Yesterday, I wrote about how fractional CMOs and marketing advisors are generalists by nature. We have to be.
We need to be able to combine business acumen with marketing skills across a wide range of channels and disciplines.
And that’s precisely why it’s so important to build your business for a specific niche as soon as you can.
When you intersect your generalist abilities with a specific target market’s challenges, you have a chance at becoming a deep specialist in that area—allowing you to create a competitive moat.
The more general your horizontal skillset, the more niche you want to be with your target market. Otherwise, you’re back to doing everything for everyone.
And maybe you can help anyone with anything. But it won’t help you grow a profitable marketing advisory practice.
Without focus, you’ll be interchangeable with literally anyone else. You’ll lose deals to people more specialized. You’ll have a hard time standing out or becoming ubiquitous to any single group. You won’t be able to build repeatable assets and one-to-many offerings.
In short, you’ll own a job. And not a very good one.
Be specific about what you do or who you do it for.
Ideally both. But not neither.