This week’s guest blog is brought to you by Brook McCarthy from Yoga Reach. If you’ve ever wondered whether being a jack of all trades Or a specialist is better for your business, this one is for you.
When you’re passionate about a subject – be it Hinduism, business efficiencies, or interpretive dance – it doesn’t need to be for love or money. Specialising in your subject can create a profitable business.
Amid a trove of generalists, specialists dominate. Without a speciality, you are one amid many, hard to define.
Your words may pop and sizzle, your profile picture all high hair and intense expression, your bio may bedazzle. Yet without a speciality in a niche, with ideas and opinions on these, you are comparable. A little more money, a little less money. A little more personality, a little less personality. Available, not available. A short brief for the client to fill out, or a long brief.
The perks of a specialist profile
Specialised knowledge and experience with your clients’ competitors offer many benefits. You need less briefing and background research. You’re familiar with your clients’ customers’ pain points and barriers to purchase, and you can correct common misconceptions and misinformation.
Specialising in a niche, or a niche within a niche makes it far easier for you to dominate that niche. Staying ‘on topic’ about your specialisation via social media, email newsletters and your blog makes it far easier to reach people interested in the same topic – potential clients.
Staying ‘on message’ enables you to establish yourself as an expert. Company managers won’t generally follow copywriters on social media, but they will follow people who post news and insight into their industry.
Me, bored?
Just because you specialise in one thing, doesn’t mean that you won’t be offered work in another. In the four and a half years since I started specialising my marketing services in the health and wellbeing industry, I’ve had retainer clients in academia and not-for-profit, strata title management and food, as well as a sex author.
For 14 months, I tweeted on behalf of a large daily discount website every single day (I gave myself Christmas Day off), before they were sold to another daily discount group for a rumoured 40 million dollars. So it’s not all yoga, fitness and vitamins. There are sex and discounts too.
Kill the superstition
As a freelancer or small business owner, we often operate under a pessimistic superstition that unless we say yes to everything, we’ll soon be queuing at Centrelink with the rest of the creative types. We may secretly believe that boring work with the demanding client must be done if we are to ever get work we enjoy, with clients we love, for a price that is fair.
A ‘yes (wo)man’ don’t get no respect.
When I first started working as a tour leader in South-East Asia, I said yes to every request as I strove to deliver the best experience possible. Tour leaders received feedback regularly via emailed evaluation forms. My feedback was average at best.
Once I embraced my inner Basil Fawlty and started pushing back, giving passengers more free time, saying no occasionally, and poking gentle fun at people when they were being unreasonable, my feedback went from good to great.
Specialising in your passion gives you the courage to push back when clients want dull work done, are unreasonable, or simply not great to work with.
Specialising allows you the time to fully explore your passion and area of expertise, to reconnect with the joie de vivre that lead you to work for yourself in the first place and to price yourself accordingly.
Brook McCarthy is a marketer specialising in wellbeing and health at her businesses Yoga Reach and HealthComm with a background in journalism and public relations. Brook enjoys making a living out of her Religious Studies degree, although she has spent more time writing about whitegoods than she cares to admit.
