Marketing, to the uninitiated, is often brought up as a final piece of the puzzle, as something to slap on at the end when the product is developed and ready to go. This view of marketing does not do the field justice. Instead, think of marketing as a complete process that takes part during the entire product development phase, a process with an end result of selling your offering.
One of the key concepts within marketing is specialization. For many small business owners who lack the academic context of the marketing discipline, these concepts are often overlooked. In this article, I will share with you how an understanding this helps you grow your business right away.
Background
First, let’s make sure we have a grasp on what I mean by specialization.
Specialization basically means to specialize yourself in a given field. By being specialized you focus only on a given area instead of possibly being active in several. Customers will thus perceive your as an expert, which adds an element of trust to your offering.
Customers Want Experts
Let’s take a practical example. Consider a contractor running a small company in your local city. Think about you looking to hire a contractor to fix something in your come. Do you want to find someone who does carpeting, plumbing, roofing, bathrooms, electrics and so on, or would you rather hire a plumber, carpenter or electrician?
Without knowing you personally, my bet would be on the latter. An expert is simply regarded more highly as we tend to assume (often rightly) that such a person does a better job than someone who is doing a little bit of everything.
How does this apply to my business?
Think about your own business for a moment. Are you differentiating yourself consciously against your competitors? Do you have a niche speciality that you can exploit that your competitors do not? These are two important questions to ask yourself.
Most small business owners have a fear of letting services go. For example, it is not uncommon, especially in service industries, to reason that the service doesn’t cost anything to offer so that it might as well be kept. While this is true, the undesired effect is that of speciality above. Rather than being seen as good, you run the risk of potential customers considering you as mediocre because you to do much. Therefore, they reason, you cannot be the best person for their specific job.
To Summarize: Win By Specializing
Several other marketing concepts and psychology studies, which I don’t deal with in this article, talk about the benefits of specialization. Everything from branding theory to customer research suggests that it is easier to create the powerful connections that you want when you are positioned as the expert in the field.
Customers want to hire experts. If you are already one, why not go all in? There are other strategies to dealing with being specialized in other areas which are out of scope of this article but in case you need to narrow your focus, you might want to consider looking these up and use them to spin off your other areas.
Over To Your: What Are Your Experiences?
Do you have any experiences with specialization? Do you have a company that offers a broad range of services and are still very successful and want to share your strategy? Perhaps you have been struggling with this problem and want to share how you took control again? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
