The most important aspect of marketing is the WHO not the WHAT or the WHEN

The problem that most online business owners have when they go into the marketplace looking for new customers is that they do not seem to have an understanding of the importance and the real advantages of niche marketing.

They focus too much on what they can sell to the masses to make the most amount of money.

However, the most successful businesses focus more on the WHO instead of the WHAT, when it comes to selling products and services. You see… You can have the best product in the world, but if you are trying to sell it to the wrong people, you will never achieve success and you will end up wasting unnecessary…

Time, Energy & Money!

So, once again… The WHO is critical. To increase you possibility of success with your home business, you need to spend 80% of your time, refining and tweaking the following critical elements of your business:

  • Your niche
  • Your product
  • Your sales funnel
  • Converting customers into evangelists and repeat buyers

But…

In my humble opinion, getting the niche part of this business strategy right is one of the most critical investments of your time that you can make.

So, what exactly do I mean by niche? By niche I am referring to a subsection of a marketplace that you can serve in a way that is unique to your competitors.

Let me give you an example….

If you are selling a product or service that caters to a mass-market such as weight loss, your niche could be a subsection of this market such as people who want to lose belly fat.

Trying to sell your products to a large marketplace with hundreds of thousands or millions of people isn’t easy. Getting your marketing messages in-front of all of these people, could take a lot of time and money.

One of the key aspects of effective marketing is your ability to leave people thinking…

This message/advert is speaking directly to my desires, problems or frustrations!

It is hard to achieve this when you are trying to speak to the masses.

But, if you can identify a smaller sub-section of the marketplace, it is easier to reach and speak directly to these people.

Make Sense?

So…

Working with a niche-based mentality is definitely a sensible way to approach building your business but there are also other considerations that you should entertain if you want to improve your chances of success, some of which include:

  • There should be a sufficient number of people in your niche to make it worthwhile – only 5% of any market are ready to buy now so you need to make sure there are enough of them out their to make your business a viable option
  • Prospects in your niche, should easily be able to afford what you are selling – targeting people based on household income is one of the best approaches to take to achieve this
  • These prospects should have demonstrated that they are actively searching for a solution to their problem – you can use tools  like Jaxxy or Google keyword planner to determine this
  • Prospects in this niche should have no few or no perceived options – if you are selling a ‘me-too’ product or service ask yourself what you can add to your product offering to differentiate yourself from your competitors

Remember…

If you try to sell you everyone…

You will sell to no-one!

So…

Once you have identified a niche market, you need to ‘chunk down’ and start to focus more on the individual people who live within this niche.

In other words…

Define Your Customer Avatar!

Your avatar is basically a profile of what your ideal customer would look like.

Some examples questions that you need to be able to answer about prospects in your niche are:

  • Where does my ideal prospect live
  • How old is she
  • What magazines does she read
  • What problems would she be trying to overcome that my product/service would solve

And..

A great way to find this information out is to survey these people.

You need to go where they are hanging out.

You could:

  1. Go to social media groups and start conversation.
  2. Set up Facebook or Google PPC ads that send your prospects to a page that captures their email address and then email them a survey using a service like Survey Monkey and any other way that you can think of.

If you can be bothered to do this, here’s what’s likely to happen….

After you receive a number of survey responses, you will find that the people who respond will have common characteristics.

They might be a certain gender, a certain age group and social political leaning etc,  and you will start to build up a picture of the ideal prospect by working on averages from your survey responses.

Then…

You can make up a profile that describes this person.

An example of a weight loss avatar might be:

  • Name: Sally
  • Age 45
  • Marital Status: Divorced
  • Household Income; $80k year
  • Children: 2
  • Political leaning: Conservative
  • Favourite Newspaper: Wall Street Journal

…you get my point.

Once you have started to build up a profile based on your market research, your probability of converting prospects to customers will improve if you target all of your sales messages, especially your advertising headlines,  to speak to people like Sally.

Every time, you right a blog post, social media message, Facebook Ad or create a Squeeze Page to capture leads – speak to Sally.

Remember, you are not looking for everyone.

You only want a select few customers who are the most likely to be hyper-responsive to your sales messages and once you target these people, you will be less likely to waste time, energy and money trying to communicate with people who aren’t ever likely to be your ideal customers. I hope this post has helped you to appreciate the real advantages of niche marketing  to find your ideal customers.

Till next time.