How to Define and Communicate Your Expertise

For small business owners, defining and effectively communicating your area of expertise is essential. Both contribute to building confidence and credibility.

As a small business owner, you’ve likely taken a broad approach to creating your business plan, covering a wide range of services or adjusting the direction of your service offerings from time to time. However, clients seeking to outsource a project will look for the specialist who best fits their specific needs.

This means focusing your efforts on excelling in a particular specialty can help set you apart. Use these four tips to define and communicate your expertise effectively.

How to Define Your Expertise

While it may initially feel limiting to confine yourself to a particular specialty, doing so can help you evolve into the role in which you feel most comfortable. When defining your niche, consider working through these four steps.

1. Consider your client’s individual needs

This first step is crucial because it includes identifying your target audience. What types of businesses could use your skills? Try to discover a pattern in the clients you’ve worked with in the past. Did they share any common needs? Your specialty is found at the intersection of those shared client needs.

2. Quantify the services you offer

Can you quantify the services you provide? For example, if you’re an IT professional, do you provide instruction guides for program maintenance? Or, if you’re a data analyst, are there specific types of data presentations your clients have found especially useful? Find the value your deliverables have in common, and use that to help define your business.

3. Look at what strategies your competition is using

What do the people who do what you do call themselves? Try this exercise: Find 10 independent professionals in your field that you respect and consider to be successful. What do they focus on? What services do they provide? What strengths do you share with them? You may even consider reaching out directly to some for advice.

4. Consider your Return on Investment (ROI)

If your business focuses more on services than deliverables, highlight how you’ve generated ROI for your clients. How were you specifically involved with bringing that client from where they were to where they are now? You can help to define your specialty by answering how your services add value to the client.

How to Communicate Your Expertise and Your Value

See if this sounds familiar: a potential client asks you what you do and after you explain, they give you a blank look. It’s a problem that many independent professionals have—how to describe a complex career. While there’s no easy quick fix, there is a key mindset you can adopt when describing what you do to a potential client. What you do depends on who you are speaking to.

For example, if you’re attending an IT trade show, your message will differ from what you’d use at an HR summit. Both industries may benefit from your services, but each has its own unique terminology.

Additionally, it may be helpful for you to sum up your business in a slogan-like sentence that you can memorize and repeat. Put this slogan on your website and make it part of your brand. This description should be short and snappy so that people can easily remember it. With some time and practice, the next time you get “the question,” you’ll be ready.