Starting Your Online Business
Starting a business, whether it's retail products or services, must establish their own "niche". It doesn't matter how great your products or services is, how great your sales letter is or your headlines, offers or what a great price you're offering. If you try to sell your products or services to the wrong market, there's a strong guarantee it's not going to work.
What is a niche? A niche is a particular specialty in which a business or person finds they prosp...
...er. Niche strategy in marketing is to market to a small but lucrative portion of the market. The small size of the niche generally ensures efficient marketing efforts and few if any direct competitors.
On the other hand, if you take an average product or service, and maybe your ad copy is only medium grade, maybe your price is only medium grade, that I've actually seen these marketing campaigns go to the right targeted audience and pull a decent response. The point I'm trying to make is, to help you understand the difference between the right target market and a good marketing campaign.
What can you do to make sure you get the right audience? You have to begin by knowing who your products and services actually appeal to. Then find the largest market that can actually buy your products or services or the best market that can afford to pay for your products or services.
You might find multiple markets. You don't want to leave any markets out. You want to be sure you target a specific market tightly enough so you can appeal to their interest, but not so tightly that you don't appeal to anyone at all.
If you have a product that appeals to multiple markets, you can develop multiple campaigns. If it's a service business, that goes into the home, then you really appeal to many markets. A home owner that is a doctor, a homeowner that is a dentist, a homeowner that is a business owner, you can target to these specific people and treat them as a particular market. One great way to get into a particular market is to find a professional that is already in that market or is already a customer of yours and get them to be a cheerleader for you. Ask them if they will endorse you. Usually they will if they like your products or services.
For example, here's a story about my good friend Janice, a letter she created.
Janice wanted to use her doctor as a reference for her business and she asked her doctor if she could write a letter from him to all of the other professionals in that market on their letterhead in their envelopes and send out that letter on top of one of his sales letters. Shockingly, Her doctor said yes.
Her letter read like this; "I don't do this very often, but I've received such good service from Dr. Blevins, I thought the rest of you should know about this." And on with her message she explained the good service and at the end she left her business information.
The results were staggering and Janice Then gave her doctor a free gift. She bought Dr. Blevins a box of his letterheads being that she used theirs, and she sent her Doctor an organizer to put them in.
You see, what this does is it makes sure the envelope gets opened from her market because other doctors will open information on other doctors. Always give your niche some kind of position to help you increase your business.
Paul Clark has work on Home Based Businesses for the past 12 years.
|
