You know you want to diversify your income streams to hit your FIRE number and we have taken the important first step of identifying your niche skills and your ideal customer profile. The next step which we have to take is to develop a marketing and outreach strategy so that you can spread your services to your clients.
Value Proposition: Crafting a client friendly message
For convenience, let us continue the example from the previous post, where we intend to start a consulting service providing fundraising advise to startup founders tapping onto the skills we have from investment banking.
Having identified our niche skill and our target market, we now have to put both together into a compelling client friendly message. This is critical because we want our message to target a painpoint where our services act as a painkiller and not a vitamin.
Let’s look at two examples:
Good example: For busy tech startup founders (like Alex), our consulting service offers tailored fundraising advise which will at least double your valuation at the next round, without any additional resources
Bad example: For startup founders, we guide you on the fundraising process and give you ideas as to who you can raise funds from and how you should raise funds from them.
Identical services can be provided for both of them, yet one sounds infinitely more valuable than the other.
Building and Marketing an online presence
Now that you have all the ingredients of your product, it is time to actually get cracking with an online presence. There are three main stages where your product can stand and many people adopt different mixtures of these three stages:
Website: Design a professional website that clearly showcases your services, testimonials, and contact information.
Social Media: Establish and maintain profiles on platforms where your ideal clients spend their time (e.g., LinkedIn, Twitter).
Content Marketing: Start a blog or vlog that provides valuable insights and solutions related to your industry.
I personally think any one of the above will work and what is most important is what your are comfortable with and which one do you think you can consistently develop time to maintain and develop.
Creating your online presence is only half the battle, and the key advise is not to be a perfectionist on your first try, just put something out there and reiterate over time. What is more important is how are you going to market your website/blog/socials to the right clients – this is where online ads come in useful.
One of the important questions we asked when we were designing the ideal client profile is where does your ideal client hang out online? If your ideal client is more advanced in seniority, he or she might use Linkedin or Facebook more. On the other hand, if you are targeting a younger crowd, you might get more success by launching ads on TikTok or Instagram.
Either way, it is helpful to think of an ad copy which speaks to your client’s painpoints and how you can solve it for them and target your marketing ad to your potential clients via three distribution channels:
Email Marketing: Build an email list and send regular newsletters with useful content and offers.
Paid Advertising: Use targeted ads on social media and search engines to reach potential clients.
SEO: Optimize your website content for search engines to attract organic traffic.
Engaging with the Community and Building Trust
It is difficult to monetize a product when your potential customers have never heard of you and have never seen you. That’s why so many new startups and new businesses fail to take off in the beginning. In the early stage of your business, it is important to interact with your community to build trust and credibility. Interacting with your community also allows you to refine your value proposition and product to ensure that you are truly solving a painpoint.
Some ways you can interact with your clients include attending industry events where you can speak and network with other people of similar interests. Too busy with your day job? You can also join online communities (eg. Reddit) and participate in their online discussions and contribute value to build a brand name. Lastly, partnerships, you can work with other blogs and businesses or influencers who already have the attention of your target market to gain their attention.
Once you have people’s eyeballs and attention, it is time to start thinking about providing free value. As a new kid on the block, you are reliant on other people taking a leap of faith in your way to engage your services. Make it easier for them to take that leap of faith by providing free value for them. For example, you can provide free or heavily discounted consultations for the first few sessions, or you can provide a free webinar to show your mastery of the subject before trying to convert them. Lastly, people also write ebooks or other downloadable resources which offer actionable advise and insights to build their credibility in this market.
Gathering Testimonials and Scaling Up
By this stage, you would have got some early sales (even if they might have been heavily discounted), but what is critical is to get these early adopters to provide you with strong social testimonials which you can showcase on your site. This will allow other new clients to see that you are not a new kid on the block and you have had a track record of success servicing other clients which significantly ease the “leap of faith” considerations they might have working with a new face.
You should also start looking at your analytics data as to how do clients come to your site, what ads are they clicking on, start conducting A/B testing to build up your sales funnel such that once you stumble upon a winning formula, you would be able to replicate it and scale it up to gain more clients onto your platform.
Conclusion
Once again, this is not an easy journey but I have attempted to summarize years of knowledge into one post. What is critical here is the roadmap and the mentality which you can adopt in order to grow your side hustle. Should you like more detailed and personalized ideas, please reach out to me on my socials!