Marketing for SMEs: Humaira Akhter on Finding the Red Thread Behind Your Best Offer

Offers are often treated as a packaging exercise: choose a market, identify a pain point, add a promise and make the numbers look attractive. That can produce something sellable, but it does not necessarily produce an offer the owner wants to keep delivering.

I spoke with Humaira Akhter about a different starting point. Her work helps experienced, multi-skilled experts find the recurring thread in their careers and lives, then turn it into one commercially viable offer they can be known for.

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Introduction

Jeremy: Offers have become a controversial subject in online advertising. A familiar formula can make sense on paper, but once everyone copies it, the market fills up with louder promises, bonuses and guarantees.

Jeremy: Your approach feels different because you use the word “excavate”. What are you looking for beneath the surface?

Humaira: I help overextended, multi-skilled experts move from scattered services towards one genius offer that is repeatable, scalable and sustainable for them. These are not people who are just starting a business. They may have spent ten or twelve years building experience and solving many different problems.

Humaira: Over time, they can move away from what made them distinctive. They see what other people are doing, add more services and eventually forget what they stand for or what they were meant to focus on.

Being good at many things can make a business forgettable

Jeremy: Is the problem that someone can have several strong skills and keep getting distracted by all the things they could sell?

Humaira: Yes. I experienced that myself. I worked across graphic design, website copy, web design and landing pages, and I even completed a user experience certification because I thought that might be my next path.

Humaira: My clients came to me with many different types of problems. I was good at several things, but the result was forgettable. In an industry where people need to understand why they should choose you, that is risky.

Jeremy: That sounds like niching down, but you are saying there is more to it.

Humaira: Niching is part of it, and there must be commercial viability. But the offer should also sit within your zone of genius. It should pay you well while giving you clients and work that challenge you to become better.

Humaira: You also need something you disagree with in your industry, what I call a “frenemy”. You are taking a position against a familiar way of working. For many expert business owners, the aim is not to build a fifteen-person agency or spend every day feeding a content machine. They want a business that supports both peace and profit.

The Red Thread starts before the usual offer questions

Jeremy: Most offer exercises start with the target audience, the problem and the customer’s pain points. Where does your Red Thread process begin?

Humaira: Those are fundamental questions, but I step further back. A person may have completed the worksheets and courses and still feel a tug whenever they talk about their offer. They are not excited to market it, or the language makes them feel salesy.

Humaira: I look at the through line across their story. We map life chapters and identify high points, low points and turning points, from childhood through their career. Once those moments are written down, recurring threads begin to show what the next offer could be.

Humaira: People are often too close to their own experience to see those patterns. Dialogue matters because another person can reflect back something that was already there but had gone unnoticed.

Jeremy: In my case, I dislike wasting money and I have often positioned myself as the underdog fighting larger competitors. My parents grew up without much money, and I remember seeing situations where they may not have received good value. That might help explain why I value clear pricing and careful use of a client’s budget.

Humaira: That is the kind of connection the process explores. It is not about forcing a quick answer from one anecdote. It is about understanding why you think the way you do and how that belief can shape the offer.

Advertising can only amplify what is already there

Jeremy: I meet owners who are very good at their work but feel uncomfortable advertising it. They assume they need to yell, exaggerate or act unlike themselves to get attention.

Humaira: Advertising is like putting fuel on a fire. It can add more fuel, but if there is no fire to begin with, that is the problem. You first have to understand what lights you up. Asking ads to make it rain before that point becomes frustrating for the business and the advertiser.

This point also connects with how I approach paid advertising. Campaign structure and targeting matter, but the message, website and offer must give people a reason to respond. Our work on turning wasted spend into reliable leads, for example, began with clearer services, better messaging and proper tracking before the account was rebuilt.

The same principle applies to landing pages. Sending more traffic to an unclear proposition rarely fixes the underlying issue. In one client project, a focused landing page produced a clearer ad-to-page experience.

A strong offer can evolve without losing its core

Jeremy: If an offer comes from this deeper alignment, does it last longer?

Humaira: It may be adjusted over time, but its core essence does not need to keep changing because it comes from a through line that is true to the person. Markets can shift every few years. Building only around the current target audience misses the more durable part of the offer.

Humaira: I developed this approach after seeing capable clients repeatedly change offers, leave programs half-finished or pay for polished plans they never executed. The problem was not a lack of intelligence. Their stated direction and their actions did not match.

Humaira: I have continued to simplify the process. One practical test is whether you can explain the offer in one sentence: what it is, who it is for and what problem it solves. In a noisy environment, a complicated explanation creates another barrier.

Why self-awareness is not always enough

Jeremy: Could a self-aware business owner work through this alone?

Humaira: Some people can use an exercise, package the result and take it to market without help. But if you keep doing the work and still cannot connect the dots, you may be missing the dialogue.

Humaira: A conversation can expose the gap between what someone says and what they do. It can also examine the nuance in their stories, how an experience shaped their thinking and why they are resisting a particular direction.

Jeremy: That can be confronting. It is easier to say, “I’ll do it when I’m ready.”

Humaira: Many clients are not ready to confront what is happening underneath the business. That can be the sign that the work is timely. Waiting for a perfect feeling of readiness can keep someone inside the same comfort zone for longer.

Humaira: The issue can also appear in a business that has enough clients and acceptable cash flow. The owner may be coasting, taking projects that keep the business afloat but no longer feeling challenged or excited by the work.

Four ideas to take from the conversation

• More skills do not automatically create a clearer market position. If customers cannot see the connection between your services, your range can make you harder to remember.
• Commercial viability still matters. Personal alignment is not a substitute for finding buyers with a real problem and the ability to pay.
• Look for patterns before choosing packaging. High points, low points, turning points and repeated client successes can reveal the work you are best placed to own.
• Paid advertising is an amplifier. Before increasing traffic, make sure the offer and message give that traffic something clear to respond to. This is also why we encourage owners to look at the business and the numbers around an ad campaign, not only the ads themselves.

You can learn more about Humaira on her website or connect with her on LinkedIn. She also offers a Genius Offer Diagnostic and information about her Genius Offer Blueprint™.

This conversation was recorded for Marketing for SMEs with Jeremy Yang. You can watch the full episode on YouTube or listen on your preferred podcast app.