How a Signature Solution Can Be a Game Changer for Sovereign Creators
We break down what is a signature solution, why you need one, and how it can dramatically improve four key areas of your online business.
Personal Note:
Later this month, I will be introducing a Tech Tuesday edition of this newsletter (maybe twice per month).
This will be more step-by-step instructions for completing one piece of your selling solution. Look for the VIP Strategy for Influencers soon, where I will demonstrate a process for converting your best social media followers into engaged omni-channel subscribers.
Finally, I want to credit Aaron Fletcher with Growthworks for the concept of a signature solution. I have adapted his principles for the topic of this newsletter.
The Power of a Signature Solution
Introduction
There are many ways to describe your signature solution:
It is your superpower
It is the expression of your craft to make an impact in the world
It is how you creatively solve problems for your peeps
It is the transformation you promise to your ideal customer
It is your competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace
In this article, I want to introduce the concept of a signature solution and how it can make a difference to your online business.
I will divide this newsletter into three parts:
Part One - What is a signature solution, and why you need one?
Definition of a signature solution
Structure of a signature solution
The Impact Generation signature solution
Part Two - How a signature solution can dramatically improve four key areas of your online business
The heart of your content strategy
The core of your product eco-system
The framework for your high-ticket mentoring program
The source for your sales and marketing assets
Part Three - Challenge to begin working on your signature solution
What transformation do you provide?
Your 3 x 3 content breakdown
New Year’s Gift - Signature Solution Template
Part One - What is a signature solution, and why you need one?
Definition of a signature solution
A signature solution is the combination of two elements of your business that produces a third element.
Element #1 - Your expertise - Incorporates your experience, talents, abilities, and creativity that you bring to your craft every day.
Element #2 - A unique solution to a problem in your market - The creative and innovative ways that you use your craft to solve big problems for your audiences.
Element #3 - Transformation roadmap - A graphical representation of the steps required to experience the transformation your solution promises. This element is also called a product roadmap.
Below you can see examples of transformation roadmaps for various niches and industries (guitar, relationships, digital marketing).
Each of these roadmaps represents how an expert in a particular field would use their craft plus a unique solution to provide a transformative experience for the audiences they serve.
Structure of a signature solution
Allow me to a use a completed transformation roadmap to explain the structure of a signature solution. It has four main parts:
Roadmap title - Your roadmap should have a catchy title and be related to the transformation that you provide for your ideal audiences.
Impact message - This is the transformation you provide, the ideal audience(s) you serve, and the unique mechanism that you use.
Three by three grid - A breakdown of your signature solution in three phases (prep, build, and grow) with three steps per phase. This simple model allows you to break down any complex solution into manageable pieces (like modules).
Outcomes for each phase - For each phase, a word that describes the big goal or outcome for that phase.
The Impact Generation Signature Solution
The IGen Business Builder’s Roadmap above is our unique solution to a big problem in the markets we serve.
In our manifesto, I identified that problem as soulless marketing. Soulless marketing describes the use of coercion and psychological manipulation to push people through an overly engineered sales funnels as quickly as possible.
The click has become more important than the person in modern marketing.
Our unique mechanism is to optimize for Lifetime Customers.™
This changes the entire sales equation from how we cultivate an audience, to the products we offer, to how we grow a list of subscribers and customers. We distance ourselves from the hype and desperation in much of Internet marketing today. Instead, we focus on our craft and look for ways to delight our audiences and make an impact.
Below is the structure of a signature solution applied specifically to the IGen Business Builder’s Roadmap.
Roadmap title - Our title is connected to the Impact Generation (IGen) and to the ultimate transformation we provide (building a business). The alliteration (business builder’s) makes the title more memorable.
Impact message - We identify the ideal audience (sovereign creators) and our unique mechanism which is optimizing your business for Lifetime Customers.™ Notice that this requires two additional goals: monetizing your craft and making an impact. These also form part of our unique mechanism.
Three by three grid - Our unique mechanism has three phases: clarity, connection, and conversion.
Phase 1 - Preparatory phase - Involves doing research on your audiences and competitors. It also means coming up with compelling offers that combine your expertise with unique solutions to your audience’s problems / goals.
Phase 2 - Building phase - Involves the configuration of your subscriber system. This step is missing from most marketing systems, or the approach to list building still follows the soulless marketing route.
Phase 3 - Growing phase - Involves the configuration of nurturing system to create lifetime customers. This includes your e-mail strategy to build relationships with your peeps and the creation of additional offers.
All three phases must be executed, in that order, and with those steps, if you want to optimize your online business to produce lifetime customers.
Outcomes for each phase - For each phase we want to reach certain marketing goals: build a quality audience, build a list of engaged subscribers, build a list of happy and repeat customers.
Part Two - How a Signature Solution Can Dramatically Improve Four Key Areas of Your Online Business
Let me now share the kind of impact a signature solution can have on four key areas of your online business.
The heart of your content strategy
The core of your product eco-system
The foundation of your high-ticket mentoring program
The source for your sales and marketing assets
The heart of your content strategy
Content creation on the Internet is a sordid mess. This includes an explosion of AI created content, the pressure to create fresh content, the lack of a content strategy, and shallow content.
Within the Impact Generation, we take your signature solution and make it the heart of your content strategy. We call it your signature content.
The idea is that you create one anchor post, and 7-10 deep dive articles that communicate your expertise, the audiences you serve, your signature solution, the pieces of your signature solution, and the impact you wish to make.
Post #1 - Your manifesto - Who you are, who you help, what you do, and how you do it. This should be a bold, unique vision for how you see the world, your craft, and your audiences.
Post #2 - Your culture wall - The core beliefs that fuel your craft / movement.
Post #3 - Your signature solution - The transformation roadmap for your peeps to follow.
Post #4 - 10 - Deep dive articles on one element of your signature solution. If you are using the 3 x 3 grid, this would mean nine additional articles.
Repurposed content
These in-depth posts will form the foundation of your organic content strategy. Each one can be converted into 100s of derivative content pieces (quotes, images, shorter blog posts, podcast topics, and social media posts) to drive more organic traffic to your signature content.
Notice this last point. Every piece of content that you create is guiding the right person toward the ultimate transformation that you provide.
Here’s an example of a blog post to help with the creation of a workshop.
Within the IGen Business Builder’s Roadmap, this is part of Step 9 - Diversify Your Offers. A workshop is one of several “products” that you can use to monetize your craft.
The core of your product eco-system
Your signature solution can also serve as the core of your product eco-system. This product matrix illustrates the concept.
Take any step of your transformation roadmap and run it through this product matrix. For example, in our IGen Business Builder’s Roadmap, Step 8 consists of an email broadcast strategy for nurturing lifetime customers.
This single step can be delivered as:
A digital product (e-book, audio course, video course)
Part of a membership or training site
A Zoom workshop or as part of a live event
Part of a group or one-on-one mentoring program
A done-for-your service
This means you can leverage one well thought out transformation map into dozens and dozens of products and offers.
The framework for your high-ticket mentoring program
Your signature solution can also form the framework for your high-ticket mentoring programs.
These popular programs incorporate recorded training lessons combined with weekly feedback sessions. This allows user to progress through your signature solution, and also receive personalized attention for their individual projects.
Using your roadmap and your signature content, you have everything you need to create a multi-week mastermind or group mentoring program complete with training materials and workbooks. It would contain one training / coaching module for every step of your roadmap.
The source of your sales and marketing assets
Finally, your signature solution can serve as your Marketing HQ.
Any phase and any step of your roadmap can turn into a lead magnet, ad, VSL, or webinar that explains or highlights that step.
Here’s an example of a social media post that has been derived from our article on the Impact Generation culture wall.
This piece of content (with a small blurb) is meant to drive interested folks to the main website where they can enter our world. At this point, the only thing we are “selling” is our vision for creating an online business the Impact Generation way.
The great advantage to this model is that, no matter what you create, EVERY ASSET leads back to your transformation and to the unique solution you provide to your audiences.
Part Three - Challenge to Begin Working On Your Signature Solution
In this final part, I want to leave you with some practical tips for beginning to think about your signature solution.
Going through this exercise was a clarifying experience for me. I was forced to evaluate every part of my business: how I marketed, the audiences I wanted to attract, how I showed up to my craft, and where and how I wanted to make an impact in my corner of the universe.
The same will happen for you as you begin to reflect on your signature solution.
What transformation do you provide?
The first set of questions to answer include 1) the audiences you most want to impact and serve, and 2) the transformation that you provide to your ideal customer.
The quality of the audiences you cultivate will determine the quality of your business.
The Impact Generation
Who are the audiences / groups of people you are most excited to impact and serve? You can be picky here, so choose wisely and deliberately.
What are the biggest problems / goals your audiences have? This is just brute force Google research.
How can you use your craft to creatively solve those problems / goals you’ve identified?
What is the transformation that you provide. It should be concrete and results oriented. If you are doing agency work, focus on mastering one technique to generate quality leads, subscribers or customers.
Your 3 x 3 content breakdown
The next part is to begin breaking down your transformation into three phases. This part is not as hard as it looks.
Every discipline can be divided into three main parts: setup phase, build phase, and grow phase. It is similar to planting a tree (till, plant, grow).
Setup phase - Where you set goals, define the terms and gather the needed supplies.
Build phase - Where you build something real that produces the first part of your signature solution.
Grow phase - Where you add more of your expertise to the system to deliver on your promised transformation.
Think it through logically. What are the three phases, and then what are the three basic steps of each phase? Write it out, by hand if needed.
Refer back to the different roadmaps in this article for more inspiration.
A New Year’s Gift - Signature Solution Template
If you are revving to get started on your signature solution, you can use our generic Transformation Map below to sketch out a name, impact message, and your 3 x 3 content grid. Just follow the previous lessons and adapt the grid to your craft and context.
P.S. If you send me your roadmap, I’ll give you my honest critique.
It’s Your Turn
As you have seen, a signature solution can be a powerful addition to your online business.
It can become the center of your content strategy.
It can become the core of your product eco-system.
It can become the framework for your high-ticket mentoring program.
It can become the source for your sales and marketing assets.
Even going through the exercise of completing a signature solution will give you so much clarity and conviction around what you are doing.
It’s deep work.
I promise you it will be the most important work you do in 2024.
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