Marketing That Works: Finding Your Edge With Seth Godin

Choosing Restaurants in Providence

My apartment in Providence, Rhode Island was in an old three story building right in the heart of Wayland Square. I was perched at the top in 650 square feet overlooking the bustling block filled with boutique shops, hair salons, and quaint restaurants.

Within the first few weeks of arriving, my wife and I frequented two such restaurants. The Salted Slate and McBrides Irish Pub. The former was an upscale joint with a rotating menu never longer than 7 or so entrees. The latter was an Irish Pub in name, but offered more than its fair share of American bar food. Among it’s sprawling 5 page menu, one could find everything from fish and chips, to chicken wings, and everything in between.

The Salted Slate never tried to appease everybody. They differentiated themselves by staying focused on a few items that they did better than the competition. I never saw a summer night without a line of people out the door waiting for a table.

Meanwhile, McBrides Irish Pub seemed to attract just enough customers to stay busy. Their food was good enough, but nothing to write home about.

Between the two, you can probably guess where we took our friends and family out to eat when they came to visit.

Marketing for the Few

Marketing your business becomes easier, and a lot more effective, when you differentiate who your product or services are for. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is trying to appeal to everybody.

Seth Godin is widely regarded as a marketing genius. He has written 18 best-selling books on the topic, including The Dip, Purple Cow, Linchpin, and Tribes. In his latest book, This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See, Seth continuously weaves this idea of differentiating yourself from the competition as an effective marketing strategy.

The relentless pursuit of mass will make you boring, because mass means average, it means the center of the curve, it requires you to offend no one and satisfy everyone…Everything gets easier when you walk away from the hubris of everyone. Your work is not for everyone. It’s only for those who signed up for the journey.

Seth Godin

Differentiate Your Practice

This concept of differentiation is so critical to private practices in the healthcare industry. As more and more patients shoulder a larger burden of their healthcare costs, they have become more aware of their purchasing decisions.

In other words, marketing your healthcare services in a way that clearly differentiates your practice from the competition is more relevant today than ever before.

Let’s look at two ways we can better market our practice to a new generation of “informed” patients:

Narrow Your Focus

Don’t try to be all things to all patients. After all, that is why we have various specialties, right?

Even within a specific specialty take time to identify your ideal patient. Write out the characteristics and types of patient you desire as though you were literally meeting with the patient, which will help in your planning process.

Find and Communicate a Core Difference

How will patients differentiate your practice from your competition? When the patient picks up the phone and calls your office for the first time, will they hear the difference? Will they experience it when they arrive to the first appointment or when they meet with you?

Stress the differences with your staff so that they are aware of the message you wish your ideal patient to hear.

Competing in a Saturated Market

Google gives me 22 search results within a 5 mile radius for “dentists near me.” How do we compete in a world oversaturated with choices?

Seth Godin encourages us to find an edge. Stand for something, not everything. We can’t be all things to every patient, but we can be the best of something to someone.

The method Seth recommends for exploring our “edge” is a simple XY grid. On each axis, choose something that people care about.

For a dental practice, those things could be ease of scheduling, convenience, professionalism, cleanliness, involvement in the community, trendiness, or state-of-the-art equipment.

It’s not even so much the features you offer, as much as the emotions those features evoke.

Now start plotting where your competition might fit on that grid. Where is it most crowded? A mistake would be to choose the axis that are the most popular. It’s very difficult to grow in a crowded segment.

Seth Godin’s advice is to build your own quadrant. Find a set of axis that has been overlooked and deliver on a unique promise that makes you the obvious choice for patients who seek those experiences.

Do you know what quadrant you’re in? Are you trying to do everything for everyone, or are you clear in your value proposition?