Hey Reader,

Do you ever say something in passing that your brain latches onto and keeps turning on?

During a coaching call this week I brought up the idea of a "sea of sameness", a phrase I haven't thought about since grad school.

A sea of sameness is defined as: a market where competing brands look, sound, and act so much alike that customers cannot tell them apart.

As creative service providers sometimes this feels like what our job is, if we're doing basically the same thing as our competitors (or AI) so how do we stand out?

Differentiation 1: People buy from people

In prepping for our Let's Get Visible masterclass in Creative Maven Society this week, I read an Inc article about a major trend coming out of Cannes this year that 'C-suite executives are becoming creators' and these 2 lines really jumped out at me:

There's a reason why companies are increasingly shifting their marketing spend from big flashy ad campaigns to influencer partnerships, because there is a personal connection built with their audience; a brand inherits that trust and will be more likely to purchase than investing in a big flashy campaign (still important touchpoint, balance is just shifting).

So how does this help you stand out in the sea of sameness?

Start blending the things that make you different into your marketing (and offers), so that you're no longer competing on things like number of photos delivered, cost per word written, or turn around time - you're now competing on their trust because they're an authentic human being with opinions, and expertise that makes sense to me.

Here's a simple exercise we walked our members through during the masterclass:

Make your own list of 20-30 personal & business things you love, have expertise in, or want to be known for - and start combining them to make fun original to you content ideas.

Real quick while we're talking about Creative Maven Society

Our whole theme this month is Visibility, and we kicked off the month on a masterclass where we went deep on Collabs, adding Personality, and Optimizing your marketing funnel with experiments. Oh, and an AI prompt to walk you through applying everything we covered based on your own analytics.

All members get access to replays, a dedicated space to "Ask a Coach", and so much more - you can apply to join here.

Differentiation 2: Nail your sub-specialty

As you get better at things, and your knowledge on a topic increases - you're able to get increasingly granular on things and often times we forget to update our external labels to match. One of the easiest examples of this is the progression of a photo business:

Phase 1: Side hustle - you probably had a friend who asked if you could take photos - you shot everything on automatic and possibly even delivered jpegs directly out of the camera.

Phase 2: Building portfolio - you're starting to build a name for yourself and a style - you're starting to charge real money, investing in professional equipment, starting to shoot in manual & RAW, and now apply a preset you purchased to most images with light edits before you deliver.

Phase 3: Starting to specialize - you're now doing 1 or 2 specific things like wedding, seniors, families, branding, or commercial - but you'll still do other work if you get asked, and you're starting to build out your systems and automations

Phase 4: Specialized - you do one thing (eg: product photography) - because the level you want to deliver requires your systems to be super custom to one specific type (eg: briefs & reviews), you own gear that's necessary for that one type (eg: light box), and your editing style only really works for this type of photography (eg: fewer higher complexity edits) - and it's now awkard to do any other type.

The high paying dream clients want specialized service providers - because the customer experience is dialed in for their specific needs, and there's nothing extra that they don't need - for example if we follow the product photography example even further and their sub-speciality is product photo of alcohol (past coaching client), you know exactly how to deal with properly lighting liquid in a bottle & keeping the color true to life, which is more important to this customer base than someone's skin tones in this sub-specialty.

I can almost guarantee you're already specializing in skill, interest, and the type of clients you're able to drive the highest results for - how can you lean into talking about how your expertise and knowledge makes you a better fit than anyone else.

Fill in this sentence if you don't know what your sub speciality is: I'm a [service type] who works with [dream client] to [your offer result] and my absolute favorite projects are when I get to [sub-speciality].

If your content isn't ruling out people for your service type you're not being specific enough. Sticking with the photo example when a wedding photography posts "this is what most people get wrong when putting together a photo album" it immediately rules out businesses looking for a branding photographer (for that piece of content), but makes it way more relevant to couples planning their wedding.

Differentiation 3: Results speak for themselves

At the end of the day people care about what they're getting. So if understading what the primary reason people buy your offer, and talk about real results you're delivering against their specific definition of success - you're no longer in a "sea of sameness" because you're telling them the results they care about.

What's the personal x business overlap that you'll be creating out that's unique to you? Hit reply!

Lyndon

PS appy here to Creative Maven Society to get access to this weeks masterclass replay