SPEAKER_00 0:00

When most people try to figure out where their expertise or their offer, their solution belongs in a market in terms of which industry or which audience, normally they tend to follow the same process. First, they would identify the audience that could potentially serve with their solution. So imagine that you're a wellness expert with a solution for becoming fit and healthier. You might consider working with corporations that want healthier employees. Or you might consider working with new moms who are trying to regain their energy and get back to their pre-pregnancy weight. Or perhaps you are thinking about getting in front of people who are managing chronic conditions such as diabetes. So you take a look at all the markets, all the different audiences, and choose the market that appears to be the most viable or most profitable or where there's more demand. So let's say that you decide to focus on corporations. From there, the marketing and positioning advice is almost always the same, which is go study the other wellness experts who are already serving that same audience within that market. And pay attention to what are the problems that they are talking about in terms of what the audience wants within that market? Or what are they promising in terms of outcome and solutions? Or how are they framing or talking about the problem solution in terms of language and messaging and positioning? And also pay attention to what kind of offers are gaining tractions. So the goal with all of that, which we call market analysis, is to identify what the market appears to want and then position your solution according to what the market wants, where the gaps are within that market that you can fit your solution into. In fact, most positioning and marketing frameworks begin right here. Choose a niche, research the dominant needs and desires and conversations within that market, then shape your messaging, your solution, your offer, and your positioning around what that research tells you the people within that market are looking for. That process has a name. Everyone calls it finding your niche. I call it the fastest way to blend in. Now, to be clear, there's nothing wrong with understanding your market or understanding your audience within that market. The problem isn't the research. The problem is what you do with that research, the advice that you're being told to follow when you do that research. Because here's what actually tends to happen when we follow that best practice of finding a niche and studying that market. So let's just say that you decide to serve the corporate wellness market. And so you study corporations, you find out what they're looking for, the problems that they're trying to solve within their corporations, with their own employees, the outcomes or desired outcome that they really want, or the specific talking points that they use to describe those challenges that they're facing in their corporation. And then you end up shaping your messaging and your marketing around all the findings that you dug out. So the issue is that every other wellness expert who is serving that same market is following the exact same process. They are also studying the same audience, seeing the same pain points, hearing the same desired outcome, and drawing from the same research. And of course, building their messaging and marketing around the same conclusions, right? Because research can tell you what the market wants, but it cannot tell you what makes you and your solution different from everyone else in that market. It can dig out the conversations that are already happening in that market, but it can't reveal the perspectives that only you can bring into that market. So going back to the corporate wellness industry as the corporate wellness experts who followed that same process, these people end up sounding remarkably similar to one another who followed the same process, right? Because they all started from the same place, which is the market itself. In other words, you haven't really found your market by following this process. You've just joined one. You're speaking the same language that's already been spoken, reinforcing the same assumptions that already exist within that market, and solving the problem the way that it's already been defined, that is already getting framed. And so the moment you do that, you've entered a competition that you never even needed to enter. Now your prospects are left asking the same question, which is why you and not everyone else who does exactly the same thing as you do or offers the same solution as you do. And that's where the real problem actually begins, because your solution may genuinely be different. Your methodology may be different, or your experience or background that has brought you to solving the problem the way you do might be very different than everybody else, right? And maybe even your perspective as the way that it has been shaped through years of working with clients or understanding the problem and the solution is very different than everybody else in your market. But when your positioning is built by starting with the market and working backwards from there, you've trained yourself to talk about what everyone else wants to hear instead of what makes your approach different or distinct. And so this is what I mean when I say most people are operating in competition mode without even realizing it. They think they found a niche. What they've actually done is place themselves inside a conversation that was already happening and positioning themselves and their solution around the same needs, same outcomes, same assumptions as everyone else who's using the same starting point or the same research. And if this is you, this is why differentiating yourself feels so difficult. That's why so many experts struggle to answer the question of why you? And that's what this episode is all about. Hello and welcome to Market in Your Truth, the podcast for entrepreneurs who want to grow a fulfilling and impactful business with clarity, integrity, and ease, without performing, chasing trends, or losing their voice. I'm your host, Ellen Atholi, and I'm really glad you're here. Let's get started. Now, this is episode three of a three-part series, and if you haven't listened to episode 19 and episode 20, I want to encourage you to go back and start there. Because what we're building here is layered, and this piece won't land the same way without the foundation underneath of it. But let me give you a short version of where we've been. In episode 19, we dug into what I call your why you factor, the internal clarity around why you're the right person to bring this solution into the market and why your perspective leads you to solve the problem in a way that others in your space in your market simply aren't doing it. Once that's clear, you stop sounding like everyone else, describing the same problem the same way. And then in episode 20, we looked at your audience, but we did it through the lens of your why you factor, not through this detached research that everybody else talks about, but through your own lived understanding of their situation, what's keeping them stuck, and what they actually need through your own understanding. And once that's clear, you stop attracting people who need convincing and start attracting people who already feel understood. And today is the third layer because once you've done that internal work, once you're clear on your why you factor and you understand your audience through that same lens, through your own differentiated lens, there's only one question left, which is where does all of that fit in the market? And most people answer that question by starting with the market itself. And that's exactly where I believe things go sideways. Here's what I mean. You're not going to find your place in the market by studying the market. You find it by getting clear on where your perspective and your viewpoint is different from what the market is already saying or advising. Let me explain what I mean by that. Every market has a dominant conversation, a set of standard ways that the problem gets framed, or a set of solutions that keeps getting recommended, same type of advice, same conversations, same information that gets circulated everywhere you look within that niche, within that market. So if we go back to the previous example of the corporate wellness space, in that market, one of the dominant conversations might sound something like this: Healthy employees are more productive, they're more committed, and they show up better. As a result, they perform better. So if you want a high-performing team, invest in their wellness. So now you're stepping into that market and you start observing, studying, researching that market and all the ways that all the conversations or advice that's circulating. And then you start building your positioning around what you found. So you naturally end up positioning your marketing or your solution around the same talking points. For example, you might end up saying something like, Our program helps companies build healthier, more productive teams. And again, so does everyone else, because everyone started from the same place and reached the same conclusion. And so the only way that they think they can stand out from everybody else, from what's already being said, is by wordsmithing, trying to say the same thing but differently. Now, I want you to step on the other side and take a look at what happens when you don't follow the same process as everyone else. And instead, what happens when you start from your own perspective? Maybe what you've seen after years of working in the space is that most corporate wellness programs actually fail. Not because employees aren't motivated, but because the programs are designed around what's easy for the company to implement rather than what actually changes behavior. So perhaps the company implements, I don't know, a yoga class on Tuesday, or offers food bowls instead of snack machines in the break room, or install step counting apps, so on and so forth, right? Now, none of those are bad, but none of them also are touching the real reason employees are burnt out or struggling. On top of that, maybe you even believe the entire productivity framing is also flawed. That when companies lead with healthy employees perform better, employees feel like a resource being optimized rather than a person, a human being being cared for. And that disconnect, that feeling of being used instead of supported, is exactly why participation rates stay low and lasting change never happens. Now listen to what just happened. The first approach, the one built from market research, produces the same familiar message. Our program gets better productivity results. The second approach, the one that's built from your own perspective, produces a completely different conversation. Most corporate wellness programs fail. And here's the real reason why. Same market, same problem, completely different interpretation of what's actually causing it. Now, all of a sudden, when you lead with your own perspective, not from the market research, you're not going to be competing on who has better wellness program. You're challenging the assumptions, the entire categories built on, right? You're not trying to win within the existing conversations that's happening in that market. You're stepping in and actually introducing a whole new conversation. And this is where most people misunderstand positioning. They go looking for an undeserved audience, an unmet need, a problem nobody's talking about yet. And sometimes the gap could actually be that. But more often than not, the most valuable gap isn't found in the market at all. It's found in the conversations. It's the distance between what the market currently believes and what you've come to believe after years of doing the work. It's the place where your experience, your observations, and your own conclusions no longer line up with the conventional wisdom everyone else is repeating in that market. That's where meaningful positioning comes from. You see the problem, the solution, your audience's circumstances totally differently, you solve it differently, you market it differently, and all of a sudden, when you do that, when you lead from that point of view, you're not competing within the existing conversation. You're gonna lead a whole new conversation. And here's another reason why that matters so much. When your positioning is built around a perspective that nobody else within that market is expressing, you're not competing on the same terms as everyone else. Because competition requires a shared set of assumptions, a shared definition of the problem, a shared understanding of what it takes to solve the problem. But when your positioning is built on something that you've observed, you've experienced, you've concluded that challenges the conventional or mainstream wisdom, the conversation changes altogether. Right? There's no longer this lineup of people or experts making the same claim and asking ideal buyers to choose between them. Here's you offering an explanation, a perspective, or a truth that the ideal buyers within that market haven't heard articulated like that before. And so those people, those ideal buyers who are living inside that market's version of the problem, who followed the advice, done the work, hired those experts, and still felt like something wasn't adding up, hear you and think, wow, finally, someone understands what's actually happening. Think about that. That has nothing to do with marketing. That's recognition. And recognition is what builds the kind of trust that converts. Now, I want to show you what this looks like in my own work. So for years, the dominant conversation in marketing has been fairly consistent. And it goes something like this: if you want more clients, you need to be more visible. You need to show up on social media, you need to create and share content, you need to gain followers, engagement, and reach. And that leads to conversations and clients. And because that's the conversation most people hear, it's also where most people start looking for answers. And if things aren't working, then the assumption is maybe I'm not on the right platform to get the correct visibility. Or maybe I need a better storytelling strategy, or I need to how to hook people in. Or maybe I need to do videos because posts don't grab attention anymore. But after years of working with experts, coaches, consultants, or even bigger firms, I kept seeing something that didn't fit that explanation. I know someone right now, as we speak, who's posting on Facebook four times a day. Four. I'm not exaggerating. And yet, her followers or engagement hasn't meaningfully increased. And she's still struggling to create consistent revenue and growth. I also know another person who's on LinkedIn, who's publishing really thoughtful, high-quality content every single day. And after two years of posting and being consistent on LinkedIn, he has gained a decent number of followers and engagement. But despite all of that, he's still struggling to gain traction in terms of revenue and growth in his business. So now, after years of putting so much effort into this one platform, he's now moving on to YouTube because he's assuming that's where he's going to have a better opportunity to get clients. And honestly, I could fill a book or maybe several books with examples just like this. People who are visible, people who are consistent, people who are doing exactly what the market keeps telling them to do and still not getting the result that all that advice is promising they're gonna get. So at some point, I had to ask a different question. And the question was: what if visibility isn't a problem at all? What if visibility is simply exposing a deeper problem that's already there? Because when I looked closely, I noticed something. Many of these people weren't invisible, but what's really happening with what they were doing when they were getting the visibility is that they were interchangeable. Even if they were sharing really valuable information or showing up multiple times a day, the market still couldn't tell why them. Meaning nothing in what they were sharing made them stand out or made them the obvious choice to those ideal clients. They sounded knowledgeable, but they all sounded like everyone else. And so that observation became my gap. Helping business owners, whether it's a law firm with 200 employees or a solopreneur who's just getting started, understand that if you don't get clear in a foundational way on why you, why your solution, and why your approach, no matter how much effort you put into getting in front of your ideal buyers, the scale is always going to be off. The amount of time, money, and effort going into the visibility bucket will be completely disproportionate to what comes back out of it. So that's what I'm inviting you to do. And as I said before, this is where most people misunderstand positioning. They think, let's figure out which market is the most profitable, which market has the biggest need, which market I can neatly fit my solution into. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. But if that's where you start, you're putting yourself in direct competition with everyone else who reached the exact same conclusion. But if instead you start by looking at the distance between what the market currently believes and what you've come to believe after years of doing the work, the place where your experience, your observation, and your conclusions no longer line up with the conventional wisdom everybody else is repeating, that's where meaningful positioning comes from. Because when you understand how you see the problem differently, you talk about it differently, you market it differently, and of course, you even solve it differently. And so now you're not competing to convince your ideal buyers that your solution is slightly better than everyone else's. You're actually helping your ideal buyers see their current circumstances differently in the first place. You're not trying to win inside an existing conversation. You're gonna lead a whole new conversation entirely. So, what does that mean for you? Well, you can start today. You don't need any researching tool, you don't need a command. Competitor analysis platform or tool. All you need is the willingness to spend the time to be patient with this one question. First of all, I want you to look at your market, look at what the dominant voices are saying, look at what the most common advice is that is getting repeated in that market. And what are the top programs or solutions that are selling within that market? And then the question is this I want you to ask yourself, what is everyone saying that you know isn't the complete answer? What do you know from your own experience, from your own result, from your own work that is incomplete in the way that the market is talking about it? Or it's oversimplified. Or in some cases, the advice that is getting circulated is actually gonna derail your audience, or it's gonna backfire on the very people who's trying to help or support. Now, let me also give you a way into that question because sometimes it's easier to find the answer through a side door. You can think about a client who came to you after already trying all types of things, after buying the service, hiring the export, following the advice, and still not getting where they needed to go. What had they been told that didn't hold up for them? What were they doing faithfully and consistently that was actually making the problem harder to solve? What were they missing that nobody in your market was talking about because maybe it's slower to explain or harder to package or less even comfortable to say out loud because no one else is saying it? That's where your answer lives. It's your lived understanding of what you've seen repeatedly and what you know to be true, but the market's dominant conversation keeps ignoring. And so when you can identify these specific gaps, you've landed on viewpoints that are different from most of what gets circulated in that market. Now, I want to be very clear about something here. This question that I'm giving you, or this way of entering into your market, is just the tip of the iceberg. When I work with clients on this, we don't just look at the market from one angle and then call it done. We look at it from multiple directions. What I found is that each of these layers actually uncovers another layer. One insight leads to another. One assumption reveals a deeper assumption underneath of that. One gap opens the door to another place where your perspective diverges from what the market believes. And that is why this work tends to unfold in layers. But for you, right now, you don't need to figure it all out. You don't need to go to all those layers. You just need a starting point. And even sitting with this one question, it'll reveal far more than you might have expected about what makes your perspective different. So again, I want you to ask yourself, what is everyone in your market saying that you know isn't a complete answer? Not what I would say differently, not how would I package it differently, but what do I know from my own experience to be incomplete or to be missing from the conversation entirely? Now, before we close, I want to bring the full picture together, because the order of this work is everything. You should never start with a market gap. It won't mean anything without the foundation underneath of it. What you want to do is start with your own why you factor, everything that we covered in episode 19, the clarity around what you see, how you interpret the problem, and why your voice is the one someone should lean into, your ideal buyers should lean into and listen to in the first place. So that comes first, always. And then you want to understand your audience, but through the lens of your why you factor, not through detached research, through the context of what you already know. And that was episode 20. And then and only then, you move to the market gap. You examine the market through your own lens. You look at what it's saying, you look at what it's saying, what it's advising, how it's defining the problem and the solution, and you find the distance between what the market currently believes and what you know to be true. When all of these three are aligned, then you don't just have a better messaging, you have a set of perspectives that belongs to you, that only you can speak from, a lens that is entirely yours, a viewpoint that nobody else in your market holds because nobody else has done this work from the inside out lived experience. And when you show up from that place, whether that's on a podcast as a guest or on a stage or in your emails or on social media, you become an authoritative voice. You become a clear choice. Now, this work is not glamorous, it's not sexy, but if you're willing to dedicate time to it, it will compound. Every layer of clarity that you built here doesn't reset with the next algorithm change. It doesn't disappear when a new trend emerges into the market. It doesn't become irrelevant when a new tool or platform arrives. It actually gets stronger every single day. I've seen the evidence of it inside my own business and of course with my clients. And with that, I'm gonna leave you with this. Businesses who become authoritative voices in their market spend their time paying attention to the patterns that everyone else is overlooking, the assumptions that no one's questioning, the advice that sounds reasonable on the surface, but doesn't hold up in practice, the gaps between what the market says and what the reality keeps proving. That's where authority lives, in things others haven't fully seen yet, and having the courage to articulate it. So keep asking the question we explored today. What is everyone in your market saying that you know isn't the truth or is incomplete? The answer to that question may be the beginning of the perspective that people come to know you for. And ultimately, that's what turns you from another option to becoming an obvious choice. Before you go, if this series has been useful to you, the best thing that you can do is leave a review so other experts who are tired of blending in can also find this series and do this work to becoming the obvious choice. And if you haven't done so, would you please take a moment to subscribe? I have more conversations that's coming that build directly on everything that we've uncovered in this three part series. And don't want you to miss what's coming next.