This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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How do I specialize as a marketing consultant? In this episode, we're gonna help a consultant define her niche, create a compelling service offering and attract clients to grow her side hustle. Welcome to Side Hustle School. In fact, this is Chris Guillebeau, your host. We're gonna talk about this challenge that a lot of skilled professionals face when they want to start consulting or coaching.
They're like, I have this expertise, but how do I package and sell it effectively? And this is so important. I'm always encouraging people to specialize, but how do you actually do that? So I love to kind of break it down in different case studies. Today, we're gonna hear from Isabella from Salt Lake City, and she's wondering how exactly to do this.
So let's see what we can do to help her and perhaps somebody else out there. Again, we want you to define a niche, package your service, and then market effectively to potential clients. That's basically the go-to plan, but how do you do it? Specifically the first part, like how do you figure out how to specialize? Let's talk about it.
Detail question from Isabella and my answer coming right up. [Music]
Hey, I'm Isabella. I'm a marketing consultant from Salt Lake City. I have a unique skill set that I believe could be valuable to businesses, but I'm not quite sure how to package and sell my services as a side hustle. How can I define my consulting niche, create a compelling service offering, and attract clients to grow my business?
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Isabella, the first step is gonna be to define this niche much more specifically. Define this niche in target market. What specific aspects of marketing do you excel at? Marketing is a very, very broad term these days. It's an entire discipline.
There are sub industries within that discipline. There are then sub strategies and tactics and approaches and such. So do you have experience working with certain types of businesses or industries? Maybe that's the first question. Again, the more precise you can be about your expertise and ideal client, the easier it's gonna be to create targeted offerings that speak the right language and attract the right customers.
So for example, instead of positioning yourself as a general marketing consultant, you might specialize in social media marketing for beauty brands or email marketing for B2B software companies. You could even get much more specific than that because B2B software companies, there's a lot of different ones. So again, think sub, sub, sub. Like the more layers you can go, the deeper you can go. People often think that this is a mistake that like, oh, if I'm getting way, way too in the weeds and I'm gonna eliminate so many potential clients, but that really is the wrong, that is the mistake.
In fact, because actually the more specific you can be, then the better it is, the easier it's going to be to sell to those particular clients and also other people that are also attracted. It's almost counterintuitive, but it really does work and we see it over and over across so many different industries. So most important thing there, as noted, but then once you have defined your niche, then you have to think about what is a compelling service offering? And I said a lot about this in the side hustle book as well from idea to income in 27 days, very specific steps of creating a specific service offering. So think about the problems that your target clients face, how your expertise is gonna help solve them and then package these services into clearly defined offerings that outline the benefits and deliverables clients can expect.
This is it. I mean, this is it folks. If you do this, you're going to have much higher odds of succeeding than if you are the general marketing consultant, the general life coach, whatever it is. You can apply this across lots of different fields. So really focus on who you're going to serve, who that target customer is to find that niche, create a compelling offering.
And then from there, you've got a lot more work to do. I don't mean to say it's easy, but it's possible. And that's why you should be excited, not because it's easy, but because it is possible, right? So keep at it, Isabella. I'm cheering you on, listeners cheering you on every day sidehustleschool.com/questions, notes, resources, always on the website.
I'm also on social media almost every day. Would love to connect wherever you are. New episode every day, of course. My name is Chris Guillebeau. You're listening to "Side Hustle School." [Music]
from the Onward Project.
