009 The power of specificity to speed up your sales

Today I'm not talking about niching, I'm talking about specificity and how it's one of the two main strategies to making sales in your service-based business.

So those strategies are:
1) being specific
2) building a personal brand

Both play important parts in your marketing, but I'm sharing a recent experience from my own business of how specificity led to faster AND easier sales.

00:00 Two main ways to make sales
02:11 The power of specificity: example from my own business
03:03 Personal branding vs. specificity
03:34 How lack of specificity makes my membership sales slower
06:59 Lessons learned

Thanks for listening!

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Chapters

• 0:00 Two main ways to make sales
• 2:51 The power of specificity: example from my own business
• 3:43 Personal branding vs. specificity
• 4:14 How lack of specificity makes my membership sales slower
• 7:39 Lessons learned

Transcript

0:40

Welcome back to the profitable creatives podcast. I'm your host, Emily Kim. And today. The title of this episode is the power of specificity to speed up your sales. And we're kind of talking about niching, but we're also not talking about niching. I know that's such an over done topic and whenever I hear it personally, I roll my eyes. But I want to share examples from my own business where being more specific in what I do and what I offer has led to more sales, not less. And it's also a lot easier. So something that I have observed and have finally been able to articulate in the last few weeks, maybe. Is that there are really two main ways to start making sales in your service-based business. Number one. You can build a personal brand. And what I mean by that it's not like a physical entity, right? Your, your personal brand is not like this beautiful document that you put together or something like that. An example of building a personal brand could be somebody buys something from you because you met them in person and they like you. Right. That's really all it boils down to building a personal brand. Is showing people who you are and if they like you enough, they'll probably buy something from you. And then the second way to make sales is to be as specific and targeted as possible. Okay. So what does that mean? I'm going to give you an example from something that happened to me recently. So a few months ago, I hosted an in-person workshop called break into brand photography. It is exactly what it sounds like. It is for photographers who want to break into brand photography. They are maybe portrait, photographers, family photographers, wedding, photographers, whatever. They've been interested in personal brand photography. And so if that's you. You sign up for this workshop. What I did not expect was for a bunch of. Almost strangers to buy this from me pretty much as soon as I published it. So I had 10 attendees. Of those 10. I personally knew about two of them. But the other photographers that joined. I had never spoken to them before, or like DMD them on Instagram or anything. And this was really, really surprising to me because up until this point, I have really relied on personal branding to sell my services. People get to know me. They're like, oh, Emily's a brand photographer. I like her. I'm going to book her for my brand photography packages. Right. That's generally how it has worked. And it's been great. But for the education side of my business, where I am now taking what I've learned and teaching it. I've known. I've realized the more specific that I am, the easier it is to sell something. So in contrast, I want to talk about my baby, my group coaching membership. Now called the profitable creatives club, formerly known as the business side blueprint. The. Tagline for it. I'm kind of workshopping still, but the tagline is. Right now. Create and sell your most profitable service in the next 90 days. That sounds great. But to a total stranger. Who shows up in my world and sees my membership. They're probably not going to buy it right. Because. It's not, I mean, it's specific, but it's not that specific. And the people that are in my membership now. Um, generally speaking like 95% of people I knew personally, or have talked to, or had some kind of person. Personal relationship or connection with, so the way that I've grown, my membership has been through personal branding. The way that I sold out my. Breaking the brand photography and person workshop was because of specificity. Does that make sense? I feel like I had this brain blast when it finally occurred to me because in the past I was talking to another one of my business friends about my membership and I was explaining what it was and she was like, well, who's it for? And I said, it's for photographers, but also. Uh, other creative service providers. Like makeup artists, designers, wardrobe, stylists. It's at her up. Which is totally true. But she said. I don't know if that's specific enough. And this was a little over a year ago. And when she told me that I was like, no, Like I help all of these people because all of these people are in my membership. I don't only have photographers. I have lots of consultants and, um, Uh, service providers, other people that are not photographers. And I just didn't want to believe her. Now, but she probably told me that in a year and a half ago. A year and a half ago, I can't talk today. Um, and she was a hundred percent right. But also that doesn't make me wrong. If I am more specific, I will make those sales faster. But is that my end goal? I kind of liked that the people that come into my membership know me and know what I'm about and know my working style. I like that. It's just going to be slower to grow the membership that way, because the time it takes to build that trust. Is longer. Than. When you sell something super duper specific. So building a personal brand, you're really working off the know like, and trust factor versus when you're selling something based on specificity, the more specific you are at you're basically already demonstrating your knowledge by being extra, super specific. I was in the place where I wanted to offer brand photography, but didn't really know what it was. And now I've been doing it for a long time since 2018. And I can speak to the exact thoughts and fears. And once of someone who wants to break into brand photography, that's why that workshop was the absolute easiest thing I've ever sold. I had 10 spots. I sold each ticket for$297 and they went, they sold out. I wasn't expecting to sell out. I never sell out when I'm doing stuff like this. And it was so easy. It was such an easy yes, for everyone. That's what everybody told me. When I collected feedback from them, everyone was like, this is exactly what I need. I want to break into brand photography. So this was a really, really important. Lesson for me to learn, because again, up until now, I have been building my personal brand. To make sales. So to recap, you can use both of these strategies in your marketing, both being super duper specific and building out your personal brand. But what's really important here is to decide what is your priority? Do you want more money now? Faster, because if yes, that means you need to put together a service or a product that is. As specific as possible. The longterm game is building out your personal brand. There is definitely a time and a place for both. But this lesson that I've learned in hosting this in-person workshop. I feel like has finally put all of the pieces of the marketing puzzle together for me. I also think it's so funny because when I am working in my membership doing group coaching calls, or when I'm working with a one-on-one coaching client, it's so easy for me to see it in other people. And that's probably the same for you too. You can probably spot it in other people's businesses, but when it comes to your own business, it is. Kind of tricky because you're so deep into the weeds. I am working with not photographers, other service providers one-on-one and in my membership. So. I never want anyone to feel excluded, which is why it's been hard for me to be specific in my marketing for my group coaching membership, the profitable creatives club, and also in my one-on-one coaching. I just, I never want anyone to feel excluded, but the truth is. You're really not excluding people because. The people who already like you because of your personal brand, because they know you. They're going to ask you like, Hey, I see you're marketing this thing to photographers, but can you help me to, like, I think you can help me. I have people ask me all the time. Like, can I get one-on-one coaching actually, let's pause currently as I'm recording this podcast right now, I actually don't have a photographer one-on-one client right now. I have. All non photographer clients, all who reached out to me. Because they were interested in my services that I am marketing to photographers. So really being specific. Is not going to exclude anyone. I feel like I'm coaching myself out of this right now. It's really just going to speed up your sales. So the next time you hear somebody talk about niching down and you need to choose a niche and bla bla bla bla bla. Let's look at it from this perspective. You are not choosing a niche. You are choosing specificity to speed up your sales for a certain period of time. I am again, going to be hosting the break into brand photography workshop in person in Boston, in January. I'm really excited about it because. Based on my results of last time, it's probably going to sell out pretty quickly because I'm so hyper-specific, now I can make it even. More specific. And the people that are interested in that I can then either add them to a wait list or rather they can opt into a wait list to be added to my email list and I can market other services to them. And then, then once they're on my email list in my world, They'll start getting my email newsletters. They'll start seeing me on Instagram. Maybe here on the podcast on YouTube, wherever I am. And that is going to slowly build up the trust that. They need in me to be able to book some of my other services, joined my membership, that kind of stuff. So I hope this was helpful for you. It definitely was for me, this has been a very cathartic experience. The TLDR of this episode is you don't have to niche down. But specificity will speed up your sales. I love a good alliteration. If you liked this episode or really any prior episode. I would super duper appreciate if you could rate and leave a review for the profitable creatives podcast in whatever podcast app you use to listen, I use the apple podcast app. So if you want to go and leave a review there too. Even if you don't listen there, that would be super duper awesome. So that I can see them. But I would just really appreciate it. And it helps people who are considering listening to the show know that, um, I am not in total hack. Basically. In any case I would so appreciate that. I hope you're having a great week and I'll catch you in the next episode.