I’d bet that you don’t devote the same amount of marketing to every one of your products or services. Some of your offerings you may not market at all. They’re add-on services that you recommend to clients based on the direction your work with them takes.
The corollary to this is that the choices you make about which of your services to offer will affect the kind of audience you attract.
I mention this not because of the freedom it gives you, but because of the real work that you need to do to decide on where to focus your marketing.
That work applies to the offerings you’ll feature, of course, but also to the aspects of those offerings that you feel will be most appealing to the audience you want to attract.
A Changing Competitive Landscape
That work has added urgency today as the competitive landscape changes on a near-daily for most businesses. AI is largely responsible for these shifts, but an increased comfort with “good enough” solutions being, well, good enough, is also pushing changes in how we do business and where we create value.
For example, graphic design pros run into this shift when their clients decide not to pay a senior graphic designer to create a full brand system when they can get a newly-minted design grad to fire up her favorite AI and have the slide deck template they need ASAP done in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost?
In that instance, the years of experience and the value of perspective that the senior designer brings to the table simply aren’t worth the additional cost in the eyes of the client. It’s up to that designer to find a different way to demonstrate the value that makes their price tag worthwhile. Here are a few ideas for doing just that:
Desperate Marketing Does Not Attract Eager Buyers
For starters, resist the urge to market everything you do all the time to everyone. Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but desperation definitely does not attract eager buyers.
There may be limited instances when there’s value in presenting the complete menu of what you can do, but in general, the more specific your marketing, the more effective your marketing message.
This isn’t just because specialists are valued to a greater extent than generalists, though that certainly contributes. The issue is that your prospect is trying to solve a particular problem and they will seek out and respond to messages that address that problem specifically.
Define the Problem, Demonstrate the Solution
Once your audience finds out that you have a solution to their problem, they’ll want to build confidence that your solution works. Demonstrate you understand the issue and know what they’re up against, and that you can provide a solution that improves their business.
For our senior graphic designer, that’s likely going to mean dropping terms like “full-service” from their marketing—and not just because it’s an overused and meaningless phrase—in favor of talking about specific problems they solve.
This doesn’t mean you have to give away the implementation work. (Which is what is most at risk of being done by AI.) That decision will likely hinge on your client’s available resources and their DIY spirit.
Meet Your Clients Where They Are
But it does mean you have to focus on the strategic landscape first. To do this you’ll need to meet them where they are: they want to talk about a specific problem, like that slide deck template we just talked about above. Meet them there, and show how your experience solving similar problems helps eliminate the bigger problem that they haven’t themselves connected to their immediate need.
Acknowledge that once you show your prospect what to do, there’s a good chance they can have someone on their team to do it less expensively than you would. They’ll appreciate your candor and by not sweeping the issue under the rug, may help you reinforce your value on a strategic level.
And that value conversation is exactly where you want to be. It gives you the opportunity to focus on your real differentiation, the expertise and experience and outside perspective that allows provides value.
Lead with that and you’ll create breathing room between yourself and competitors whose expertise is in AI, not the judgement that makes the difference in achieving the desired outcomes.
Sure Bet, Not Expensive Alternative
AI and cheap vendors will still win jobs that clients deem not important enough to invest real resources in. But for any project where clients recognize that a deeper dive is going to yield measurably better results, you want them to think of you not as the more expensive alternative, but as the sure bet.
Save the implementation work for the upsell. In the age of “good enough” and AI’s growing dominance, value for implementation is being eroded daily.
Still, it turns out that sometimes good enough isn’t quite. Sacrifice the more mechanical work you do in favor of demonstrating in creativity and strategic insight and you will maintain your value in the eyes of your prospects.
Occasional large-scale changes can re-invigorate a marketing plan that’s beginning to falter and can provide a blast of inspiration that ripples out through the rest of your marketing. By the way, if you’re interested in hearing some of my podcast and radio appearances, you’ll find a few of them listed on the Andigo website.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
