“How do I avoid being pigeonholed?”
That question, posed to me last week, is what I’m going to try to answer in this newsletter.
It came from a consultant I’ve known for a few years, reacting to some advice I’d given about making his website more focused on what makes him different.
The advice felt constraining, and limiting. So he asked how he could implement it without being pigeonholed as only doing one thing.
But I want to start with the premise. The question wasn’t, “Should I avoid being pigeonholed?” but, how do I avoid it?
And I don’t really think we should try to avoid it. I think we should court and encourage it.
“There seems to be an almost religious belief that the wider net catches more customers, in spite of many examples to the contrary.”
— Al Ries, Jack Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Because, as Blair Enns likes to say, “Pigeonholes are stuffed with cash.”
In fact, I think we could say that pigeonhole is a euphemism for a successful position.
When people know us for one thing, they, by definition, know us. But when they don’t know us for something, they don’t know us for anything.
As Claude C. Hopkins, perhaps the most successful copywriter of all time, put it a century ago:
“Don’t think that those millions will read your ads to find out if your product interests. They will decide by a glance — by your headline or your pictures. Address the people you seek, and them only.”
Again: We want to address the people we seek, and them only.
The more we avoid focusing, and try to appeal to everyone, the more we dilute our ability to reach and impress anyone. And the more we avoid categorizing ourselves, the more our audience will fail to notice and remember us.
The question, then, becomes, how do we successfully categorize ourselves?
“In other words, there is more than twice as much room to grow profitability inside an industry as opposed to across industries. From the standpoint of profitability, industries are fairly similar. Companies inside an industry, however, tend to be very different.”
— Felix Oberholzer-Gee, Better, Simpler Strategy
The temptation, the false idol, is spanning categories and doing multiple things for multiple types of clients.
For my business, that might be attempting to not just do content-first marketing for expert advisors, but to bridge that into offering generic marketing support for all B2B enterprises.
But what happens is those expert advisors, the ones we work with best and provide the highest value to, would come to see us as just another marketer. And those B2B enterprises would see us as too specialized for advisors to understand their industry.
It’s lose-lose, not win-win.
Think about it this way: If a prospect asks, “Why should we work with you?” you’re already off on the wrong foot. That should be abundantly obvious from your marketing, your website, your content.
The question they should be asking is, “How can we start working with you?” or even when.
“If we are not seen as more expert than our competition then we will be viewed as one in a sea of many, and we will have little power in our relationships with our clients and prospects.”
— Blair Enns, Win Without Pitching Manifesto
The goal of our marketing becomes pigeonholing ourselves.
To create or occupy a category with such clarity of expertise and purpose that everyone who needs a business within that category thinks of us first.
As Clayton Christensen and his co-authors wrote in Competing Against Luck, “Organizations that lack clarity on what the real jobs their customers hire them to do can fall into the trap of providing one-size-fits-all solutions that ultimately satisfy no one.”
It’s what I call the “Buffet Problem,” the fact that buffets, we might intuit, should be enormously successful. I mean, they offer a little bit of everything!
And yet, how many enormously successful buffets can you think of? Even if you can think of some, those are probably specialist buffets, choosing to focus on a particular cuisine or style.
Because it’s not actually profitable to be known for doing a little bit of everything.
Better to be known for one of the many things you could do, rather than being unknown altogether.
“Everybody is looking for ways to build their businesses by expanding into other categories. Their real strategies should be to build their brands by dominating their categories. And often the best way to do that is by contracting their brands so they stand for something.”
— Al Ries
This requires choices.
Tough, brutal choices.
But here’s the silver lining, the secret trick to make it more palatable: You don’t have to make these choices permanently.
You only have to make them publicly.
Businesses can change. More than that, businesses should change when circumstances require it. If your positioning was best-fit for a certain situation that no longer exists, then changing it is not inconsistency, it’s wisdom.
Obviously, changing your position idly or randomly carries a cost. Every time you try to move categories within the mind of your prospect, you risk getting dropped from consideration altogether.
But sacrificing what we think we could have in favour of what we can have is the secret.
“Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway.”
— Christensen & Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution
Which means, as Dorie Clark put it in The Long Game, we want to “choose what to be bad at.”
If we’re uncomfortable with that idea, we can soften it slightly into, “choose what to be unknown for.”
We’re choosing what we’re not going to promote, what we’re not going to make content about, what we’re not going to publicly offer.
If a prospect desperately needs a tertiary service we don’t actively promote, but we know we can provide enormous value for them in particular, perhaps we take on the work anyway. As long as it doesn’t take us away from our core offering and clients, it may be worthwhile.
But if we promote a little bit of everything, if we publicly offer a buffet of options, we will resist categorization and therefore memorization.
Which means risking our reputation.
“A product that doesn’t have word of mouth will eventually cease to exist as far as the general public is concerned.”
— Ryan Holiday, Perennial Seller
Our goal is to be the default option for a particular client with a particular need. Which means courting word-of-mouth, recommendations, and referrals.
That is so much easier when we have a narrow, specific claim of expertise. As Blair Enns wrote in the Win Without Pitching Manifesto, “By staking a narrow claim we build the credibility for the client to assume we have capabilities beyond our claim, whereas a broad claim generates the opposite reaction.”
People naturally assume that if you’re the best at one thing, you’re probably good at others.
But if you aren’t the best at anything in particular, they tend to think you’re not good at anything.
When that happens, we end up needing to spend more and more on advertising, promotions, discounts, and marketing to get the attention and notice we need to get clients.
The more scattered our offering, the more expensive every sale becomes. Because we need to convince, persuade, and pitch.
“At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.”
— Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy
I talk to my clients a lot about the idea of “pounds per square inch” in their marketing.
Essentially, marketing needs to exert a type of “pressure.” Not pressure on the prospect in the form of forceful, aggressive tactics.
But pressure on the attention economy itself.
We need to be so apparent, so known, and so popular in a particular area to “break through” into the awareness and memory of our prospects. If we spread ourselves too thin, we can spend the same amount of time and energy and get nothing in return.
If we, however, focus our energies and resources in a specific area, we can get noticed while spending very little. Because we’re exerting more pressure per square inch.
This means that as we focus, the cost of each sale goes down and down, compounding our efforts.
But as we broaden and spread out, the cost of each sale goes up, as our marketing efforts diminish the further out we have to go from our core audience.
As Hopkins put it, “However big your business, get down to the units, for those units are all that make size.”
Seek the attention of one person, and seek to place yourself within one category, and you stand a better chance of attracting the masses.
But seek the attention of the masses by doing some of everything, and we commit ourselves to obscurity.
“A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver great value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of a superior profitability then follows: delivering greater value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency results in lower average unit costs.”
— Michael E. Porter, What is Strategy
Note the double benefit:
When you focus, you can provide more value than a generic provider. At the same time, you can be more efficient in your operation because you have a specific way of delivering that value.
But won’t that require “leaving money on the table”?
Yes! But that money isn’t ours, it belongs to someone else.
You can always tell when you’ve taken money off the table that doesn’t belong to you. Here’s what it feels like: It feels like a demanding client who doesn’t understand your value. It feels like constant headaches, looming deadlines, and excessive pressure.
It feels like not being appreciated or understood.
And it’s all because we took money that wasn’t ours, to do work we weren’t the very best at.
But when we take the money from the table that belongs to us, we have better, more appreciative clients.
We have better processes, and smoother procedures.
We have less deadline pressure because we are motivated and excessively experienced at the task.
“There is nothing more difficult than to discover where expediency lies—it is apt to lead from one expedient to another, in a vicious circle through endless knots.”
— B. Liddell Hart, Why Don’t We Learn from History
When we dither, when we refuse to make the tough choices, we bring more pain upon ourselves.
We get caught in the endless cycle of expediency, saying yes to any work we can get, instead of saying no to the work that isn’t for us.
At Kelford Inc., we provide content-first marketing for expert advisors. Do we have clients that exist somewhat outside that categorization? You betcha.
But we don’t promote that, we don’t publish content about that.
We talk publicly about the category for which we are best suited, at which we are credibly the best.
So that when someone who knows us knows someone who needs content marketing for their advisory business or advice-driven non-profit, they think of us.
Better yet, they speak of us.
I’d rather that than to publicly promote all the things we could do, and get none of the attention we deserve for the things we should do.
So my answer to the question, “How do I avoid being pigeonholed?” is quite simple:
That’s easy, you’re already doing it by doing a little bit of everything.
You’ve tried avoiding the pigeonhole.
Perhaps it’s time to place yourself within it.
Kelford Inc. are content-first marketers for expert advisors. If you want to build your credibility with your prospects before you ever meet them, we’ll show you the way.