Lessons

Lesson Info

Ariel: Identifying Your Niche

today we are going to be covering those three topics on that screen. Um, we're gonna talk about niche or niche, and I'm gonna use both words and we're really going to begin to define that because no social media strategy works unless you have a pocket to put it in. After we kind of talked about identifying your niche and how and where you fit into the landscape, we're going to dive into what I call the signature story You need to have a story and a story is not a bio. A story is something that touches and moves and resonates with people. Some people tell really profound, deep, sad stories. Some people tell funny stories, but it's it's relevant in social media to distinguish yourself in the market place to have a story. And then the third thing we're going to talk about in the first section is writing your plan. A lot of people sort of get really overwhelmed and scared with social media, and I think the reason why is there's no plan in place, So those are the three things we're gonna hi...

t at the top of the middle and the end before we dive in, though. I know ah lot of you out there. This is social media boot camp, so we probably have some newbies and some more advanced people. There's a couple of things rattling around in your head. The 1st 1 is you don't like social media. It seems invasive. It feels weird. I don't want to tell anyone I'm eating a tuna sandwich. Um, you don't want to over share things that feel personal. Maybe you have kids. You don't want to share photos of your kids. I mean, there's all kinds of reasons to not like Social media do not confuse disliking what others dio with disliking social media. So whenever people come to my office and they're talking about their strong distaste around this, they say things like, Well, I don't like the way that person markets themselves or that person is too pushy, and they're always being to sales. He or I don't like the way my competitors, er, is doing something. So you have to kind of give yourself a little bit of a lobotomy here and pretend that you didn't see all the bad stuff that everyone else does on what I invite you to do is focus on what you do like about social media. Even the biggest haters that come to me and want to talk to me about this stuff. They can find something they like. They'll sit there all day long. And so I don't like this. I don't like that. I don't like what he said. I don't like the way she over shared. I don't care about that person's divorce and was all over Facebook, and that was crazy. But if I say okay, well, what do you use the Internet for? They will say something like, I love getting my news there or I love Pinterest and looking at photos or I love playing angry birds. I don't know whatever it is, people like social media for some reason. So for those of you that are having that conversation in your head, think about and focus on the things you do, like the next thing I want to say, which is the other thing that comes up all the time before we get fully into this is the benefits of social media can't be measured with crude data, especially for small business, and I consider anyone who is a creative entrepreneur, solo preneurs, photographer, artists of any type. You're a small business. This conversation comes up all the time. It's happening in Fortune 500 companies. It's happening with independent musicians driving round in their van. It happens 100% of the time when people come to my agency and to all of the people I know who run online social media and marketing strategy firms. And they say, What is my r a y? If I give you and I give this process of social media X amount of dollars, I want to see it come back to me. And I think every good business person should think that way. And that's the right question to ask. Except in social media, it's the wrong question to ask. So equating money with R. A Y in social media is exactly like getting angry. If you go to a cocktail party and you don't make money at the end of the night and you come home, you go. I didn't make money. That wasn't the point. So you want to really think of social media and all the platforms as a great party? What do you do it a party. You go there because something about it was attractive. Someone invited you. There was a theme. There was a reason. When you get there, you meet interesting people. You, you you don't just dive in and push yourself on them. You say? Do you know the bride of the groom where you say aren't thes many hot dogs delicious or whatever you say? You know, you have to remember that social media is like that The r A y comes back and can come back years after you plant the seeds. It happens to me all the time. People will call my office and be like I just read this great article you wrote about did it on. I think I wrote that article in like 2002. But this is the beauty also of social is that it lives on forever. If if you have a block especially you can go back years and see things, so are oh, I get it out of your head. Don't think of it like that. Of course I'm not saying to spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars on a social strategy, but what I am saying is you will be stopped very quickly if you get upset and angry about money, you might spend on a strategy on skinning your socials on getting your brand together online because the R A. Y will come back to you in a long time. Guy Kawasaki, who wrote a author publisher entrepreneur, talks about building a platform, and we're obviously talking about that for the next three days here, and he's talking about it in the context of authors. And he says it takes about 18 months to even get anywhere when you're building a platform. So how long does it takes? It takes a really, really long time. So the next thing I want to say about that is, ah, lot of artistic people especially get in what I see and what I call analysis paralysis. Their project isn't finished. Therefore, their social site shouldn't shouldn't go a go live yet or my book isn't out. So I'm waiting to do Facebook or my I work with a ton of musicians. My album isn't released yet, so therefore we're not going to do anything that is the wrong way to think about it. It is never too late to start on social media. And don't wait any longer for those of you that are in that waiting and planning phase, get out of it as swiftly as you can and just start posting. Also in your social media process, you will learn that it's a process. You might think that you want to be talking about something. You start talking about it and and no one reacts or it doesn't feel authentic to you. It takes time. How many of you are photographers? OK, it took time to figure out what your style waas You don't just take photos of everything you don't show photos of everything you don't sell yourself is the person that takes photos of everything. Maybe you are a portrait photographer or you take one of my friends runs photography. He takes only pets. Or maybe you do weddings. Or maybe you do corporate photography. I don't know, but you don't just do everything. And it probably you started out thinking I want to do one thing and then you shift and you end up doing something completely different. That's finding a niche, and that's OK. Social media also is cool because an average tweet last 45 seconds on average Facebook post last three hours. So you can't really screw it up like you can. You compose something and everybody forgets about it really, really quickly. That's not to say to do anything stupid online, but what I'm saying is, if you're doing something and it doesn't seem to be resonating or working it only last three hours, so you have tomorrow to try again. So when you are thinking about a social strategy and beginning to work your way into it, I want you to be aware of this. 70% of users in recent studies that I'm a study nerd. This was an IBM study. They report that they use social media to connect with friends and family. That is a primary reason why people are using social. That is why people tend to like Facebook a lot because everybody they know their friends and their family are on there. It's a hard platform to market on, and that will be covered tomorrow on Wednesday. But what that means is as a creative as someone marketing their business, their brand, their product, you are interrupting a conversation that is mostly being had between friends and family. And you're trying to insert your product, your good, your service, your marketing message. And this is a bit of a quandary. So what the outcome should be is that you begin to feel like a friend, any family member, and that way you're not interrupting. You're joining the conversation. So those are the things that I wanted to point out about being a friend. Joining the family are a Y and hating other people's bad stuff. Now that I've addressed those weird objections in your head, we're going to dive in. So, um, three parts part one is identifying your niche and your customer. Um, I'm gonna dive right into a sort of interesting um, e marketer quote that I found it was actually really interesting study, and what it said was this. 80% of marketers begin with tactics instead of goals. So everyone taking this is a marketer. Everyone online. Um, and I think that because we're so overwhelmed, there's Twitter. There's Facebook, There's Pinterest. There's Lincoln. You're supposed to use all these things. There's different rules for each one. They all actually look really elegant and simple. Twitter, easy 140 characters. It's not that easy. Facebook simple. It's blue and white. It's not simple at all. So I think, especially if you read marketing blog's or read marketing books about these topics, you can get really caught up really, really, really fast in the tactics that has nothing to do with what you're really doing on social media, which is the goals. I remember when I took my first photography class, I could not understand aperture. I just kept torturing my photography teacher and and she finally she said, Well, apertures aperture And I thought, Well, that answered it, you know? So what? Really when the lights started to go on for me was I just started to take pictures, and then you could sort of reverse engineer that. So what you want to do here is really, really look at goals. And don't get so caught up. Yes, the brass tacks air coming in the next two days, but what I'm gonna work on is the 30,000 foot view or going back on. We're going to talk about goals and niche. So knee short niche. We've been having an argument for two days now, all over the creative live site about this is not as easy as you think. And the cool thing about the Internet. There's 200 million blog's Your niche could be anything you want. It could be midget break dancing and we could find blog's about this. And this is the business that I am in. I'm in the extreme niche marketing business and the more niche you can get. And the more you can become known in that niche, the more success you will have again as a creative. We want everyone toe like us. But the truth is, you don't need everyone to pay you. You only need a specific, small focused niche. My focus specific small niche is creative entrepreneurs. For years before that, it was independent musicians. Me and seven people that work for me make a full time living off of Onley talking to independent musicians, which isn't it. So I urge you to A niche is not say, um, travel a niches, European backpacking or, um, shamanistic journey. You know you want to get really, really granular with your niche. So these air niches that I have at my agency, we've actually run entire campaigns around each and every one of these bullet points that you see here. Then I wanted to share them with you because I think it will get your mind going about what your niche could be. Now you wanna have a primary niche, obviously. But there can also be a secondary niche so you don't have to choose just one and go crazy on that. You're archetypes, which will be later in the day. You'll have a primary, a secondary and maybe even 1/3 1 so you can be flexible here so you can be the photographer who is also gluten free. So you can. You can pull things into your niche, my niches, coaching independent artists. But I happen to love cooking and eating. So I post stuff on my block that has to do with that, and I have a cat and I rescued her. So animal rescue is part of what I talk about. Do people come to me because I'm the animal rescue girl? No, but it's an interesting part of who I am, and it's a niche that I'm passionate about causes charities, lifestyle, these air, all wonderful things that you can dio for your niche. You can add any of these niches on top of your primary platform, so you want to definitely get thinking about how to find it, what it is and what resonates with you. What do you passionate about? And it could be little and mundane for those of you that are stopped around social media and again, back to those people that you hate that share everything, find something that you're comfortable sharing and just begin sharing on that topic. And what you'll find is if you do a Google search or Google Blawg search on any niche, there's millions of blog's covering it literally on anything. So even if you're not comfortable or you're like, Well, okay, maybe I like vegetarian cooking, but I don't know how to cook. Millions of blog's know how to do that already. Plenty of Pinterest pages already have that people are already posting about that on Facebook. Find their content and share it with your community. So this is a way of beginning to market, using the niche that you're interested in without feeling the need to have to create all that content. So I think that's another thing that stops us when we're beginning to get into social media is like, Oh my gosh, I have to Blawg. I have to tweet. I have to write Facebook pose. I have to keep up with my LinkedIn and all the people cause I want business. This is insane. It's an insane amount of stuff. Oh, and others Google Plus. And then there will be another one next month, and it just keeps coming at us. But the cool thing about it is there's someone who's already dominated at least something similar to you and what you want to say in your niche. They probably don't have exactly what you are going to create, and you can lean on them, use them, shine a light on them, use their content. Here's a story about an artist that we represented a couple of years ago, and, um, his name is Darius Lux. He was signed to a major record label, and on it was, ah, writer at Universal, and he, like many, many other artists that we've represented, got dropped, and he became an independent musician, a great songwriter, great voice, made a video. It was a cool video. It was made in his garage. It heads like a cool cast of characters who were his neighbors. This video is what he hired us to market, and he called us up and he said, I've got this great video and I want to get it out into the world. I want it to go viral and we've said OK, we'll give it a shot. Almost no videos go viral for those of you who have that is your dream. But put that out of your head right now. Um and so we took a crack at it and Darius is lovely. Song did okay, definitely didn't go viral. We marketed him, too. He's sort of like pop rock guy. We marketed him to pop blog's rock blog's singer songwriter. Blog's People liked it, but it was still kind of flat lining, and it was beginning to frustrate me on my team and Darius. So we got him on the phone one day and he sounded different and I said, Darius, why do you sound different? He said, Well, I've actually been diagnosis, I'm gluten intolerant and it's really been selling my life down, and now I'm gluten free and I've got all this energy and I feel different. I feel better and it's incredible. And a light bulb went off in my head and I thought, There's my ankle. And with his permission, we began to pitch him as the gluten free musician. And we went and we found dozens of blog's, and we wrote the bloggers that were running. The blog's a little note saying, Here's Darius Locks. He's gluten free. Could he maybe write a block post on what it feels like to be a gluten free rock star? Or could he write a block post on What is it like to be gluten free on the road? Long story short. We got about 15 feature huge articles with interviews, and one of the bloggers called him the gluten free rock star, which gave us our niche. When you're going for thought leadership most of the time, you cannot make up what you are and say it. You need to kind of wait for the community to tell you what you are, and then you can use it as your waiver flag. So we didn't say gluten free rock star. It was. It was the gut gazette. Was this great blogged about living gluten free. They did a fabulous interview and Darius had all this content. It wasn't easy for him. We called him every week and said, OK, now we have to do another interview. Now we have to do another block post and there was an incredible outpouring of content that he had to go go through. I talked to him last week to prepare today's talk, and I said, Darius, tell me a little bit about what your journey has been and lo and behold, he has now toward in Six Cities because he's gluten free playing at gluten free conferences. I mean, this is kind of funny. A lot of you are like, really, but it's so hard to find a niche, especially if you're just a musician. The world is not waiting for any more music to come out sadly, but the world is waiting to be connected. And so Darius goes any place. He's gluten free conferences, and there's gluten free food producers and people whose lives are changing and their celiac disease, which is actually very serious and being talked about and people line up and they by his CD, and he signs it and he's got an entire community. He actually told me that he has a huge fan base now in Phoenix. He'd never been to Phoenix before we started this strategy. And so the result of this super focused niche blogging is this. Now, if you go to Darius his website, it doesn't say the gluten free rock star. This doesn't mean you have to give up who you are, but this is a niche that works for him. He may be getting a beer sponsorship from a gluten free beer, and all of these gluten free food companies send him boxes of food because they would like him to endorse these air. All sort of what I call the halo effect of what happens when you can pick and Mitch and own it again. You don't go to his website and see gluten free gluten free gluten free all over it. But if you Google him, you'll certainly find a lot of articles on him, and you'll see that this is one of many things that's interesting about this client. So I wanted to tell you that story because I wanted you to kind of keep that in the back of your mind as you begin to identify your niche. And again, it doesn't have to be that you hang your hat on that one niche niche forever. Okay, how do you do it? I find that if you decide that your niche is going to be something, if you're not, we're ready. That thing were somewhat good at that thing or have a real desire to learn about that thing. It's not the right match for you, so I might be really, really interested in a topic. But unless you're willing to kind of walk the walk, it will appear inauthentic if you begin to share it on Social. I also would say, Just because something is trendy, that is the absolute worst reason to choose it for your niche. So right now, people might be talking about something that's in the news, or you see that someone else has used that in their platform. If it's not coming from within, its not your true North, and it shouldn't be a niche, no matter how popular it is. So look in the mirror. Who are you? What are you about? Don't even think about your career. Don't think about your role. You want to think about writing down anything? I'm a fashionista. I am. I love toe workout. I love whatever it ISS next. For those of you that that have a platform or ready and you've got some fans and you're doing a little bit on social, you want to look at your analytics Who was following you? Are they men? Are they women? Are the older that young? Where do they live? What language do they speak? This will also begin to give you a sense of the niche that you might not even know that you're in. It turns out my niche is dudes in their fifties, Why I've been in rock n roll for 17 years. I tend to work with touring musicians who are older guys who are trying to learn about social media. But I didn't really know that until I started looking. And so now I lay off the block post about buying a new mascara and shopping and things that are completely relevant for most 50 year old dudes, and I try to lean more towards content that works for them. The next thing you want to dio, if you have clients look at all of them. I highly recommend that if you have a client, no matter how much money they paid you if you don't like them, don't make that your niche. You will suffer and in misery you wanna look at the client who's who's the client you love the most. Why did you love them and get really granular? And we're gonna talk about that later in this talk. And then you're going to create a detailed customer archetype. How do we do that? I think that when you're thinking about social media, the most comfortable thing you can dio is model. All of it is if you were speaking toe one person that one person should be the person who would be the ideal client for you. If you're charging $10, for what you do right now, the ideal client pays you 20. Think about it in that paradigm. Think about everything. How older they What's their name? What's their gender? Hair color, eye color? What's their weight? Do they have kids like you? Are they single like you? Are they divorced? Where do they live? What do they do? And not only what they do is their career. But do they like to go to the same places you like to go to any time, especially as a creative that you have to have contact with your client base? If you have nothing to talk to them about, it can be really not a fun experience. You want to think about their needs and their wants, not Onley their needs in their wants in the context of hiring you. But there needs in their wants on a more global platform. And then you want to think about their objections, especially if you charge money. People will always have objections when they're about to hire you. You want them to part with that money. Make up a conversation in your head about why they're not gonna pay. You could solve it. How much money can they spend on you? For years I worked with independent artists. They don't have a lot of money to spend on May, so I always had to work within the paradigm of how can I deliver something fabulous for a very low price, which could be really, really exhausting if you do it hundreds or thousands of times like I did and do. Why would they invest in you? Think about the good stuff. Think about the bad stuff. Think about what an investment in anything is. If it's a Web design company or photos or anything, what would they object to do they have a little voice inside their head? Do they have a husband? Do they have a wife? Do they have a partner? A lot of times when working with bands, there's the one dude in the band that does everything and then everybody else objects. That's not an ideal client for May, because I've got one dude that has to do all the work and four dudes that hate him and me, and it sucks what keeps them awake at night. Do you solve that? Maybe you don't, but you should probably know what it is because then they become an ideal client because you can relate to them. So are there any questions about niches? Niche identification were creating an archetype that I can answer before we sail into Part two. We do have some questions coming in, and Gina Heart has a question because you mentioned primary and secondary niches. Can your niche recovering many different niches like you talk a lot about fitness and the importance of topics. Overall, can you make that all work together? Like, she says, I'm an example. Health, fitness, fashion and inspiration. Can that overall be a A brand or 100%? So think about that's exactly that's perfect. That's a perfect paradigm, and it's coming up later in the talk. So if fitness is your primary niche, maybe your fitness instructor, maybe you're doing something around fitness. Well, what comes up? Nutrition. Maybe it's about supplements or vitamins or what to eat or antioxidants. I mean, there's a 1,000,000 things that you can talk about that go hand in hand with nutrition and fitness. Well, then, if I'm going to go work out, I might as well look cute, Right? So then, you know, maybe we should talk about fitness, fashion and trends and fitness, or the best headband to get the hair out of your face or the best products to use. Or if I'm going to set up a home gym. I mean, this opens up an entire world of secondary content. So, for example, as a social media strategist, I talk mostly about mindset moving yourself out of the way, aligning yourself with where you're going to make your money from your customers. But the other things I of course, have to talk about are the tools. Are we using Flicker or instagram this week? Are we gonna use Hoot suite or social bro to manage our stuff? And that gives me 20 other different columns on my on my block world to talk about. So yes, you can. Certainly. And there's so much under fitness alone that you could dio you can do, ah, history of fitness fitness through the years you could cover Jane Fonda, Jacqueline. I mean, there's there's so many cool things, and again, you could be a much more well rounded person if you begin Teoh incorporate all of those things. People don't want a one trick thought leader to follow right thought leadership is cool because it sort of encapsulates many, many ideas around something. But just a little bit further on. That from Kalac's is does operating in multiple niches. Leashes mean that I need to have a platform for each one, Or can I combine my messages into the same site Twitter account, etcetera. Yeah, I don't recommend having separate Twitter accounts for everything. You will drive yourself nuts. It's already hard enough. Teoh do one thing now. That doesn't mean that this isn't hard to Dio. I think if you have two things that are massively divergent, it might be hard to put them all into one bucket. But for the most part, I say I went to a social media marketing Internet like Rob Ross Session a cup many, many years ago, and I remember the guy on stage said one thing. One site, one idea, one site. And I think that's an old standard. I think, in the new social media marketing, the forgiving part about it and why I love connecting creatives to long tail niches is it allows a little bit more flexibility. The reason why I hate commercial radio is commercial radio assumes that the listener is stupid. They only like one kind of thing, one kind of music, because they're selling advertisements, so that's what that is. But when you goto like Pandora or Spotify and people are allowed to choose and curate their own stuff, all of a sudden you find out that people like all kinds of things, so I would say yes, bring as many ideas unless there again, wildly divergent into each of your primary platforms. I think the worst mistake I ever made was I made a separate account for my book. So I now have to keep up with music success in nine end Cyber PR. And it's a nightmare. And like every week I'll be sitting on oh, forgot to post on that secondary Twitter account. So, one one thing for all of you. Thank you mean you want to find on social media, then becomes a nightmare. That's when you feel like you're managing too much, which I mean, I'm sure the other leaders and teachers will be going through that. I mean, then it just begins to just feel like you have to learn 10 languages instead of one. I have another question from social underscore out, uh, to clarify. Is archetype pretty much the same thing as a client's persona? Yes, yes, it iss on an archetype of sort of the embodiment of something, so as deep as you can get with that, I mean, I showed just a few bullet points what I would recommend you do with these slides is literally sit yourself down for two hours with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, depending on how you enjoy thinking at right or what or both and, you know, really write this out right this out. This was a technique that my mother actually taught me, who's who's a great marketer, and I've seen it. I've seen it with a lot of other entrepreneur coaches where they say you don't know who your marketing to until you can get into their heads and hearts and minds, and to spend a lot of time really thinking through that. It's incredible. It's like when you do a vision board or when you, when you really, really think about what it is you like, it will show up. But if you're just like I think also, when you get into that place of like I have to make money, you get a little bit desperate around really beginning to curate the right clients on. When I find that when anyone has an upset around their business, it's because they're not serving the people that they're meant to be serving, and so really connecting to that is what this exercise is about. And again, if you did all of this before, you even fired up your computer and went to Facebook and drive yourself nuts about what size the photo is supposed to be and how how come it didn't get shared or liked or whatever you would be on a much clearer path. One more thing before we move on. Just tough. Toodle, who is a regular here, is timing in and saying so if my primary niches advising women starting a family, it would cover wedding planning, eternity, early childhood education, homemaking. My getting this right. Does that work? That's a lot. I mean, yes, it works. It totally works. But those air I mean, we have an entire early childhood education blogger world that we only market to. So these are all great things you want to know. You want to be careful that you don't want to have so many things that you're constantly jumping back and forth. But yes, that is correct. That all fits into one canon of things. But still what I'm hearing you say then is go deeper, go deeper. Great. No one want needs a generalised. No, General information is so it doesn't connect to people because it's just general, you know, it's like, How do how do you plan a wedding? Well, I don't know where you're getting married Inside, Outside on the beach, barefoot. Are you in a big wedding dress? Are you in a scuba suit? I don't. It depends on who you are, like planning a Mediterranean style barefoot beach wedding. I mean, that sounds like it's almost too niche, but you'd probably be shocked that there might be a lot of people that fit into that. One of my dear friends, Greg Kessler, is a wedding photographer, and he spent years just shooting weddings. And then he found out that he's really good at shooting very, very expensive private sign, a 1,000,000 N. D. A's extremely wealthy people weddings, cause he's really good. That and he's got a really high maintenance people that go crazy if it's not perfect and that's his niche. So he let all the other stuff go, and he's very, very selective about which clients he takes, and he needs fewer of them, which is also a dream come true.