The secret to Spreading the Word...

Greetings, Carl here.

It's day one of my email course on Spreading the Word (which is the term I like to use for marketing around here). I'm so excited you're here!

This week, I'll be sharing five ideas from The Fellowship with you that I hope will help you get better at marketing.

And the first idea begins with a secret.

As soon as we think about marketing, we think we need to go as big as possible.

All those people who sell marketing stuff are constantly trying to get us to THINK BIG.

They ask questions like:

• Will that scale?
• What's the biggest possible audience?
• How many people are following on Twitter?
• How big can we get?

Big, big, BIG!

Well, I'd like to let you in on a little secret.

When it comes to Spreading the Word about the work of a Real Financial Professional, the secret is SMALL.

Seth Godin talks about this as a "minimum viable audience." Some amazing things will happen to you when you start viewing the world through that lens.

Two things, in particular, become clear…

1- The idea of "everyone" goes away.

The idea of "everyone" goes away. And that's really, really important because in today's world, "everybody" doesn't exist!

Back in the days when the main form of marketing were TV commercials and billboards, maybe you could speak to "everyone." But now there are thousands of ways to reach your audience. If you want them to pay attention, you need to be talking directly to them.

We're not talking to the average person.

We're not even talking to the average retired person.

We're not even talking to the average retired physician in our town.

We're talking to a group that's even smaller!

2- No one cares about your amazing solutions.

I know, I know, as Real Financial Professionals, we are in the solutions business! But I hate to break it to you—no one cares about that.

No one cares about the beautiful portfolios you build.

No one cares about the incredible financial plans you create.

No one cares about your solutions!

But they do care about the problems they're facing.

And my question for you today is…

If you believed that, how would things be different?

If those were the lenses you were viewing your marketing activities through, how would you do things differently?

When you combine this idea of getting small and being focused on people's problems, you get some amazingly powerful things.

Thinking small + focusing on people's problems = SOMETHING POWERFUL.

Let me just walk you through my favorite example of this.

There's a Real Financial Professional who I've known for a long time. He's been through a bunch of my trainings.

He focuses on helping technology executives.

You hear people say that a lot, right? "My niche is tech execs."

Well, it's a start…

But this advisor goes farther than that. He focuses on technology executives who work at one single company (his hometown happens to be where that company is located).

That's a pretty small niche.

He understands the company's benefits package better than any one of his clients.

And one step further—he works with technology executives at a single company who are of Indian nationality.

He realized that this group of individuals have some really interesting challenges to face. So he focused on helping them solve their problems.

It became his smallest viable audience.

Here's another example…

I used to work specifically with people in Utah, who loved to spend time outdoors, who were physicians, specifically who were ER doctors. I actually ended up working with ER doctors with three specific specialties because they shared common problems.

And you know what that meant for my marketing?

It gave me something to blog about. I could write emails and whitepapers about the specific problems ER doctors were facing.

But the real benefit was that once I was in conversation with someone in my niche, I almost always heard them say things like, "How did you know that is exactly my problem?"

I understood their problems before they even told me about them because I had spent so much time with others just like them.

Now that's powerful!!

But it's not necessarily easy to get there.

When you niche down, you feel like you're saying "no" to all those other groups. You say "no" to tech executives. You even say "no" to tech executives at a specific company. You say "no" to anyone who doesn't fall within your niche.

But then there's this giant YES to the right people.

It turns out the bigger "yes" is far more important than all those little "no's."

Once you find your niche, two things happen.

1- You find out there's way more of them than you thought.

2- They talk to each other.

And that, my friends, is the key. The secret to Spreading the Word is to focus on the smallest possible audience and become a real expert in the problems they face.

The secret to Spreading the Word is to get small.

That's it for today! If you want to spend more time on this subject, check out the extra credit below. I'll be in your inbox again tomorrow with the next lesson.

-Carl