Irresistible Offers: Why Advertising to Fewer People Will Get You More Customers

Shane Melaugh

Hello and welcome to the ActiveGrowth podcast. This is the first episode in our third series, which is about how to create irresistible offers. The reason we are talking about irresistible offers and the reasons we are dedicating a whole series to this topic is because the better your offer is, the more irresistible your offer is, the easier it is to sell, to get traffic, to get people to share your business, tell their friends about it and so on. The more irresistible your offer is, the easier it is to build a successful business. Conversely, the worse your offer is, the less appealing your offer is, the more difficult everything else becomes. Stay in this first episode. We are talking about the most common problem that leads to unappealing offers. It's an interesting problem because it's one that you can't see in your own business. If you see this in someone else's business, you can tell, "This is not a good offer", but in your own business you're blind to this. That's why it's very important to stick with this episode and keep listening even if your first reaction is, "This doesn't apply to me. I don't have this problem." In fact, especially if that's your first reaction, keep listening until you hear our examples and our action steps. You can get the show notes for this episode by going to activegrowth.com/15. With that said, let's get started. Hello, I'm Shane Melaugh.

Hanne Vervaeck

And I'm Hanne Vervaeck. The other day, I was looking in my mailbox and I found the flyer there and this flyer was for pizza. You might think that a flyer for pizza that's nothing weird, right? This flyer [inaudible 00:01:50] for pizza, they also offered kebab and what was even weirder is that they even had sushi. Now, I want to ask you. Would you order sushi from this place?

Shane Melaugh

Oh my God! No. It feels like that's such a strange combination. I think of sushi as something that requires great delicacy to make and that's somehow not the same image that's conjured from a pizza and kebab place.

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly. You can see the greasy kebab and like the fresh fish next to it.

Shane Melaugh

No. It doesn't work.

Hanne Vervaeck

It doesn't work at all. This is what we are going to talk about today, right?

Shane Melaugh

The problem here is basically that I guessed this place, their logic was that, "Okay, if we sell pizza ..." I'm guessing it's like you can order it like pizza delivery. "Okay, a lot of other people are doing that. What if we also add kebab delivery and we also add sushi delivery, then that must mean more customers, right?" Offering more things must mean more customers. I bet next week you'll get one where it says, "Also, wedding cakes."

Hanne Vervaeck

Wait. That's not really something people order, right?

Shane Melaugh

No. Birthday cakes? I don't know.

Hanne Vervaeck

You are totally right. That's like, "Oh, yeah, let's offer everything that somebody could order on a Friday night when they are too lazy to get out," right?

Shane Melaugh

Yeah. In this episode, in this series, we are talking about irresistible offers. This has come up through some of the discussions that were started from the previous episodes and it also come up. It's something that we see this a lot in our work at Thrive Themes. As you can imagine, we see many, many landing pages and websites and opt-in forms and offers and so on that our customers make. We do these website reviews. We just get a lot of exposure to what people are building in terms of offers and sales pages and online businesses. Quite often, you take one look at one of these websites or landing page and you just immediately see that this is never going to work. We kind of have a privileged position because we get access to all of these websites that you, the general public, let's say, will basically never see because they will never succeed. As a, let's say, normal web consumer, we are actually exposed to the cream of the crop of websites. We generally only come across the really good stuff that succeeded somehow. In our work at Thrive Themes, we see a cross-section of all types of websites made by all kinds of people. We also see the ones that will basically never succeed and never take off. I think it's easy to forget how commonly a website has this problem where you look at it and just go, "No, this is never going to work." The most common reason you get this feeling when looking at a website is that the offer on the site or the page. It just doesn't work. This pizza, sushi, kebab offer is one such thing. It just feels wrong. It feels wrong right away and you're like, "This is not going to work."

Hanne Vervaeck

I'm sure they are wondering why they don't get more sales. I think that the moment that they decided to make sushi, they thought that it was going to be a huge increase in sales and now they are probably wondering why their sales in pizzas dropped.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly. Yes, exactly. This is the type of problem we are going to look at and it's the type of problem that we want to help you avoid or solve. The pizza, kebab, sushi example is, of course, is pretty extreme. Basically, everybody hears that and goes, "That's weird." I'm guessing that if you're listening to this, you probably don't have a problem with your offer to that degree, but similar thing or the same thing can go wrong with your offer in more subtle ways that you would probably not be aware of. To clarify a couple of points, first of all, we are talking about the offer itself here. We are talking about not the way the offer is presented like your copywriting and design even though those matter as well. The offer itself is basically separate from all that. It's separate from your copy. It's separate from your design. It's separate from your website. The offer is basically what do you get and how much does it cost. If I come to your website, what do I get and how much does it cost me? Offers can be bad in different ways. Let me just run through some examples of what we've seen. First of all, an offer can be too expensive. Everybody knows this problem, something can be too expensive. You might be offering something I want, but it's not at a price that I'm willing to pay. If you're selling a pad of sticky notes for $100, I'm just not going to pay $100 for a pad of sticky notes.

Hanne Vervaeck

Are there Swarovski stones on those sticky note?

Shane Melaugh

Maybe.

Hanne Vervaeck

Because that might be worth all the cost.

Shane Melaugh

You think? You're in the market work.

Hanne Vervaeck

To me, it might be.

Shane Melaugh

I don't know.

Hanne Vervaeck

I love sticky notes.

Shane Melaugh

Do the Swarovski add to what makes you like sticky notes?

Hanne Vervaeck

Glittery sticky notes, come on.

Shane Melaugh

If you're selling glittery sticky notes for $100, then you have at least one customer we just found out. The point is that with something like we have an idea of what many things are supposed to cost. If the price is simply too high or if the thing is just not important enough, then that just not going to work. It also illustrates why the offer is separate from the presentation of the offer. If you have something that is simply overpriced, then even if you have great copy and great design and so on, it's not really going to make a difference. Another common problem is what I would call missing the mark where there's an offer, but it's just not what I want or need. This could be an issue of targeting. If I come to your website and I go, "No, this is just not something I want to need at all," then maybe you're targeting the wrong kind of people. If I click to an ad to get there, then you should probably target that ad to fewer people. It could also be a product market fit problem. It's possible that no one comes to your website and thinks, "This is what I want or need," which means that you have to change your product. You have to change your offer to fit someone's needs. Another way in which an offer can be bad is it can fail to be believable. If I tell you give me $10 and I'll give you $100 bill, that is technically a great offer and something that who wouldn't want that, but the problem is you don't trust that. You'll never going to believe that this isn't a fake $100 bill that I'm giving you. The same goes for many things. Of course, if someone is selling guaranteed investment advice, triple your investment in 30 days and it cost like $7, why would you believe that, right? Those are some of the most obvious ways in which an offer can be bad and in which offers can fail. Another one and the one we're going to focus on here is that an offer can be too generic and does unappealing. Maybe it is something that's useful. Maybe it is something that fits me in general, but it's just not important or interesting or urgent enough to bother with. This too generic and unappealing offer, that's the first thing we're going to take a closer look at.

Hanne Vervaeck

I really want to challenge everybody because the easy one is saying like, "Oh, it's too expensive." The reason why people don't buy my service is probably because it's too expensive. Even if you ask people, if you ask your audience, they might say as an easy answer, "Yeah, it's too expensive", but very often it's because it's not appealing to people. They don't see the value in there. Just lowering the price would never help. I think that's very important to keep in mind that, yes, of course, if you're pricing something like a ridiculously high price and nobody would be willing to pay, that's a problem. Most of the time, it's not the first thing.

Shane Melaugh

It's much better for your business as well if you can increase the value of your offer to the point where people are willing to pay a lot for it than to be involved in a pricing race to the bottom where you're like, "Well, what if I give you 50% off?" At some point, people will be like, "Okay, whatever, I'll buy this just because I'm a hoarder." That's not really going to help your business.

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly. It's one of those things, if you just look around, you will find people who have services and they just like, "Yeah, this is 10K in our service, whatever, and they can get away with it." It's too easy to be like, "Oh, probably because I'm charging 100 bucks an hour, it's too expensive for people." I think that's actually a clue that there's something really wrong with the offer.

Shane Melaugh

Yes.

Hanne Vervaeck

Now, like Shane just said, the thing that we're going to concentrate on in this episode is if you are too generic or too unappealing. I'm sure you've heard it before like the riches are in the niches and that's from somebody who doesn't know how to say niche because that's the right way to say it and the riches are in the niches doesn't work really, so whatever.

Shane Melaugh

No. I think you are allowed to say nitch instead of niche.

Hanne Vervaeck

I still feel that because it comes from a French word. You probably use the right explanation.

Shane Melaugh

Anyway, we believe that we should niche down. We should have a niche offer rather than a generic offer.

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly. How can you really apply this and when do you know when you are going to niche or when you are too narrow, so that actually nobody wants to buy it from you anymore, that there's no audience anymore? First of all, I want to ask you another question. When you are looking for a photographer and it's for your wedding day. You are looking around, you are ready to have a good photographer because this is super important day. You want to make sure that he doesn't mess up. Would you go for somebody, a photographer, who is doing like kind of everything or would you go for somebody who is actually specialized in wedding photography? The same is like for taxes. If you have problems with your taxes, would you go to a lawyer who specialized in foreign taxes or would you just go to a general lawyer? The reason that I'm asking this is because when you make that decision yourself, it's like super easy to see that you would prefer somebody who specialized. Somebody who actually niched down their business and decided, "I'm a photographer. I can take pictures of anything, but I'm going to specialize in weddings" or "I'm going to specialize in foreign taxes" or whatever.

Shane Melaugh

My favorite example of this is imagine that you have a pounding headache and you go into the pharmacy and you just need something to get rid of this headache. You are looking in the painkiller section, let's say, and there's one that's just generic painkiller and there's one that is headache buster. It's a painkiller made for headaches. Now, obviously, that's the one you go for. Here's the thing. Even if someone came in and said, "Listen, the painkiller and the headache painkiller is basically the same thing. It's just the label that's different." I bet most of us would still be like, "Yeah, I still going to go for the headache one."

Hanne Vervaeck

Even if it's a little bit more expensive. You want the thing that is fitted for your needs. Now, the problem is when many entrepreneurs think about their own business, they are not doing this because there's a fear in doing this. One of the fears would be, "I'm going to lose business because I can't serve those people, so why would I miss out? Why wouldn't I do it?" Also, it seems logical that if you offer more services, you have more opportunities to sell. One last one that I think that is actually very important is that feeling like, "But I can actually do all of that. I'm a designer so I can do logos and I can do websites. I can do whatever other design, anterior design or whatever." Because why not? More services, more opportunities and more clients.

Shane Melaugh

It's interesting how from the consumer side we think about this very differently than from the entrepreneur side. From the consumer side, it seems pretty obvious like the examples we gave before. It seems pretty obvious that you want the more specific thing, but as soon as we switch into our entrepreneur mode, we can't help but see a potential crowd of customers and every time we specialize, every time we narrow our focus, we just see like this crowd is getting smaller. I don't want that. I want a larger crowd.

Hanne Vervaeck

There are a lot of advantages in having a niche offer. One of those advantages is actually that it's way cheaper to do marketing because if you have to reach a lot of people, then that is actually something very expensive to do and it's very inefficient. You will need to shoot large and then hope that some of those people will actually be interested in what you are looking for. It's also super hard to actually write a clear message. When we go back to the copywriting, like we said, it is important to be able to present your offer, so that people understand if it's something for them. If it just have in mind that this is something that everybody could use, then it will be really hard to convince somebody that it actually is for them.

Shane Melaugh

In the show notes, we are going to link to a website review we did where you can see a practical example of this problem in action and our solution for it. We were reviewing a website. It basically had too many offers for too many people. The problem is if you present them all in a single page, every time you are talking about one thing that interest one segment of your audience, you're losing the attention of everyone else. This is a big problem in presenting your offer. If you have a narrow and clear focus, it's actually quite easy to say the exact right things to the exact right people whereas if you try to appeal to too many people. This is an attention management problem. I tend to think of a lot of what we do in online marketing as attention management because online everyone is always an instant away from closing your site and going somewhere else. People's attention spans are at an all-time low. If someone is going through your page or your video or your presentation, whatever, where you present your offer, the moment you give them a "this isn't really made for you signal", you lose people. Even if moments later you go, "Hold on. There's also something for you in here," they're already gone. They're already somewhere else. This is also why it's really important to have this very, very clear focus because trying to appeal to too many people, all everyone in your crowd is hearing is, "This isn't for me."

Hanne Vervaeck

Because everybody is a special snowflake.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly.

Hanne Vervaeck

Everybody likes to feel as if you know exactly what they are feeling and what their problems are. An example of this was when I was talking to an entrepreneur and he developed this tool to scrape websites and then import the data in WordPress. He came up to me after I think it was after a copywriting talk. He actually said exactly the same thing like many entrepreneurs say like, "I have this tool. I think it is a good tool, but for some reason, nobody is buying. I really have trouble selling it." I was listening to his story and this is actually perfect for someone who would like to switch from, let's say, Weebly to WordPress. I was asking him like, "Can you do that? Can you go from Weebly to WordPress?" He is like, "Yeah, yeah, sure." I was like, "Okay. How about like Wix or Squarespace to WordPress?" "Yeah, yeah. I can do all of that." I asked him to pick the most promising niche and he didn't want to do it. He was like, "No, but you don't understand. I can do it for Weebly and I can do it for Wix and I can do it for Squarespace." I asked him, "Which one do you think is the most promising? Which one is maybe the biggest market? Which one is the most demand?" I was trying to explain to him that it would be much easier to have people who are looking to switch from Drupal to WordPress and have that term and see that ad in their Facebook and are targeted that way than being like, "Hey, this is a website scraper for importing stuff in WordPress."

Shane Melaugh

What does that mean? We have to understand that in consumer mode, everyone is selfish. If I have a Squarespace website right now and I want to switch to WordPress, then if you simply tell me, "Look, here's the thing that switches from Squarespace to WordPress, then I don't care what else your tool does. I just don't care. I'm sorry. I know it's important to you the creator and you are proud that it also does all this. I don't care. All I want is to switch my website from Squarespace to WordPress. End of story."

Hanne Vervaeck

His feeling was really that his tool would become less valuable by doing that. It was really funny because I tried to explain that he could still have landing pages. I explained like, "This is the tool from Drupal to WordPress and this is the tool from Squarespace to WordPress." Just basically like multiply the number of people that he could talk to as long as he didn't try to talk to everybody on one sales page. I don't know. I guess in the meantime he stopped developing the tool. It is so important, like you said, to give the consumer the feeling that this will solve their problem. The moment that they read your sales page or your message, they have to be like, "Yes. Hell, yes. This is the offer that fits my needs."

Shane Melaugh

The "hell yes" thing is really important because if you want to get an object in motion basically, it takes that extra push of initial energy. If you have an offer that makes people go, "Yeah, sure," then that is actually not enough to get someone to make that commitment. Like a lukewarm yes is not enough. You have to have something that makes a certain kind of person with a certain kind of problem go, "Heck, yes! This is exactly what I want."

Hanne Vervaeck

When they're like, "Yeah, maybe, I don't know," this means click away and find a tool that fits my needs better. If really after so much searching I cannot find anything, then I might maybe come to you, which is really not a position where you want to be in. We want to get to that "hell yes" feeling for our customers. The question is, should you niche down on your business? At what point do you know that you're making this mistake? We have a few easy things that you can actually do to figure out if you're trying to reach too many people, if you are trying to appeal to different audiences. The very first one is ask a friend if they can easily refer someone to you. If they know exactly what you are doing, it should be super easy for them to say, "Yes, I have a friend and she has children between the age of four and six, and I know that you have a clothing line for those kids." That is super clear and they can refer somebody to you. If you are specific enough, this should be super easy for your friend. If your friend is like, "I don't know. Tell me again. What are you doing? Maybe my friend, Mark, I think he kind of need a website like the one you are offering, but I'm not sure," then probably you're not specific enough and you can go deeper and you can niche down on your offer.

Shane Melaugh

I would also say that an important factor here that if your friend understands what you offer, but has trouble thinking of someone to and was like, "Yeah, I know what you do, but I don't know among my friends, among my colleagues. I can't really think of anyone." That's a real problem. That's a problem of the offer being too generic or too unappealing. Whereas if you have a technical product and your friend is like, "Look, I don't really know what you do," that's a different problem. Basically, it's not difficult to explain to someone, "Look, this is what I offer," but they just can't seem to think of someone who is like, "Yeah, definitely, I have this one friend who needs this." That is the sign that it's too generic.

Hanne Vervaeck

Now, the second question that you have to ask yourself is, do you know how to reach your audience? An example of this is that it will be much easier to reach dentists in Dallas than it would be to reach English speaking small businesses. At that point, when we go back to the fact that your marketing will be more expensive if you don't niche down, this is clearly the question that you have to ask yourself. Do you know and is it easy to reach the audience that you want to reach? Because the easier it becomes, the less money you will have to spend to actually get the right people in front of your offer.

Shane Melaugh

This one is huge. I have to say that when I talk to people who ask me like friends and people who know me otherwise who asked me for business advice. I have them talk me through their idea. This is always the one that I end up insisting on them. "Look, you have to be able to point to a group of people who need this thing." If you just say, "No, I bet there must be many people. I mean, sure, there must be so many people out there who need this." "No, no. I want you to be like point your finger at a group of people who need this." It has to be so obvious. I like the example you gave, the dentists in Dallas. You can walk there and knock on the door. That's how specific that is. You can find literally the dentists in Dallas whereas if you just like, "No, this is for people who want a website and you have like this idea of ... There must be this huge crowd. I'm not quite sure who I'd walk up to and shake hands with, but there must be out there." That is a sign that it's way too generic.

Hanne Vervaeck

Again, imagine that you have to do Facebook ads. What are you going to do? Are you going to target everybody between 30 and 50 in the hope that they might be interested in your offer? That's not a good way to spend your money.

Shane Melaugh

By the way, just like as a very basic tip for Facebook ads, I think people make the same mistake there. As you are setting, you are targeting in Facebook, it tells you how large your audience is. Beginner mistake is to look at that number and go, "Oh, this number is going down. That's not good. I want to reach more people." That's exactly the opposite of what you want. You want that number to be small. It's great if you have an audience that is only a few thousand people. It is not great if you have an audience that is 500 million people.

Hanne Vervaeck

There's something about a big fish in a small pond.

Shane Melaugh

There must be some saying about that.

Hanne Vervaeck

It's like if you can dominate a small market, that will always be easier and better than trying to catch a little bit of a huge market. Now, how can you niche down? There are several ways that you can niche down your offer and depending on what you're offering right now, this might or might not apply. Try to think through all of them and try to think if this can apply to your offer. First of all, you can niche down by audience or by industry. We have a cheat sheet in the Forget Traffic course that you can download on the ActiveGrowth website. One of the question is, who can you serve best, but also who are you excluding? I want to repeat that question right here because it will help you to niche down your offer. Who are you not going to serve? That's a very important question. Now, the second way of niching down is by technology and this would be instead of creating websites, you can create Shopify websites or instead of creating just general websites, you can specialize in WordPress websites or any other technology. If you are using a specific software for your service, then this is something that you can use to niche down.

Shane Melaugh

You can often see this with piggyback businesses that appear when something becomes successful. I think that the most recent example of this in our space is Slack. Once Slack started taking off, there were all these piggyback businesses that showed up, which is just something for Slack, some tools, some feature for slack where there's no real reason why they couldn't make a generic version for that. That's basically for everything and we also integrate with Slack, but these businesses are smart enough to realize that it's better to target very specifically people who have this need and are using Slack. This happens basically for whenever something platform-like takes off, there will be all these add-ons and extensions and third party things made for that platform. That's why it helps them reach the right crowd more easily.

Hanne Vervaeck

Now, the third thing that you can do is specialize. For example, if you are doing audio editing, you could offer podcast editing, which is much more specific and it will be easier to reach your audience because then you can target podcasters, for example. The specialization is also what we were talking about with the photography, the wedding photography instead of just general photography or the designer who concentrates on landing page design and doesn't do any logo design anymore. Becoming specialized in a very specific topic can always help to niche down.

Shane Melaugh

In some cases, especially with service-based businesses, if you've been grinding it out and doing all kinds of work for all kinds of clients, this can be a great opportunity. You can basically look at all of your past clients, all the work you've down and look at, "Okay. What's been the best work here? Where have I gotten paid best? Where have the customers been the most satisfied with my work? What's basically been the smoothest? What's the 80/20 here? What's like the 20% of clients that bring me 80% of my income and possibly also 8% of my joy because I actually enjoy doing this type of work? Do they have anything in common?" Maybe you'll find that, "Oh, it's always the logo design jobs are great. This is something I'm just good at and the customers were satisfied and it just goes really well. Every time someone comes with a web design project, it's just pain and in the end it ends up costing me almost more than I get." Then, that's a great signal. You can be like, "Oh, maybe I should specialize on logo design. Maybe I should only work with those good clients where I actually get paid and basically fire all of the other clients that are causing me pain and not paying me well."

Hanne Vervaeck

Another example of this was a friend of mine who was talking about his guitar course business. This is like a beginner guitar lessons online. They even still have DVDs. You know the reason why they have DVDs is because they found out that the people who were willing to pay for beginners guitar lessons were between 50 and 60 years old and they still like looking at DVDs.

Shane Melaugh

That's interesting.

Hanne Vervaeck

The moment that they realized that that was their audience, that was their segment, that was their target audience, they then flipped around the whole business, concentrated only on those people, made songs that those people would be appeal to, changed their whole way of talking and so their business grow exponentially. A challenge for you would be go to Google and put it your industry and then for. This could be guitar lessons for. It's actually pretty funny because it brings up some very interesting ...

Shane Melaugh

It brings up the autosuggest thing.

Hanne Vervaeck

Yeah. Google will suggest what comes after that. You will see if you try to the guitar lesson example, it brings up "for autistic children" or it brings up "for country music." These are suggestions that Google is making based on researches that people are already doing. This might help you to find a niche in your industry.

Shane Melaugh

To make this even more practical, here are some examples of businesses that exist that are successful niche businesses or that started very clearly targeted in a niche.

Hanne Vervaeck

Let's Eat is a website builder, but only for restaurant websites. Daddy Daughter Hair School is a hair styling course, but only targeting fathers who want to help their daughters with their hair. This is maybe a website that you already heard of, the Nerd Fitness website. As you can see, that's not a fitness program for everyone. They are very specifically targeting those people who also like to read common books. One more example that I really like is Wag, which is a dog walking and dog sitting app for busy dog owners. Not just for when you're on holidays or whatever, no. It's for busy dog owners.

Shane Melaugh

Another one that you might be familiar with simply because it's in our market is ConvertKit. ConvertKit is an email marketing service that brands itself as being for bloggers and especially when they started. They really advertise that this is for bloggers and writers. Really, it's a general purpose email marketing tool. If you have an e-commerce stores, there's no reason why you couldn't use ConvertKit, but they chose to focus on that niche. They are open to other people joining, but in their advertising, in their messaging, they are staying on that niche. I also got an insight into niche business in my previous life before online marketing where I was selling hardware. I was selling highly specialized computer hardware for water cooling computers. The market of computer tech was already dominated by these huge players, these huge companies that were selling computer hardware. This emergence of this niche of people interested in water cooling allowed some new players to enter that market where they didn't start by saying, "Oh, we are the new egg competitor basically. You can buy all computer hardware here." They would have never stood a chance, but there were the small specialized stores where like, "Okay, we sell this water cooling stuff to this small group of weirdos interested in water cooling their computers." Another example of something that started out as a niche business is Thrive Themes. Our first product was a visual editor made for creating sales pages in WordPress. That's how specific that was. If you are a WordPress user and you're frustrated because you want to make a sales page and WordPress is not built for that, here's the solution. This is how we started. Of course, we still focus on a niche. We still focus on people who care about building business websites, conversion focused websites. We are not saying our products are for anyone who uses WordPress, but we have expanded a little bit from that original niche. That's another thing to keep in mind is like you can start small. You can start in a small segment, get a footing there and then expand not too much in most cases. You don't want to go super generic from there, but you can slowly like expand that focus and start appealing to more people once you already have something going.

Hanne Vervaeck

If during this podcast, if you're feeling kind of icky about the idea of pushing away that many clients, then you're still not exactly in the right mindset, but knowing that you can always expand later might help you to decide on concentrating on one very specific audience just for right now. For example, if you're a content marketer, that's your service, you can start by specializing in content marketing for restaurants, if you notice that there's a real demand for that. After six months, a year, the time that you establish yourself as an authority in that niche, you can branch out and say, "Okay, now, I will also take on the fitness market," for example. You will have to stay niche for a specific time before starting to branch out.

Shane Melaugh

Get some success in that niche and it will be much easier than to ... You have the credentials to be much easier to say, "Hey, look what I did for these restaurant owners. I can do something similar for you." All right, to close off, let's look at the specific action steps. What can you do to niche down to find the better niche to narrow your offer in the right way? Here are the steps you can take. First of all, you can use this Google trick that Hanne mentioned. You type in your offer for and look at autosuggest and look at what comes up there. Look at some of the results from some of those autosuggest as well to see, is there a competition serving this specific needs? What do they look like? Get an idea of where you might fit in.

Hanne Vervaeck

If you don't want to go manually through Google and type your industry for and then A and then B and then C to see what comes up, you can actually use a tool or a website that's called ubersuggest.io. When you go to that website, all it does is basically scrape Google for you so it will add those A, B, C after and you will be able to get a lot more results in a shorter time. That's a little hack.

Shane Melaugh

Next, what you could do is when you find a couple of specific niches or specific, let's say, avatars of people you can serve, you can get an idea of which ones are better to go after by doing the following exercise. You can do this in a spreadsheet. You have four questions and you want to basically rate from one to five for each of your niche or avatar ideas. The questions are, number one, how many people are in this segment? Number two, how difficult is it to reach them or how easy is it to reach them? Number three, how much can they spend? Number four, how big of a pain point is it for them? How urgent is the need in other words. The idea here is it's rating from one to five because you just want to estimate. You don't have to find the exact numbers or anything. To give you an example, let's say I'm a fitness coach and I look at my offer is, "Hey, you want to be fit? Hire me." I noticed that it's way too generic. If I try to appeal to everyone who wants to be fit, then I can't really compete with the cheaper offers that the fitness studios or the large chain fitness studios are making. Most of my potential audience then they're just going to the cheap gym and I can't compete there. I can't compete on price. I can't compete on reach. I have to niche down. I do the ubersuggest thing. I do the Google suggest thing and so on. Maybe I find two possibilities there. I could do a Paleo training, functional fitness, train like a caveman kind of thing or I could do fitness coaching for troubled teens. I could run through these questions. How many people are in this segment? The Paleo training I can look at how big of a thing is Paleo food. How many people are into that in terms of the restaurants they go to, the food they buy and so on? You got an idea. It's quite a lot of people. Troubled teens is probably fewer people. How difficult or easy are they to reach? With the Paleo training thing is okay. They are all already going to crossfit. I can reach them, but the easiest way to reach them would be with my competitors. There's also various online groups and stuff I can join. I can definitely reach them, but they're already being served. With the troubled teens there, it's mostly about connections. Maybe if I know someone who works in a program with them or I have connections with the school or something, then I can very easily reach people. If I don't have those connections, then it would be quite difficult. How much can they spend? The caveman Paleo people can generally spend quite a lot. They're already spending money on this expensive food and on the CrossFit gyms and all this. Whereas the troubled teens themselves don't have a lot of money to spend and their parents varies. In many cases, they also wouldn't necessarily be very well off. Then, how big of a pain point is it? Here, the caveman Paleo training, it's not a huge pain point because even though this is an important part of their lifestyle, they're already being served in their CrossFit gyms. Whereas with the troubled teens, it's a huge pain point for them and their parents. That's just an example of how you could then end up with an idea of which one is better to go after. In this case, this would depend a lot on as we just talk going through the questions, depend a lot on like what my connections are, where I might have a foot in. In both cases, if I can say, "Look, I offer this fitness thing. If you're a parent of a troubled teen, I'm going to specialize on this. I'm going to give them something to do something that can ... If you have like aggressive teen or something like that, they can do all this physical activity. It will make them feel better and it will also tire them out. It will give them something that they feel good about, something where they're making progress. Like this can be a cornerstone of their development." It's how different is. I think about how different is that from a generic, "Oh, I'll help you get fit" offer. Some people are going to be like, "This is a God send. Yes, finally, something that we can do, something that might troubled teen can feel good about right."

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly. Those parents that you are targeting to pay, if they [inaudible 00:43:59] like, "Hell, yes, please. Take my teenager. Help him feel better." The same is if you ask your friend, if he knows somebody like that, he would immediately like, "Oh, yeah, the son of my colleague, he's been in trouble like he's already been in juvie. He would need this." It also answers the two criteria that we talk before, right? You can easily have people refer other people to you and people would say, "Hell yes" to that offer if that is their pain points.

Shane Melaugh

Exactly, yeah. The same is actually for the caveman training. You can further differentiate yourself from the normal CrossFit training. There as well is like if you ask someone, "Hey, do you know someone who would be interested in caveman training?" They're like, "Oh, yeah. Dude, I have this friend. He is just like always going on about Paleo and stuff. He doesn't shut up about it." That is exactly the person who'd be interested in this. There you go. That's an exercise you can do and you can run through this exercise. Of course, we will also add this in the show notes. Sorry, if we didn't write all the questions down, no worries. Just check out the show notes where everything is written down for you.

Hanne Vervaeck

When you do this rating, just might also be inconclusive, which is actually a good thing. For each one, you're like, "Nah, two, maybe three. Nah, two, maybe three." Then, probably you haven't found the right market to go after yet and you should dig a little deeper to get to that hell yes.

Shane Melaugh

You definitely want to see some fives on that list. All right, my final point here is that once you've decided or once you have some possible niches or some possible avatars to go after, then ask yourself, "Which is the most lucrative one?" This might sound greedy, but I always recommended start with where you can make the most money the fastest because this is what will give you the getting off the ground cash. I have never started the business just because I wanted to make a lot of money. I'm always more motivated by creating good things than I am by making lots of money. What I wish I would have understood sooner is that if I make a lot of money first, it's much easier for me to then create great things. I see this a lot where people are basically like they're too selfless. They're not greedy enough and you are just not serving. Even if the reason for your entrepreneurship is because you want to serve the world, you are not serving the world if you are struggling away with almost no clients, unable to pay the bills. That doesn't help anyone. It's much better to go after the most lucrative idea first, make some money, make sure that you are taken care of and then you have the resources. You have that base where you can say, "Okay, now, I can do more of the stuff that matters to me. Now, I can expand my business more in a, let's say, selfless direction, more in a purpose-driven direction." Start where the money is.

Hanne Vervaeck

Exactly. Even if you think about it, you're really not helping anybody with going after people who can't pay for your services or for your tools, for your offer. At that point, you're not going to make any money. You're not helping anybody. It's way better to have something where people are ready to pay and then you can reinvest that money to do some cool stuff for the people who would never be able to afford to your services.

Shane Melaugh

That wraps up our first episode in the third series of the ActiveGrowth podcast. You can get the show notes at activegrowth.com/15. There, you can find a summary of everything we talked about. You can also find the various links to subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher or wherever else you listen to podcast. You can see a written version of the exact action steps that we talked about that you can walk through to find the right niche to narrow your focus and to make your offers more irresistible or to move further towards that irresistible end of the spectrum. All of that and more is at activegrowth.com/15. If you've enjoyed the ActiveGrowth podcast, please take a moment to think about whether you know someone who could benefit from this kind of content. If you do, send them a link, share it with them, recommend it to them. We really appreciate that. Thank you very much and I'll catch you next time.