Growth Accelerator 2 - Getting clear on your target market

G', day, guys. It's Dan. It's Wednesday. It's the day I most look forward to the week, which is podcast release day. We are moving swiftly on. We're up to episode 28 now. It's amazing how these things grow and it takes consistency and a great team and I really love producing these for you and I get some great feedback. So thanks for listening. This week I want to go a bit deeper into Video Business Breakthroughs, which is the new ebook that I've created, which you can get for free on the website filmmakersbusinessacademy.com and just click the orange button, you can download it for free. But this is a topic which is really close to my heart and one that I get a lot of pushback on. So I really want to kind of dig into this this week. And the topic is, you know, target market and being clear on who it is you target. And so I'm really excited to kind of share some insights with you this week. And just before I get into that, I've just recorded two amazing episodes with a guy called Brian Casagina, who is an Australian bor. Nomadic copywriter, marketing expert, used to write, used to be the head copywriter at mindvalley. Has made millions of dollars, millions and millions of dollars through copywriting. But we dug into a couple of episodes with him. One on email marketing and the power of email marketing and also one on quiz funnels. They're going to be coming to you in a few weeks time. And yeah, I'm really ramping things up with the podcast. I'm going to be pushing more episodes out. So thanks for listening, I really appreciate it. And if you have any topics you'd like me to cover, reach out, connect with me on LinkedIn and let's have a conversation. Anyway, I'll leave you with this week's episode.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

So I'm going to touch on a very important subject this week, which is target markets. Now, this is probably the topic that I get the most pushback from in anything that we do in the business coaching space. So bear with me because I'm going to explain to you why it's so important and hopefully convince you of the merits of at least trialing this. So, you know, there's an analogy of if you try and chase two rabbits, you'll catch neither. And that's what most video businesses do, except they're chasing five or six rabbits, which is why there's always this peak and trough this feast and famine of work, because they're literally trying to do everything for everyone. So if you're not clear about who you serve, then the chances are you're chasing more than one rabbit, which means you're chasing more than one market or trying to sell video to everyone and you're going to be run ragged. It's as simple as that. You're going to be in a hamster wheel and be like every other company out there. So what I want to do is help you understand how to differentiate yourself in business terms. In a very crowded marketplace.

If you get very clear on a niche vertical, that's the only way to build your business consistently. And that's what we're talking about, consistently and to grow, you know, with a solid pipeline of sales, with, you know, inquiries coming in consistently. And if you get this right, you'll become the authority in your space. It's as simple as that.

Most business video businesses don't realize this, that niche verticals are the only way to build your business. You know, when you're trying to serve everyone in the process, you try and please everyone and you end up really not targeting anyone in specific in a market, which is why you tend to lose gigs on price. Because the only determining differentiation point when you're in a crowded market is price. So you've got to be really clear and only target one sector or one market at a time. Now this could be as simple as we just support agencies with video production. And what I want to be really clear on here is this doesn't preclude you from doing other kinds of work, but in an increasingly crowded market, you have to be able to speak to your target market directly.

So it's the number one challenge I see with video production companies. They're just trying to appeal to everyone and they're scared to, to narrow down in case they miss out on work. And the fact is it just doesn't happen. So only deal with one target market at a time and have a very clear idea of who your client is. You need to understand their pains, their wants, their needs, their frustrations, their aspirations. What are the desired outcomes of that market? You know, take for example, Simon, one of my clients. He specializes in making training films, really internal comms films for a wide variety of businesses. But he also does some nice documentary stuff within Those clients. So he's just an amazing project with 7 11. And the CEO has become like a personal friend and he's always calling him up and he loves working with him. So what happens when you go into a niche vertical is, let's say you go into manufacturing. Well, you do a job for a manufacturing company and then you do a job for another manufacturing company. And then guess what, the people in those positions know other people in manufacturing companies. And so you become the kind of go to for the manufacturing space. And it's so simple. But for some reason I just find so many people just resist it. If you focus on a specialist market, you're only going to chase one rabbit. So, you know, doing everything for everyone will simply not work. When you go after a single niche vertical, you can become the expert, you gain expert status in that vertical, you become an authority. And when you become an authority, you become the go to person. And so people then go, oh, we want to hire this video guy because he's a specialist in manufacturing or in food or in engineering or in, you know, automotive or in, you know, Marcom's films or working with agencies. One of our clients, Gareth, who was on the podcast a few weeks ago.

You know, he, when he started with us, he was just a generalist. He was doing photography, he was doing events, he was spending I think $800 a month with an SEO company to just kind of keyword events. But yet nothing on his website said anything about events. And so he did events, he did all sorts, he did kind of photography, he did, you know, documentary style videos, he did kind of corporate stuff. It was all over the place. What we were able to do was get him very focused on his number one business. So in our video business accelerator program, we have what we call a business audit. And we get you to kind of analyze all of your key numbers and metrics for the previous year, where the work came from, etc. And then we've got some data and from that we base the decisions on how to build your business from there. And almost every time a client does this, we end up with a surprise. Because what we think is happening in our business and what's actually happening can be different things. So you have to be measuring the data and the metrics. So Gareth rebranded and now works exclusively for agencies. Now he still does other work, but the messaging on his website and he said to me in that podcast was, you know, we're actually getting more SEO traffic now because the relevance on the webpage talks to his target market and they now focus on supplying agencies with outsourced video production help. So by focusing on your one market, you can get very focused on your message. And when you get focused on your message, you can mark it much more clearly to that target market because you understand in detail what your target demographic likes, dislikes, what their frustrations are.

And then you can define what we call a single client avatar. Now this goes against very, very popular beliefs. We seem to be in a kind of period of, you know, Facebook expertise. I go onto some business groups on Facebook and I hear people asking a question. Then 47 opinions come back on how you should do something. And look, it's all well intentioned, but what you get is 47 different opinions with no context and no real understanding of where the, where the advice is coming from, whether or not it's actually good advice. But also you can't fully articulate the challenge you're facing in a sentence in a Facebook group. So, you know, you have to think about investing in the right kind of support and the right kind of help. And I say investing because, you know, the scarcity mindset that we, that we all kind of, you know, live in to some degree is, is especially with filmmakers, it's like, weirdly, we'll spend thousands on gear and think nothing of it, but when it comes to investing in ourselves, it's like, oh, I want to try and do that cheaper. Or, you know, there's of risk or lack of.

Willingness to invest in marketing and accepting that maybe you'll run some ads and they won't work, but you'll learn something. And business education isn't free, you know, we have to pay to learn the lessons.

So, you know, my question to you, baby, how well do you document your target clients, you know, so that you can communicate directly to them in your marketing? How well do you know them? How well do you know their fears, their aspirations, their frustrations? That's a great one for video production. Ask your clients, you know, what's the most frustrating thing about working with a video production company? You know, what is it? And they'll tell you. And if you write that down, you can use that information to be very, very valuable. But let's imagine you go after a single target market. So let's take Simon, for example, one of my clients, who's focused very much on marketing and communications departments, but really they make a lot of internal comms films. Well, he was recently invited to the internal awards for 711 the franchises. And they got an award. They got a nomination for supplier of the year. Now, one thing that you can do in a niche of article is get to know all the movers and shakers in that space. Go to trade shows or industry events, go and sponsor something, sponsor an award, sponsor something in the business.

And become someone of value, give value up front. If you give value up front, you will, you know, like so often, and I'm going to be really, really honest here. So often video people are very selfish. They're very like, you know, what's in it for me? How much can I make? And the client becomes this kind of somewhat secondary element. If you flip that and say, okay, how can I help my client achieve their outcome? And if that's through video, we can certainly help them achieve that. But what else are you doing over and above to support your client, to help them get their outcomes? That's what I feel is missing. Often we're a very transactional industry and I think to survive and to thrive and to build a consistent business, you've got to reinvent how you approach going to the market. And that means taking a more business like approach and losing some of this. And I don't want to kind of paint a brush across every video production company because it's not the case. But so often I get this sense of, oh, you know, I'm only a poor filmmaker and you know, hey, you know, you know, you've got to just pay me. And it's all a bit kind of like, you know, single focus on you and not enough focus on the bigger picture of how can you serve clients. And that may not be a popular discussion. And I know that I get a lot of pushback on this, but I can tell you the clients I work with who have the greatest success are focused on a target market. Now one of our clients, Colin in San Francisco.

We had a discussion about this and he's like, well, you know, I kind of do a lot of different things, a lot of different clients. These are some really high end work. But what we discovered was they basically supply bigger companies who have an internal marcom agency style division within the company and they work very well with them and that's their target. So you can always find your target market. You can always find your niche. It doesn't have to be a specific niche in manufacturing. It could be working with or aviation, it could be working with a broader range of topics. You need to figure out in your market what the vertical is, what is the group of people who. And here's a great measure, you want to be in a space where they'll have their own trade events, their own magazine, their own kind of industry specific events, because that's when you can get in and become one of these. Go to suppliers. Now, I hear a lot of people go to.

Sort of business networking events and networking is great, but it can be quite small fry. And if you're looking for consistency and you're looking for bigger repeat business jobs, you have to go industry specific and start digging into them. And just as I say, you don't need to not do other work, but you need to have your brand branding and your messaging tell the story that you are the expert in the field for that specific sector. And that's really the key to building a sustainable business. It's one of the core foundations. And if you speak to any marketing expert, they will say you've got to go into a single market and become an authority in that market. So what will happen is you just become, you become the go to person and you can take up, you know, five or six or eight clients in that space and even work on some sort of retainer model with them. I mean, that's something we can talk about later on in another episode of it's something I really want to dig into more is what are the other ways that you can sell your services to the market? What other offers can you make to the market.

That will help the market? So if you take nothing away from this episode other than start thinking very deeply about how you can help your clients achieve their success if you genuinely have a real care for them, the money will come. It's as simple as that. Be authentic, genuinely care about your client's success and what matters to them. And I promise you that you will find yourself never having to worry about work again. And then all of your focus can be on marketing effectively to that target market. And you know, it's not easy, but it is simple. But what happens is once you niche down to one specific sector, you start to look at all the different ways you can communicate with that sector and opportunities within there. And I was listening to a great audiobook with Chris Smith called the Conversion Code and he talks about the fact that they supply marketing done for you marketing services for the real estate industry. And at one point they tested going into some other sectors and they spent a lot of money and didn't really gain any ground. And one of his advisors said to Chris, look, the real estate industry is worth $3 billion a year or something crazy in that one state he was in, in Florida, he said, you'll never run out of opportunities here and they are now a $10 million business serving, you know, real estate companies all over America just supplying marketing services. So think about that. Think about how you can evolve what it is you do to serve one core sector or market, and I promise you, it will solve all of your problems.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast with your host, Dan Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the Accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes, and we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.