“20 Minutes of Successful Niche Secrets – EPISODE 46,”
With Glenn McQueenie – Three Secrets Why Niche Markets Are More Profitable
Glenn: Hi! It’s Glenn McQueenie, and thanks for joining me on my 25-Minute Success Series podcast. Today, you just get me, and I really just wanted to step back a little bit and explain why I really think that there are three simple secrets on why niche markets are so profitable. And this is really just from a chapter in my book, “The McQueenie Method.”
So first, you have to understand that people want to work with people who get them, and positioning yourself as a niche market specialist to solve someone else’s selfish need is really why they come to you. Now before you go and choose which market to dominate, you should do some research to ensure that there are enough people interested in the service you intend to offer. You have to make sure that there’s an available market out there for you. Some people could pick a really obscure niche only to find that there really is no market, but my experience is there are so many micro niches and micro markets available, and none of your competition is dominating any of them. I think you should really try to study your MLS statistics and look at the underserved areas in the higher margins. Be aware of what people really want, and then just take that perfect solution formula to your target market, because I think people expect to pay more for a service or product that is customized to their individual needs. In other words, people will always pay more for a specialist than they would pay for a generalist. Think about it yourself. We’re conditioned to see that different doctors (generalists) get paid lower than specialist doctors. There are some types of lawyers who are more general-based compared to more corporate or really narrow target market-based. They get paid a lot more money, and that’s really why the riches are in the niches.
The concept in the first secret to niche market profitability is called the “perceived value” of your service. This is a concept that’s defined as the worth of a service in the mind of your customer. It’s their perceived value of the service you offer that dramatically affects the price that you can charge. They’ll pay more for a Broadway show than a local community theatre show. They’ll pay more to watch professional rather than amateur sports, and they understand that a surgeon makes more money than a family doctor. This value is already pre-programmed into your customer’s mind, so take advantage of this psychology and offer customized solutions to your niche market customers. That’s really what my book and this whole talk is about today. It’s already pre-programmed. You don’t even have to overcome the obstacle or the objection of paying more for a more specialist-based service than that of a generalist.
The second secret to niche market profitability is to become the highly visible “celebrity specialist” in your niche. This may begin by writing an article or a blog targeted right to your niche market, or creating a special report on “How to Avoid the Top 10 Mistakes of Buying Your First Home” (or moving up, or moving down, or buying an investment property). And you can also add more value (or perceived value is what they call authority), by conducting monthly seminars to your target market. Being in front of your niche all the time means that they can really never forget you. Find out where your perfect customer consumes their information. Is it Pinterest, Periscope, Facebook? Is it Instagram, blogs, websites, direct mail, video, or podcast? Where are they? And then just offer them content that they can easily digest and that fits into their selfish needs. It’s really a story about reverse engineering this and looking at who your target market prospect is, and just saying to yourself, “If I was lying in bed next to them at night, having a conversation (and I don’t mean this in a creepy way) – but what’s keeping them awake at night with respect to real estate? What are their biggest fears? What are their greatest aspirations? Just go be them, and think about it deeply for 10 minutes. Then just write an article that would address all three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine or ten of their concerns, because then when they read it they go, “Oh, this person gets me.” So step out of your comfort zone and shine. Become the trusted expert to your niche market and watch in amazement as you grow this tribe of loyal followers. You’ll discover that building your marketing becomes more targeted and way less expensive.
Then we have the third secret of highly profitable niche markets, and that is that your marketing expenses decrease dramatically, because you’re not trying to be everything to everyone. Quite frankly, it would cost too much money for you to try to hit every target, yet so many agents just do this “blast, blast, blast” marketing all the time, and are just shocked when they never get any results. People are coming to you instead of you chasing them when you focus in on your target. The magic of doing business in this high interest, low competition environment is that people actually want to consume what you’re offering. Your conversion rates are very high, so you waste very little time dealing with your imperfect or non-perfect fit clients.
These three simple secrets to niche market profitability are very simple to follow if they’re done the right way, and the right way includes positioning yourself as the trusted resource so you’re coming from a place of contribution, from caring, from drive and from dedication. It’s not a “get-rich-quick” scheme that your realtor competition is trying to follow. The McQueenie Method really involves targeting to find a market using your natural strengths, story, and personality, and increasing your knowledge, expertise, and visibility to become a celebrity niche market specialist.
In order to build your business around a specific niche, you first want to look at the specific needs and criteria of the group. Look at what we call the “D.O.S.” profile. The ‘D’ stands for Dangers or fears; ‘O’ is for Opportunities; and ‘S’ is for Strengths. What is it from their point of view? What if you were to show up at your consultations now just with a blank pad of paper, and just simply say to them, “Tell me about some of the dangers or fears you’re looking at?” And just listen deeply, and they’ll tell you all their fears and aspirations. And then get them moving into the future. Where’s the opportunity? Where are they going next? People get excited talking about the future a lot more than where they are, staying in their present state of mind. So we find out, “Tell me about that house. Where are you going to? What does it look like? Why are you there?” “Oh, you want to be in walking distance. You want to be close to transit. You want a big pool. You want to be able to have a big kitchen. You want to be able to entertain.” That’s when they’re really going to give you what their aspirations are. And then finish off (especially in a listing presentation), by asking, “What are the strengths of your present home? What made you buy this home? You’ve lived here all the time. Can you tell me what you really like about it so that we can craft the perfect marketing strategy?”
When you do this, you start to understand what their world looks like from their point of view, and then you can build a system to solve their selfish problems. Don’t pay attention to what your competitors are doing; instead, just focus all your attention on your perfect customer type. Mentally build an avatar based on their needs and their D.O.S. profile. After that, begin using the service that you sell as a means of turning their normal (they think it’s a commodity experience) – “I’m just buying a house” or “I’m just selling a house” – into a really unique experience. Begin thinking about their D.O.S. profile from your perfect-fit client, and create a unique service to solve that unique problem. How many quarters, or how many 90-day sprints would it take of dedicated effort for you to get out of being a commodity generalist agent to become the niche market celebrity specialist of choice? This is your competitive advantage over other real estate agents. Get your competitive advantage over those agents who only focus on the short term. They’re squirreling. They take a class – “Oh, I’m going to go and do this,” or they hear a new train – “I’m going to go and do this,” and then their enthusiasm and motivation wears off in three weeks. And then they go and chase the next shiny object. This is where you actually beat your competition, because you’re building a business worth owning with a long-term focus instead of a short-term focus that I would argue about 85% of the realtors are really working to. When you shift your focus to long-term, you stop having that short-term job, and start really having a long-term business worth owning. Most agents will focus on getting deals this quarter, because if they don’t, they’ll be in really big trouble, and this is a terribly stressful way to run your life. Of course, they have to focus on this quarter because they have not built any long-term models, systems, or unique processes to get them out of this “I do everything” generalist, commodity trap agent.
In this podcast, my goal is to help you shift into long-term focus. It’s not easy to do because everyone is selling short focus of their products and services. And you know what? They can’t sell long focus because they simply don’t have it in them themselves. For instance, the diet industry is all about short focus crash diets. These may have a small effect initially, but most people gain the weight back – and sometimes a lot more. If you compare this to someone who is always careful about what they consume, and who works out over a long term, you’ll see that these two approaches are not even comparable. It’s really a question about: are you real estate committed, or are you real estate concerned? Think about that in health. Are you health-committed to doing everything you can to live a really healthy life? Or are you just health concerned? – “Yeah, I’m a bit concerned about it” – but you’re not really willing to do anything about it. This unique process that I created with The McQueenie Method is really just to use technology (and the technology is the system you create) to get faster, simpler, easier, cheaper, and better results. This is the system that you’re creating, and your technology is anything that helps you get faster, simpler, easier, cheaper, and better results. The key is to take this system, or your technology, and add teamwork to it to execute your vision.
One of my coaches, Dan Sullivan, has a great book called “The Question,” and I really recommend it to everyone. In essence, the key question to ask your customer is, “30-90 days from now, what would have to happen for them to consider this experience with you successful, and a unique one?” Think about that. “It’s 90 days from now. We’re finished the transaction. What would I have to do, what would we have to do, for you to consider this such a great experience and a successful one, that you would honestly become one of my raving fans?”
What if we just built our business model from that approach? What does it look like 90 days from now when they’re moving into their house, and what are they telling their friends about you and what it was like to do business with you? Your clients are buying a 30, 60, 90-days experience that’s really targeted: getting a great house or selling their home to meet their selfish needs. The experience is what they will be describing to their friends and family. This is what they’re buying – a unique experience with you, and you never want to make them feel isolated after the experience you’ve given them. So what has to happen to have the best real estate experience ever? Listen closely, and the clients will tell you exactly how they need to be served. The beautiful thing is that you’ll discover not only what makes your client tick, but also that you can get to be a hero to them. When you line up your unique abilities to a market that you love to serve, and where you want to be a hero to them, you’ve discovered the winning formula of exponential growth in your business. The initial advantage is that your business grows as you enter the highly profitable world of low competition and high margin.
Here are just a couple of additional benefits before we wrap up:
- Let’s look at money. You’re going to make a lot more of it per transaction.
- Let’s look at time. You’ll get a lot more of it back, because you’re only working with perfect-fit clients.
- What about relationships? Now you’re going to have more time to spend with the people you really like working with, and no time with the people you don’t want to work with. And that will give you more time to spend with your other personal relationships that are really important to you. And more importantly, it will help you build a great business so that you can live a great life of purpose and legacy.
- The experience: the longer you stay in this area, the more you improve as you gain more experience, because you’re gaining the inner wisdom of a niche that can’t be Googled by anybody else. The more happy clients you serve, the better you’ll feel that you’re on the right path, and you’ll love what you do. People will rave about what a great experience they had with you.
- You’re also going to get more creativity, because along with this experience, you’re going to find ways to make your model even better through your own creativity, and you’re going to formulate new approaches to improve your business.
- What about visibility? The more visible you are in the field, the more credible you appear in the marketplace. It’s called “social proof” (and also authority). People start coming to you to solve their selfish problems because they perceive you and see you as an expert.
- What about referrals and connections? “Birds of a feather flock together,” and they all share their stories and experiences with each other. Instead of just one pay date per transaction, you get paid in multiples, because satisfied customers send numerous referrals to you. Think about it – they’re really the gatekeeper to, on average, most people have 400 friends and acquaintances. How you work with that one person determines if they open the gate and let you into their world.
- Confidence. Every time you add new skills and capabilities, you’ll learn to be way more confident.
- You’re going to increase passion, because you’re going to spend days doing something that you really love with people you really love to work with. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing more satisfying in real estate than when you love working with your client, and you help them get exactly what they want, and at the end of it, they just say, “Oh my God, thank you so much! We couldn’t have done this without you. You’re amazing!” I think that’s why we do this.
- And finally, you’re going to achieve what we call “celebrity status” because everyone will want to work with you. They’re telling all their friends about the experience, so now you have more line-ups to come and work with you, which in turn allows you to raise your standards of who you’re going to be working with.
So just understand that you’re already perfectly suited for your own niche, because at the end of the day, when it’s time for your prospect or customer to decide who they want to work with, business is still personal. They choose because they like you and sense they can trust you. It’s not about your company; it’s all about you. The customer has made an emotional decision to do business with you. The clearer you can explain to the customer who you are and what you stand for, the easier it is for the customer to choose you. My advice is just become the best you! Utilize your factory installed strengths and unique abilities, and constantly work on your skills, knowledge, attitudes and habits to be as attractive as you can to your target market.
Thanks a million for taking the time to listen to my little rant today. I appreciate you, and thanks for listening. And I really, really would love to see in 2018 that you start taking that single target market. And again, you don’t blow up your business; you just start taking 10% or 15% of your week to start focusing in your target market as you’re running your business as you do right now. And then what you’re going to start seeing is, every 90 days, the needle starts moving 5% or 10% more towards the niche because you’re starting to get that feedback loop, and people are starting to run to you.
I’m Glenn McQueenie. Thanks a million for listening! Have a great day! Bye!