WARNING: lazy Hypnotherapists should ignore this article!
It’s Sunday, and that means catching up on the pile of reading that came in the mail this week. In this weeks backlog were two gems that both hammered home a critical lesson virtually all Hypnotherapists ignore, which has a huge impact on their profits.
So pay attention, there’s a good chance you are making this same critical error. As the warning states above, to implement this strategy requires work, so if you’re lazy, go read some feel good book on attracting wealth by simply dreaming about it.
It’s Not Just A Lock Anymore
There aren’t too many things in this world more mundane than a combination lock. It’s just a lock… right?
Wrong! And that kind of thinking will kill your bottom line.
And Master Lock is one business that ‘gets it’. They are continuously niching down to serve more tightly knit markets. And they discover this niches by constantly doing their homework. Also known as Market Research.
In the July 30, 2007 Business Week magazine, it’s reported that Master Lock discovered in recent research of their market that 70% of ‘mass market’ shoppers (purchasers in stores such as Target and Autozone) were women. And these women focus “less on the lock and more on what was protected”.
The result was a strategy to segment the market by locks specialized for protecting items such as bikes, tools, computers, etc. Instead of having generic looking locks in one display. Each lock has a unique name and packaging that indicates it’s specialized protection for the item, and these locks are placed in the same area as the item they protect.
One of the New Specialized Master Locks
It’s not a padlock… it’s a Personal Storage Unit Lock. It’s a Computer Theft Deterrent Lock. It’s a School Locker Lock in bright colors so you can find yours easier. It’s a Trailer Hitch Lock.
The reality is, the same lock will do most of these purposes, but the research showed this is what their market wanted. When Mom is buying the kids school supplies, she will get the School Locker lock. Smartly segmented is Smart Marketing.
The world is fragmenting into “Micro Niches”
In a world where you can find TV channels for everything from Golf to Competitive Shooting, and over 8000 radio stations on the Internet for every imaginable kind of music, there is no “general public” anymore. There are an almost infinite number of “specific publics”. I like to think of them as Micro Niches.
In this month’s newsletter from Glazer-Kennedy, marketing mastermind Dan Kennedy had this to say:
By being ignorant or lazy or both regarding the consumer demand for micro-customized products, services, advertising, marketing and sales processes, entrepreneurs sacrifice opportunities for inordinately high responsiveness, premium prices and margins, greater loyalty/repeat business, and greater referrals.
– Dan Kennedy
I put the highlighting on the word ‘services. The big lesson is this… if you aren’t creating customized ‘micro-niched’ hypnosis services you are missing out on HUGE opportunities.
If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you’ve heard me repeatedly talk about the importance of positioning and how trying to be a one-size-fits-all solution is a surefire way to go out of business fast.
One-Size-Fits-All Hypnosis Ad
By Micro-Niching your Hypnosis services, you can target your advertising and marketing, build a reputation as THE EXPERT, charge much higher prices, get much better client compliance, and attract the kind of clients who will pay and refer you other quality clients.
And here’s a little secret… the one-size-fits-all approach requires no effort. That’s why so many Hypnotherapists do it. It’s the lazy way to do business.
So if you are willing to put in a little effort, do your market research, and create advertising & marketing targeted at specific micro-niches, you will reap huge rewards since few others will bother and instead just bellyache about how advertising doesn’t work.
It’s your choice as to which camp you want to be in.
