When my daughters want pigtails in their hair, they come to me because I’m more gentle and their hair gets tugged less.

When they want to play Lego, they go to their daddy because he’s the expert at building things with blocks.

I’m the one they ask for snacks, he’s the one they ask for piggy-back rides.

Kids learn very quickly how to get what they need and they learn which avenue to take to get it fastest.

It didn’t take too many times for Daddy to put the wrong sized dress on the children before they just quit asking him to help. I only made so many pathetic attempts at drawing things for them to start walking past me to go to Daddy when they wanted to make pictures.

Do you think your customers are any different?

This is why finding a niche is so important. So very, very important that it can never possibly be stressed enough.

Let’s consider a bakery for a minute. A bakery opens in a town that already has a bakery. Old bakery has been the only bakery for many miles, for many years. Their stuff is good, their prices are good. They deliver consistent quality. They sell all kinds of baked goods from bread and rolls to cookies and cakes. They sell preserves for you to put on your bread, and they have every different kind of pie you can imagine.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the bakery.

But then another bakery opens up in the same town.

Townspeople think it’s crazy – there’s never going to be enough business to support two bakeries!

But the new bakery is a very different operation than the old bakery.

This new bakery offers gluten-free products, diabetic-friendly desserts and it’s a peanut-free zone. They sell health-foods disguised as cookies, loaded with flax, raisins and other healthy things. Their jams and jellies are certified organic.

Even though there are two bakeries in town, they serve completely different customers. They each have their own niche.

Do you think either bakery would suffer from the others’ presence?

I’m thinking not.

People still wanting the gooey, sugary treats go where they’ve always gone. People wanting a healthier choice probably haven’t been frequenting the first bakery anyway so they try out the new place.

Do you make it very clear to your prospective customers what you do better than your competitors?

Do you even know what you do better than the competition. Do you know why your customers are choosing you?

If you do, are you highlighting that information in your copy?

Do your website visitors know why they should choose to work with you?

If you’re not seeing the type of conversion rates you’d like from the current marketing material you have out there (including your website), I challenge you to look at it with an open mind, as if you were a potential customer viewing it for the first time.

Do you have to sift through a bunch of dry information to find out the bottom line – why you’re better than the rest?

I ask you this because if you can’t find that information yourself, then how can you possibly expect someone who doesn’t know you to find it?

If you’re not really sure what that is, think back to my opening “pigtails” example. What are your current customers coming to you for most? Take a look at your most popular service and you can probably figure it out pretty quickly. Remember, you’re constantly evolving. What you do best now might be different than what you did best when you first started your business!

A “copy polish” (as I like to all it) will cost less money than you think and when you consider the ROI and the fact that you could possibly be losing scores of potential customers from the get-go right now, you can’t afford not to have your copy revised to make it clear as to why your customers should choose you.

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