, the strategy sweet spot between those two things. And it's like, how do we apply this thinking to this specific situation? And so that's, that's how I got, I came up with or refined what I'm doing to, for people like you, for people like me.
00:43:16
Speaker
For people who want to leave their full time job as the VP of marketing somewhere to become a solopreneur. That's a, that's a good portion of my clients right now are people who are like, Hey, like I don't, I want to go solo, but I can't see the path between what I'm doing today and not looking like everybody else. This, this is how, this is the path for them. It's the same thing.
00:43:37
Speaker
If you want to go solo, especially if you're a student, don't even know where to start. Go get a job, go find the problems they don't have answers to and start specializing in those problems, fix it for your company, and then pretty soon you can start building a whole profile around being known for that problem. It's a much better way to approach it a niche now from what I'm unlocking from this conversation today. I'm like, huh, that's the way I'd be going if I were starting over from scratch.
00:44:03
Speaker
start looking for problems in interesting places. You got to know to start knowing the problem. You got to know to look. But one thing you said that stuck with me is and this is more conventional marketing wisdom is that you were like, the personal brand plays a huge role in here. And I'm like very anti personal brand. Like very much so. Yeah, I'm like very much not the personal brand guy. And I think because I think it's bad advice. And because personal branding on the surface is like you are the product.
00:44:33
Speaker
and your platform, most platforms, whether they know it or not, are unintentionally monetizing Envy. This is, you're pushing people, I think, in the wrong direction. It has nothing to do with the outcomes you're capable of. Like, you're not known for a byproduct of creating outcomes for people and creating valuable things. You're known for the sake of being known. And I think this is where a lot of, like you said, students and stuff, they're like, I gotta get, I gotta blow up on Instagram. And it's like, no, you don't, you gotta do something interesting.
00:45:03
Speaker
Blowing up is a byproduct of that. Chris Walker doesn't have a personal brand. He has a reputation. Jason Vanna doesn't have a personal brand. He has a reputation. That's the difference between people who sit there and beat the personal branding drums. They're the product. They're monetized. In my opinion, they're monetizing. I might lose some friends over this one. Whatever. Who cares? I don't agree. I think we're talking about the same thing. You've just attached some baggage to the term personal brand.
00:45:31
Speaker
But when I'm talking about personal brand, I'm talking about the reputation that you're talking about being known for achieving, solving problems and helping people. Um, but I think we're getting into semantics of like, what does personal branding mean? And you're just talking about it as getting, becoming known without having the reputation. And I would just say, well, having a strong personal, having a quote unquote strong personal brand would be to be known for a good reputation, being able to solve things. I'd say Chris Walker has a very strong personal brand.
00:46:00
Speaker
What makes it a personal brand? Well, it's him personally. And when you say Chris Walker, people have thoughts and feelings and know, and things that they know from his thought leadership. Another term with lots of baggage that I'm like, well, it's still a good term. Even if people have come and mislabeled it and done crappy things with it. Yeah. Still a good term. I think, I think in our world, like people may use, people use the term personal brand to describe a lot of different things. Like you said, like the way that you describe people using thought leadership, like,
00:46:30
Speaker
People think thought leadership is just ranking in Google for a bunch of random terms and like your name is still attached to it. It's like, no, you have to literally lead people to a new and different place, right? There's the leading part in there. The leading part. So, I mean, whether or not I've probably attached baggage to it, I think that that's, I think this is stuff that people don't recognize that they're feeling, especially like in that student category you talked
Growth Through Genuine Value and Unique Offerings
00:46:55
Speaker
about. When it comes to building an audience,
00:46:58
Speaker
It's build an audience for the sake of building an audience. It's not build an audience as a byproduct of doing all these other things. So, and it's like, I think it's an important distinction to make regardless of semantics. I do believe it's an important distinction because your audience, this is how people end up hating their audience is they're doing it for the sake of it and not doing it in part of the bigger mission that they're on. Yeah. Hold on one second.
00:47:29
Speaker
It's funny, I just finished writing a whole kids book on how to grow an audience because most kids, you know, when they want to grow up, the 30% of them now want to be YouTubers. But I actually address it in the book. There's a point where the character is trying to build an audience to ghost town, no one's showing up, and he starts leveraging like cheap tricks, just trending things just for the sake, because it's popular and it's doing it, and then it ends up backfiring and not working out.
00:47:52
Speaker
like doing TikTok and doing dancing, even though you're not a dancer. And he's like, well, it's getting views, you know, and then it just doesn't work out. Um, because that's just not how you build an audience. You build an audience by being adding value through, it could be through entertainment and it could be through education or it could be through education.
00:48:11
Speaker
even better if it's through a little bit of both, right? But you have to provide value through one of those two ways by being incredibly helpful or entertaining, preferably both. And if you're not doing that in a way that's unique to you, that taps into your experience and your skill set and being able to help someone, even if it's just someone helping you a few steps behind you, because you could be 12 year old, 12 and doing this, if they're 10 and they're still getting into something like sewing, like my daughter, then
00:48:39
Speaker
You know you could still create an audience around those things as long as you're providing Actual value and not just doing it for the sake of growth itself. That's when you get in trouble 100% 100% and that's that's when like the last kind of piece of the puzzle comes into play So it's like there's more to building a POV. There's like more tactical things I call them the bolts that kind of it's all the different sound bites and stuff that you'll need but there's like seven of them so there's a whole other thing but
00:49:06
Speaker
Once you have that in place, like kind of what you're talking about, we get to the deployment phase. It's like, well, how do you actually intentionally move that point of view into the marketplace so that people not only see it, like most people stop at, see it. They're like, Oh, we've reached this many people. We got this many likes. It's like, no, how do we know people saw it and consumed it and learned something and wanted to share it with somebody or wants to talk about it with somebody, right? Like we're talking about resonance. We're talking about how do people, how do you make sure it connects with people?
00:49:35
Speaker
That's really what we're after. And the deployment plan shows up in different ways for a bunch of different people. So when you talk about how you reach your audience, an easy example is that in my past role, the director of demand for an agency, a big portion of our customers were home service-based businesses, like roofers or foundation repairs, stuff like that.
00:50:03
Speaker
And after talking with them, like this is part of the process. Like you talk with your customers and you find out where they consume stuff and what are they doing and what types of content do they like and who are they listening to and who do they are, who do they follow and trust? And we learned we were deploying in the wrong place. Like a lot of times like, they're like, yeah, I read a book if I'm on vacation and I have some time, but I'm in my truck most of my day going from job to job. I basically only listen to podcasts. I never read articles. And I was like, well, we're doing a whole lot of blogging right now.
00:50:31
Speaker
and a whole lot of publishing to LinkedIn or publish into whatever other platforms. And it turns out that like, we're not able to reach you because we're not emphasizing the podcast. And so that helps you fine tune how you reach your audience and how you get in front of them in the right ways. So it's not just about posting like this. It's not about the tactic. It's there's so much more in there.
00:50:54
Speaker
Absolutely. And there's man I could, I'd like to spend some more time unpacking all the different things you're doing to get it into the message afterwards. But
00:51:03
Speaker
I think that's almost like a whole separate podcast. So maybe we schedule a part two to this in a month or two and see where that goes. But for those who are listening right now, who are listening to this and being like, oh my gosh, I've been positioning in the wrong way. What's the one thing they could start looking at now in order to kind of take the step towards niching down in the right way so they can actually grow an audience that's going to impact revenue?
00:51:34
Speaker
In one sentence, answer the question, what problem do you solve? In a long-winded format, interview your customers, learn why they bought from you. And it's not just in when they answer the question and said, well, we needed help growing our sales pipeline. Ask them, what do you mean by that? Ask them, why does that matter? Ask them, what does that allow you to do? Get two, three layers deeper to find the true root of the problem.
00:52:04
Speaker
Do that across your customer base and you're going to pull out some really interesting insights. So I have a whole playbook on this. It's free. It's on gate. I'll give you the link to it. You can throw it in the show notes for people. Um, just the agency niche design playbook that will, it'll apply to anyone who's trying to just think this way. But in there, I talk a lot about how this stuff shows up for agencies in a ways that they, they can specifically apply it or like solopreneurs and stuff.
00:52:29
Speaker
Well, it's a good bridge to where can people learn more about you. So I'm going to be linking to that in the show notes, but where can they find that on your website? Where can they connect with you online? Yeah. Uh, I'm on LinkedIn. I write about and talk about this stuff all the time. Um, and you can check out the thing that I do, which is basically helping businesses and so openers deploy this type of thinking in their own business, uh, harness and hone.com. Fantastic. Thanks for joining me on the show. Thanks, man.
00:52:57
Speaker
Whoo, that was a fire interview. I know because I was taking like, ferocious notes over what Nick was dropping on this episode. And it's funny because I just listened to his interview on the Agency Life podcast and was taking notes then too. But to hear him break down his POV block, that three step framework was really good for me. Not focusing on industry, which I already struggled with, focusing even on this audience growth thing. It's kind of like, well, but what industry? Well, lots of industries need it. So how do I then focus and then
00:53:27
Speaker
less on the industry and way more on the problem that people are actually facing. It makes so much more sense to have him articulate it that way, gave me freedom to then pursue the problem and not have to speak directly to a specific industry. I can actually focus on a problem that covers many industry because, well, nobody else is. I'm tackling a problem that not a lot of people are going after.
00:53:47
Speaker
Um, the other thing I looked at was his three step framework was frame and name, the problem, something I knew a lot about. Um, and I've tried to do it here before. Like I mentioned in the interview, I'm still on my like fourth iteration of trying to find the exact problem that resonates with people that leads.
00:54:04
Speaker
Uh, to audience growth, the solution, obviously I don't want to offer audience growth and try to reverse engineer, but like there is a problem that needs audience growth. So, but how do I find and articulate the right problem? And it's just going to take time. Um, but also not just stopping with the problem, but trying to find the dream life. Once the problem is eliminated, his step on evangelizing the life without the problem, the business outcomes, the emotions, uh, the desirability of what life looks like on the other side. I'm like, Oh.
00:54:33
Speaker
Like, how did I not think about that? Like, of course, of course you need to paint the dream outcome of what it looks like if the main problem is solved, not with your solution, but if just the problem goes away, what does life look like? Of course, this needs to be part of your point of view. Describing the dream outcome, the desirable result needs to be part of what you're championing as well from a content perspective, right? And that's what all this informs. All of this, defining the problem and defining the dream outcome, this is a content thing. This is what you should be doing in your content.
00:55:03
Speaker
And then lastly, building the bridge between the two, man, that gives you a lot of fodder for what you should be making in your tweets and in your podcasts and in your newsletter. And it's going to be a big trend that you're going to see coming in this very podcast moving on down the road. So hopefully as you've listened to this interview, if you listen to this final part of this, this episode, you'll start to see me tweak and subtly change and introduce
00:55:30
Speaker
my own villain and my own dream scenario of what audience growth can mean for you and to every other business out there who's investing in content marketing but not seeing the kind of growth that their content deserves.
00:55:44
Speaker
Thank you for tuning in with me on another episode of the Attention Podcast. If you haven't followed me already, check me out at linkedin.com slash in slash digital marketing. Dan, I love hearing from all of you or any of you on any of these episodes. If you thought this episode was particularly fire, you know, let me know on LinkedIn. I love connecting there. So find me there and I'll see you on the next episode.