Why is Positioning & Niching Down is so Hard For WordPress SaaS With Special Guest Kai Davis
This Week Show’s Sponsors
Castos: https://castos.com/
Atarim: https://atarim.io/reviews/
Bertha.ai: https://bertha.ai/
LaunchFlows: https://launchflows.com/
WP-Tonic’s Monthly Free Workshop
Friday, November 12th, 2021 at 10:30 am
Learn to build modern WordPress marketing funnels for yourself or for clients with also native marketing automation with an easy-to-use stack of plugins and services! This free webinar series makes it easy to build a WordPress-based ClickFunnel Killer. You can sign up here for auto-notification on when we are doing the next workshop here.
Intro: Welcome to the WP-Tonic podcast where each week Jonathan and his co-host interview, the leading experts in WordPress e-learning and online marketing. Jonathan, take it away.
Steven Sauder: Welcome back folks to the WP-Tonic show. It’s great to have you with us again, we have an amazing guest Kai Davis with us. He is gonna be talking to us about why is successful positioning and niching down so hard. So how you find that niche, how to pare down your services to focus on that niche? And he’s really an expert in this space. So this could be great to hear his expertise and his thoughts on it. So to begin, Kai, do you just wanna quickly introduce yourself, and let people know kind of who, and, what you’re doing
Kai Davis: Absolutely pleasure to be here. Jonathan pleasure to be here Steven thank you again for having me back on the show. So I’m Kai Davis. These days I’m positioning myself as your Shopify SEO guy. I’m the founder and CEO and all that jazz of double your e-commerce a Shopify consultancy. And I have another business off to the side where I sell growth focus, educational products, books, and courses for independent consultants and freelancers, like who might be listening to the show right now. So, it’s been an interesting journey, and these days I’m super excited to be growing double your eCommerce.
Steven Sauder: Awesome can’t wait to dive in, learn more about everything. Jonathan, you wanna, introduce yourself?
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So I’m the founder and dog’s body of WP-Tonic, we specialize in the building of learning management systems for consultants for education, for businesses. We are into e-learning that’s what we do over to you, Steven.
Steven Sauder: Perfect and I think I forgot to mention this is show number 639. That’s a big number, lots of shows, and lots more to come, before we dive into it, we’re gonna go for, a quick sponsorship break here and we’ll be right back
Ad: Hi there folks. I just want to tell you about our major sponsor and that’s Castos. If you’re looking to get into podcasting for yourself or for clients, you need a top-quality podcasting platform, and that’s what you get with Castos. It has a superb interface, really easy to use, and you’re not penalized for success. They have a flat-rate pricing structure. Don’t matter how many podcasts do you make? How many downloads do you achieve? You’ll just pay one, fixed-rate with Castos. Customer support and just the quality of the people are just amazing. Also for the WP tonic tribe Castos is just offering their amazing deal if you go to the WP tonic website bank link newsletter. You can get your first six months at half price. That’s right half price. That’s the only exclusive offer to you the tribe. Also, you’d be able to sign up for the WP tonic weekly news data, which keeps you informed about all the stories and what’s happening in the WP tonic tribe. Please show your support for the show and support Castos. It’s a fantastic platform.
Jonathan Denwood: All right, coming back. Kai Davis is with us. We’re talking about successful positioning and niching down. And I think one of the most interesting things is to hear about how people decide, how to niche, and where to niche. And something that you’ve really focused on Kai is the Shopify niche. And in e-commerce, there are a lot of different directions to go. Jonathan and I are both really familiar with woo commerce. We’ve done, some things on Shopify, but how did you choose to niche to Shopify? Did you start there? Did you start somewhere else and end up there? How did you start, like, thinking about that and deciding to niche down to Shopify?
Kai Davis: Good question. So to truly answer this question in full, we’re gonna have to go into the way-back machine and head back to 2013 when I first started the double your e-commerce joint. So I’ve always been interested in e-commerce. I cut my teeth on eBay back when I was like 13 years old and Shopify came onto the scene, a few years back. And I very much enjoyed Shopify because I felt it made it easier for merchants to launch and grow stores. Woo commerce is solid it’s a great option out there. I just I’ve used it before. I used it for a few years on my own sites and it really didn’t resonate with me. And so when I was looking at re-launching double your e-commerce and, growing it again, I started thinking about where do I wanna niche down to where do I wanna double down?
And I realized, well, I’ve got a good amount of experience with Shopify. It’s a platform I enjoy. I might not be head over heels in love with it, but I enjoy it. I don’t hate it. And I have a decent network of merchants and providers and app owners who are in the Shopify niche. So I took a look at it and I said, well, there are some good things on the Shopify side. There are some good things on the non-Shopify side, but over the years, what I’ve discovered when it comes to niching down and positioning yourself is you can’t ever have a perfect amount of information you can’t ever have, a clear yellow, big road forward into making money online. All you could really do is get to a point where you said, ah, feels like I have 60 or 70% of the information I need let’s make a decision and see what happens. And so I said, you know what? I’ve got enough information. I, I, I think I suspect Shopify would be a good bet year or not a bad bet. And so I made the bet and proceeded on forward and I’ve been enjoying it so far over, this year.
Steven Sauder: So you like first got Shopify really by doing your own Shopify store is kind of how you started building that skills and expertise.
Kai Davis: Yeah, a combination of my own Shopify stores, Shopify stores for, friends, family colleagues back in 2013, and then starting to work with merchants who said, we need a marketer, we need a search engine optimization specialist. We need somebody who could just help us understand how to grow our store and grow our properties and just continue doubling down from there.
Steven Sauder: So when you got into helping, agencies or people with their stores, you focused primarily right out the gate on Shopify, cause that’s where your connection was. It wasn’t like a decision like, oh, I need to niche down you niched down because you had expertise in that area that was better or deeper than expertise in other areas.
Kai Davis: Yeah, exactly. It felt like I already had a bit of an advantage there just based on knowledge of the platform already having worked with it in the past that just made it sort of the easy choice to move, move forward with. It didn’t feel like I would be making a mistake by picking Shopify over, woo-commerce, or another platform out there, let’s say web-flow. But it just felt like, Hey, this seems like a good enough decision and I’m not gonna sweat over it too much.
Jonathan Denwood: Do you feel like that’s like a, generally a good way of starting to think about where to niche down is to start thinking about where my core competencies or is it cause I feel like in my head there are times where I wrestle with the idea of like, do you make a data-driven decision or do you make a passion enjoying decision? Or just knowledge [Inaudible 06:54] like I know this stuff versus like I know there’s X amount of people here with X amount of money. like when you’re starting to think about that process is one way better than the other or is there a hybrid method or kind of where does somebody start thinking about it themselves?
Kai Davis: I really advocate the hybrid method. I think either starting from the emotional point, like, oh, I kind of hate Shopify. Let’s not go in that direction or start from the analytical point. Oh, they’ve grown X percent year over year. I see increasing demand. Both of those are great, but I think taking one of those perspectives in isolation sets you up, not for failure, but for maybe a hard time. Since if you say, you know what all the numbers add up Shopify is growing, it looks like, if I start here, I’m gonna be owning 10 Teslas within six years, let’s just get on that rocket and then a year and you’re like, like, oh, I kind of hate this, this is not fun. Unless you check in with yourself on the other side of that decision, if you started from analytics, checking with emotion, or if you started with emotion, checking in with analytics and validating that decision, I think it’s going to be a harder decision to make.
So I really like approaching these sort of positioning decisions with that hybrid mindset. What does my intuition tell me? What do my emotions tell me? And what do the market and the analytics tell me? And when you, me, anybody listening combines those three, I think you’re able to make a better, more insightful decision rather than just saying, I like woo-commerce let’s double down there and see what happens. And then realize, oh, this might not have been the growth rocket. I thought I was strapping myself to.
Steven Sauder: Yeah. Jonathan, over to you.
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So, we are about WordPress, but we like talking to people that are using different platforms in the digital world and a really great experience marketer like you. You said, you like Shopify, but you are not a total fanboy. So what are some of the key, like two or three things that you really like about Shopify and what are two or three things that you don’t like about Shopify?
Kai Davis: Yeah. Good question. So in terms of what I, like, I think like the big picture. They have really transformed the ability of a merchant or a hustler to say like, I want an e-commerce store, click, click, tap, tap. Oh my, my shop’s up. And I’m selling things like it’s so different than how it was 10, 15, 20 years ago back when we were making computers out of twigs and twine and sticks. But I’d say their ability to transform an e-commerce game is great. I Love the app store and just the growth it’s created around the net and for these merchants. And, I love their educational content really. Like they’ve done a great job of helping people understand how to grow their store, what to do, what effective marketing online is really about.
On what I don’t like I think that’s a harder question to answer. I am searching my memory banks to see what comes to mind. I think with any platform, there always are challenges between were the merchants and users of that platform want to head and where the growth mandate of the platform is. And as Shopify gets larger I think we’re gonna see a bit more dissonance where merchants are saying like, oh, we really need features like A, B, and C to help us reach people and grow. And Shopify might say, oh, that’s great our, two-year plan has us not focusing on those things and focusing over here.
So I expect there to be a bit of divergence over time, but I think that’s sort of what you’d expect with any platform as it grows. We can look at Twitter, Facebook, anything out there, and they’re always is a bit of dissonance. So I don’t know if there’s anything I’d point to, as like a big red flag about the platform, but more just knowing this dance, knowing the game, knowing that as they grow, they’re gonna have a different mission than the merchants. There might be some friction down the line.
Jonathan Denwood: Are there any, you specialize in on the SEO side. Before I ask you that, the last it was a very large Shopify project it was about five, six years ago so it is probably irrelevant. But, it started to expand, what the core functionality of the client wanted. There was scope creep, it was paid scope creep, but it happened. So we started having to do a lot of going to the app store in Shopify, finding plugins, hiring JavaScript engineers that had experience with Shopify. In the end, it got more expensive and messier than if we had done it on WooComerce from day one. Is that a common thing and, and it, but it’s a difficult thing. You really gotta understand the core, what the client is looking for before. But I do think there’s a place where, you’re not getting the benefits of a SaaS platform you are getting because you’re just, it’s just got to too- they’re looking for too much of a custom solution.
Kai Davis: Yeah, yeah, no I resonate with that. I think maybe that is honestly part of the challenges with Shopify and like this zooms out to a lot of these merchants end up with a Shopify website, which is wonderful. But within that, they have a huge online marketing platform, which is an app and is running custom code on it and apps. And like, it’s kind of more like a SaaS application for a store than just an E-commerce, portal. And I think exactly to your point as they start saying, well, I see my colleagues, I see my competitors have these features. Let’s get them added here. They might not be looking at Shopify stores for that comparison. They might be looking at woo commerce or custom-coded sites.
And so what the merchant wants might not be easily possible on the platform. But I think when you zoom out with the merchant and say, okay, what’s the outcome we’re looking for here? Do we want, this design and to emulate this, or is this to increase the conversion rate or get more traffic. When you zoom out to that big picture goal, the merchant or the client has, it’s easier to zoom in, on what the essential aspect is and make sure you’re on the same page. I’ve definitely ended up in the same spot where, the client wants A, B, and C and we’re iterating on the platform to get there. And we just end up drifting off from where they want to be and where we want to be and nobody’s happy. And so I really like just, having a meeting of the mind. Saying, what’s the big picture goal we’re aiming for here rather than these tactics in three dozen plugins, what needle are we trying to move? And from there saying, okay, how can we most effectively move that needle? Maybe it is a dozen plugins. Maybe it’s a custom-coded app. Maybe it’s something else. But whenever I find myself in those scope creep situations, I find myself just setting up a meeting with a client to better understand what are we actually aiming for here?
Jonathan Denwood: Well, I suppose that, inadvertently, you just want to know, why it’s a good idea to hire somebody like you really. But I don’t think you planned it, but it is a good example, isn’t it? Because otherwise, you can go on a very time-consuming, expensive windy road, can’t you?
Kai Davis: Yeah. Yeah truly,
Jonathan Denwood: So over to you, Steven. We’ve got time for one more question, Steven before we need to go for a break.
Steven Sauder: Excuse me. When kind of getting back to the niching down question and positioning yourself, when should somebody like start thinking about that? Let’s say, I have a store, I have a bunch of different products. How do I know if I need to think about niching down to something a little bit smaller, like picking that niche and really committing to it, or really positioning myself as, an expert or whatever in a specific area? Like, how do I realize that oh, wait, I’m casting my net way too Large?
Steven Sauder: Good question. And just to clarify, are we talking about a store, like a Shopify store, an e-commerce store niching down or say a service provider, niching down to a particular or target market.
Steven Sauder: let’s talk about a store and okay. If it’s very different, then let’s also talk about that service, provider, because we kinda have like those two different people in our audience. So I think both would be very valuable.
Kai Davis: Perfect. So for the first one for that store, when should a store niche down to a specific target market or a target audience? It’s a squishy question. What I found is sort of like the gut-level signal that people resonate with is your marketing isn’t getting you the impact you’re looking for. Maybe you’re spending money on ads. Maybe you’re doing the search engine optimization thing. Maybe you’re doing, social or offline and meetups. And you feel like I am pushing this bolder, very, very hard, very, very frequently. And it’s just not moving. I’m not getting traffic, I’m not getting sales. We do stop and we get, one, two, a dozen folks visiting the site, but they aren’t really converting what’s up.
What I found time and time again in the dozens, if not hundreds of Shopify and eCommerce stores I’ve worked with, is if you are positioning is off, if you don’t have a target market, if we’re a store that has everything for everybody, you aren’t going to sell to anybody. Because your marketing message isn’t resonant with anybody. There’s not anybody out there who could land on your store and say, oh my gosh, these products are for me and that situation I’m dealing with.
There’s a quote from this wonderful consultant and author who unfortunately passed a few back, Gerald Weinberg. And the quote, if I could remember it says, “It’s the law of raspberry jam, the wider you spread it, the thinner it is.” And I just love this quote when it comes to marketing and positioning. Because if we think about this hypothetical store of a very wide target audience, we could start to see, oh, if they’re targeting everybody, if they’re spreading the jam, that is their marketing as wide and as far as they can there’s not gonna be that much marketing left to reach their target market. To say, we are the products for you, dear reader.
So what I often recommend is as merchant starts to feel like their marketing, isn’t having the impact they’re looking for, where it just isn’t clicking, use that as a trigger to start this niching down, target market focusing activity within business. And it often isn’t, flip a light switch. Oh, we woke up and we decided we’re gonna focus on this particular market. It takes some soul searching. It takes some analytical reasoning. It takes some talking with your target marketing customers, just to understand who your best buyers are, who those people are that buy more, more often at higher prices. And so often when I’m working with, oh, please you.
Steven Sauder: Oh, no, I was gonna say that’s great. We probably need to go for our break now. But when we come back, we’ll keep leaning into this question and maybe talk about, service providers and if that’s different than e-commerce store and starting how to think about that. So now quick break from our sponsor and we’ll be right back
Ad: Hi there. Folks, are you looking to build modern shopping cart landing pages using the power wheel comments, all yourself, all for clients, and you want to do that quickly with little need to know about paying to code? Well, if the answer is yes and it should be, I’ve got the perfect answer for you. And that’s launch floods. Don’t flow is the most modern and easiest way of building a modern band in shopping pages, all your clients. It also works natively with Gutenberg and the LinkedIn page builders [inaudible] or TV. It’s really flexible, really powerful. Plus if you go to the WP tonic website, backlink newsletter, you’ll get an amazing deal of the flows lifetime deal. I think you almost get a third off, which is just amazing, and it’s just an exclusive offer to you the trial, please show your support. And Launch Flows is a sponsor of the WP tonic podcast and the show itself. It’s much appreciated
Hi there folks, are you involved in the building of new websites or supporting WordPress websites as a freelancer or agency owner? If the answer is yes, we’ve got a great tool yet Atarim, as you know, you can waste a tremendous amount of time with email or phone tech with your clients around a new WordPress build-out or supporting multiple websites it can be a real pain in the posterior. Atarim you get a sensual interface where clients can log in and with an easy visual interface, they can show you the changes they require. It’s a real game-changer, and it will save a tremendous amount of time and frustration. Not only for yourself, for your team also Atarim has given us a great offer, basically only costs you $1 to try their program. It’s really fantastic if that sounds interesting. Go to the WP tonic website, WP tonic backlink newsletter, and you’ll be able to try this great product, like I said for just $1 what a fantastic offer. See you soon folks.
Steven Sauder: All right, coming back, folks. We’re going to, learn a little bit more about niching down for our service per now, but we kind of just talked about eCommerce stuff. So, Kai, maybe just continue that thought that you had, and kind of think about what may be that difference between the service provider and the e-commerce store.
Kai Davis: Absolutely. So if we contrast an e-commerce store with a service provider, I think it’s both a little harder and a little easier for the e-commerce store. So on the harder side, you might have a warehouse full of inventory that you bought with your target market of everybody. You’ve got shoes, you’ve got rugs, you’ve got mugs, you’ve got hats. Well, who’s gonna buy this stuff. So as you niche down, you start to run at that challenge of like, okay, what do I do with this inventory?
On the flip side, as a service provider, your assets, most likely are like, you’ve got a website, you’ve got some copy written, may you have a couple of PDFs. And so when you start to say, hey, my marketing isn’t resonating. I’m not getting the clients I’m looking for. And you start this process of niching down. You don’t have as much physical inventory to deal with, but you probably have a good amount of web inventory, pages, and copywriting you’ve done that you need to update to resonate with your new target market.
So I think in both cases, it’s a similar process of looking at your marketing, looking at your leads, asking yourself, am I getting the impact I’m looking for? And then starting to take action to refine down to those best buyers. The people who analytically you could see are buying and emotionally, you could see, oh, I want to work with these people. It refills my cup to work with them.
Steven Sauder: When, you’re thinking about niching down, can you niche down too far? Or is that like an impossible thing? Because people’s gut is always like, oh no, I don’t wanna niche myself too far. So like everyone airs on the opposite side and like airing on too small niches, like hardly ever a thing that someone needs to be concerned with?
Kai Davis: Yeah. I think you nailed it airing on too small of a niche is too rare of a thing too hard of a thing to actually do. But because we’re humans because we have squishy meat brains, we will look at it and say, oh my gosh, there are only 15 million potential customers in this niche. This is too few. What happens when I work with all of them? And the truth is it, it’s not a situation that’ll ever happen, but it’s an emotional situation to be aware of. So I think it’s always valuable to see if you could niche down a little further into a more specific target market, but there is an element of diminishing returns here. If you’re like, okay, Kai, I’ve spent six months, niching down and refining and refining. I’m gonna spend six months more no man get on out there in market.
Like there’s a point when you’re just niching to niche down further. I think it’s good to engage in it as an activity and say, Hey, how could I become more specific and targeted in my marketing, but you definitely hit a point where you need to go out there and market and see, okay, is this more specific niche, is this more specific target market clicking like I wanted to? If not after this drawing board, but if it is, how can you pile more wood onto this marketing fire and get it going even hotter and faster?
Steven Sauder: Yeah. Jonathan over to you.
Jonathan Denwood: Yeah. So, you do a growth action plan on your website. We’ve got mostly agency owners, plugin developers, implementers, SaaS owners, they’re our audience. So everybody’s looking for growth. Steven’s looking for growth, I’m looking for growth. So maybe you can quickly tell us about your growth action plan and also maybe one or two mistakes you see all the time when it comes to business owners when they want growth.
Kai Davis: Absolutely. So the growth action plan is a service offering of mine where I sit down and work one on one with the business owner, typically an agency or a micro agency owner, sometimes an app or a plugin owner. And we say, okay, first, where do you wanna go? Like, there’s no purpose in talking about growth unless we have a target. Otherwise, we’re just growing for growth’s sake. So we start off just saying like, where do we wanna go? What’s this three-year vision. Where do you want your business to be, to support you and your lifestyle? Then we take a look at your current metrics. What has it looked like for you in 2020 and 2021? Where do you need to be in 2022? Are you on target for that?
Based on this meeting of the minds, what I jokingly call a Vulcan mind, meld between myself and your business. We have a detailed meeting. We have a detailed conversation. I prepare a growth action plan, combining my insight and experience with what the client has shared about their situation and their goals, and their business. We have another meeting just to talk through my recommendations and make sure they feel they have a clear and concrete action plan to follow for the coming six to nine months. So at the end of the project, the client both has strategy and insight into what to work on and to do this, not that action plan, just to say, Hey, this month move this bolder It’s the most important one. Next quarter, focus on these four, and into the coming year think about these three priorities. Just so instead of feeling like, okay, I’ve got 12 things to do. I’m not gonna do any this is too hard. The client has a clear plan for what to work on, to grow in their target destination, where do they wanna reach and what do they need to do to get there?
Jonathan Denwood: And what couple of mistakes you see people do. Patterns that you’ve observed with these conversations? Are they one or two things you see people doing wrong? Cause they’ve probably been trying this. And normally when they outreach to an expert, like you, it’s not worked, that’s why they want to hire you and get your knowledge because they’ve been trying this themselves. So are there any one or two things that you see a lot of people doing wrong when it comes to this?
Kai Davis: Yeah, there, there are two that immediately pop to mind. They might not be, things that people are doing wrong, but more opportunities people don’t think of. So the first one that comes to mind is a lot of the folks I work with myself, included, sadly, have a resistance to doing what’s worked in the past. because we’ve done that before yes, it worked yes, it was good yes there’s probably still, metaphorical money in that banana stand, but we’ve done it before Kai, where’s the newness. And I’m like, okay, I hear you. Newness is fun let’s start with the thing we’ve done before we know works until it’s no longer working. And for myself included, it’s often a light bulb moment. Oh my gosh, it’d be so much easier if I just did the thing which already worked. And I encourage anybody in the audience when you’re thinking about growth if there are, one or two things you’ve tried in the past, but then set aside for whatever reason, consider coming back to them, consider seeing if you could spin those up again and get them moving. Oftentimes that’s all it takes to start seeing some movement.
The other one I’ll call out that I often see as a missed opportunity is folks don’t often engage in backward planning. So if we take a target number, like a revenue goal, you wanna make, $150,000 this coming year. Well, how many clients do you need to get there? How many leads do you need to close that number of clients? What marketing activities do you need to be doing to generate that number of leads consistently month to month? Unless you take, even if it’s only 30 minutes and start thinking through these numbers and like the shape of your business and the revenue you need, it could be way too easy to end up in a spot where you think, okay, we’re gonna hit our targets in Q4. We just need to close 80 leads.
And suddenly you realize like, oh no, we’re running in the wrong direction. We can’t get there. So in my growth action plan in my work with my clients, I will often sit down and say like, let’s do some backward planning here. Let’s figure out that big, hairy, audacious revenue or business goal, and let’s backward plan to specifically each month, we need to be outreaching to maybe it’s six podcasts to get on as a guest. Maybe it’s a dozen potential clients. Maybe it’s content collaborators, maybe it’s agency partners, maybe it’s something else. But when we go through this process of taking that big goal and figuring out the weekly or monthly actions to take 99% of the time, the client I’m working with starts to see growth because they know what to focus on. Otherwise, it’s like, maybe I move this lever. No, maybe I move this lever. No, what am I supposed to do, Kai? Well, we have to plan it out. And we have to see to the first point, what have you done before that you could continue doing to get the growth you’re looking for.
Jonathan Denwood: That was fantastic over to you, Steven.
Steven Sauder: So much of like success in growth and building a business, like really just spoils down to execution and, and what you were saying, like just resonates because like it’s so easy for me to hop around and like pull different levers and be like, oh, what’s the cool new idea that’s gonna change everything. When in reality, like yeah, cool new ideas are great, but you have to also execute on those and you have to keep executing on it over and over and over again. And marketing isn’t like some mystery box that takes the, like some crazy, like, a billboard on Times Square. And then all of a sudden, you’re a billionaire or whatever. Like, no, it is just, you wake up every day. You have like you’re saying, you do have those like boulders that you’re pushing up, the, what you have to do to push that boulder a little bit farther today. And you keep doing that and eventually like you see those big results.
When you’re working with a client, how do you convince somebody to just do that grind? Or, what can I change about myself so that I wake up every morning and do that grind? Cause sometimes that’s like, that’s the hardest part.
Jonathan Denwood: Can I just slightly intervene? I’m sorry to do this, Steven. Well, it just occurred to me that is the crux because yeah, you gotta be consistent on the grind. But Kai also pointed out people do things and they’re doing the work, but they’re not getting the results. So they are doing the grind. It’s that balance is there are a lot of people that won’t do the grind, but there’s a lot of people that put in, but it just isn’t working. And there’s that link to what you just, said during the interview that they’re not niched down or they don’t- is it a mixture not niching down and not really understanding the needs, the wants of their target audience?
Kai Davis: I think it often is. It’s hard to like do a diagnosis, from afar without being, elbow deep in somebody’s business. But oftentimes it is because they don’t understand their market because they don’t understand exactly who they’re marketing to. And through that, they don’t understand how to effectively reach their market. Look, my perennial example of a Shopify store is CBD dog treats for elderly dogs, which just has a bit of evocativeness to it. And if I’m trying to reach that target market, and I say, you know what, I’m going to go on TikTok and I’m gonna DM folks and see, do you run a Shopify store selling, dog treats for elderly dogs of joint issues. My target market probably is not going to be on that platform. I could go to LinkedIn and I could do the same, maybe there’ll be a few more people and I’ll start seeing a bit more traction It won’t feel as much like a grind, but it still won’t be getting me the results I want.
So oftentimes zooming out. The fundamental issue I see is because the business I’m working with doesn’t quite understand who their target market is or hasn’t defined it because they’re spreading this jam way too wide. They don’t know where to reach these people. And so they try, we’ll try, we’ll try Instagram live. We’ll go to that meetup. We’ll do some SEO content. And three months later, they’ll say, I feel burnt out and exhausted. None of this is working. The reason is they don’t know where to reach their target market and they don’t know how to reach their target market. So as you better define what your niche is, what your positioning is, who your ideal client is, then you’re able to do a little bit of market research.
Where do these people hang out online? What do they read? What do they subscribe to? What do they listen to? How do I get involved in those conversations or get onto those platforms? And then suddenly it feels less like a grind, you see yourself getting traction, getting responses, getting more leads, getting more engagement. And it starts to head in the right direction.
So oftentimes the fundamental issue is the business does not know who their target market is and they haven’t yet done any exercises to refine in on that. But there are hundreds, if not thousands of other reasons why the marketing and the growth can just stall for folks. But this is one of the most fundamental reasons. And one of the most common problems I run into
Jonathan Denwood: Just to follow through and in, we probably need to start wrapping it out for the podcast, part of the show, Steven. But that’s where you really help isn’t it Kai cause you to help them identify the target audience because I’m struggling with this it’s been a constant struggle for WP-Tonic. I think I’m getting better, but I’m still struggling. I’ll probably have to have a chat with your Kai actually. That’s the endorsement a very large endorsement folks. When I am going to get my wallet out with a guest. But I think that is the crux of it, isn’t it? Apart from these externals that the market is in decline, you’ve chosen something that’s going the wrong way anyway. So that’s a problem. But apart from this external is the that is the crux, isn’t it? You don’t understand who you’re trying to sell to.
Kai Davis: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Or are, if you’re trying to sell to like four different target audiences at once because one of them will be right. Suddenly your marketing message again is spread in so many different directions against It gets hard to know what’s getting traction or if even are getting traction.
Steven Sauder: That jam analogy just keeps coming up. It’s a good one. I like that. I’m gonna remember it. All right. That’s it for the podcast, but we’re gonna be, doing some bonus content. So, head over to the WP-Tonic Facebook page or YouTube channel to check out the bonus content. Kai, thanks so much for coming on. We appreciate it. If you could let everybody know where to find out more about you, maybe the growth action plan and you also have some new, exciting, interesting stuff about email template libraries. I know that’s one area that I always get stuck is trying to write a bunch of emails to clients and how to word things and stuff. So maybe, talk a little bit about that and where we can find out more information.
Kai Davis: Heck yeah. So first off, I’ve got two websites I just wanna quickly plug. The first is KaiDavis.com and you can find links to these in show notes. Kaidavis.com is my repository of information, guidance products, and my growth action plan for agencies, micro agencies, and experienced freelancers who are looking to grow. Doubleyourecommerce.com is my consultancy for Shopify stores that are looking to grow through growth focus, search engine optimization. And, if you sign up on either side, you’ll get a steady trickle of emails from me to help your business grow.
The product you just referenced Steven, it’s my new email template library, and we’ll get a link in the show notes. And I put this together after clients asked me for literally years, hey, do you have a repository of your emails, Kai? And I was like, oh, I got some of this product and some of that product and a few over here, but there wasn’t any one-stop spot to get, Kai Davis stamped templates to use in your emailing. And so over the past few months, I started putting together this email template library. It has my book writing better emails to help you, dear reader, understand, okay, what goes into a good email? What steps do you wanna take to get a good chance of getting a reply and having your follow-up really the land?
But the real value of the meat of this product is the email template library itself. You have 22 email templates from me. I’ve written them. I’ve rewritten them dozens of times you have context and guidance from me on how to use these email templates, how to customize them for different situations, and when you need it you could just copy-paste, customize, and then send any of the email templates included to your clients, to your lead, whoever it might be and take that awkwardness out of the equation when it comes to writing these important client emails.
Steven Sauder: Awesome. Thanks so much. And, as Kai said, head over to, the WP-Tonic website, check out the show notes to get all the links and info and details there, as well. Alright. That’s it we’ll be heading into bonus content here. We’re gonna be talking about sales outreach in 2021 and 2022, cause it’s changed a lot over the last couple of years. See you guys later. Bye.
Outro: Thanks for listening to the WP-Tonic podcast, the podcast that gives you a dose of WordPress medicine twice a week.
Sign-up For The WP-Tonic’s Weekly Newsletter
Sign up For WP-Tonic’s Weekly Newsletter Where You Read The Latest WordPress News & The Best Deals! Join The Tribe?
Newsletter