What do you do?

It should be simple enough, but sometimes this is one of the hardest questions to answer!

Earlier this year I attended the Finding Clients virtual summit. It’s actually meant for translators and interpreters. I participated because a number of my friends were speaking, but also because I knew there would be useful tips for me there about client acquisition, marketing, positioning etc.

And I wasn’t disappointed!

The whole topic got me thinking more about how we position ourselves. Because, if we’re not clear about that, we can’t make it clear to others what we do or what value we add.

I talked about this on the podcast too – in episode 324. You can listen to it there if you’d prefer, but this isn’t a transcript or any kind of AI summary. The topic is the same, but this is a separate article.

how do we position ourselves?

Sometimes people aren’t clear about this because they’ve never thought about it. Maybe they didn’t have to before, especially if work was coming through agencies or there were enough referrals to keep a stream of new projects coming in.

Sometimes, as in my case, we have thought about it in the past, but we need to change it because we have outgrown what we used to say. We’re not doing exactly the same things or serving the same clients, so the messaging needs to adapt in order to keep up.

Sometimes we’ve added new services and these need to be included.

Sometimes we’ve changed direction because something wasn’t working, our initial idea wasn’t as interesting, or market expectations changed.

Reinvention is good – ok, maybe as long as we’re not doing something different every week, which can become confusing for people who want to understand what we actually do! But in general it’s a good thing because it usually means we’re growing and adapting.

how do we describe ourselves?

I changed my title to “language and communication trainer” on LinkedIn because I felt that just saying language trainer didn’t fully cover what I do any more. Some people don’t want a traditional language course, but they’re using English as an additional language and they are looking for support with public speaking, how they come across online, how they describe what they do etc. Basically, it’s more about communication than learning a language. Often it’s about putting what they already know about English into practice in real situations.

So, names are important, but they’re not the whole story. Good positioning is not just about what we call ourselves. For service-based businesses, it’s also about which problems we solve, how we help, and what benefits we can bring to our customers.

This is not the same as what we do! Sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the details of the services – how they work, what happens on the course, how you get to your end results… But that sometimes bypasses the more important point about why these services and why you, not someone else with a similar offer.

Plus, before we can be clear about this in another language, we have to get it straight in our own head!

how do you get clients?

At one of my recent networking events, someone asked me how I get clients. She meant specifically which platform or which method I use for finding them. For me that is primarily through LinkedIn, but the events also help with getting to know new people, some of whom may choose to become customers if they’re looking for English communication support. The English with Kirsty podcast and this website also play a role in terms of people finding out more about how I can help.

So, I answered the question, but then I started thinking about this process and the various parts that are necessary in order for it to work.

Positioning – is it clear what i do?
Visibility – do people know that I do that?
Connection – do the right people know that I do that?

If any one of these parts isn’t working as well as it could, the other parts will have less of an impact. And, in my case, as what I’m doing has changed a bit recently, the positioning was the part that needed most attention!

Even if we consider all three of these areas, we can also undersell ourselves if we:

Only focus on what we do and not the impact it has for our clients
Assume people know what we do – if we’re meeting new people all the time, we can’t afford to make that assumption
Keep playing it safe – I find it much easier to talk about my podcast and free events than my paid services
Are too vague – sometimes it’s not about talking about our services more frequently, but about being really specific about what sets them apart.

And … on the subject of talking about my paid services! I decided to set up a little tracker to record the last time I talked about each programme and calculate how many days ago it was. This actually helped me. Sometimes it feels like we’re talking about things all the time, but the numbers there told a different story. “Really? I haven’t talked about that course for 3 weeks now?”