Starting From Nowhere Part 5 - Attracting Your Customer

If you have only just joined us in this series about starting a home business from zero, we have looked at choosing the best home business for you and how to find your ideal niche.

In Part 4 we looked at the importance of getting to know your customer, in other words identifying your target market. Knowing your market and catering to their tastes is fundamental to your success: you cannot successfully market to everybody in the whole world. Think about how different people's tastes vary. For instance, if you were going to produce a TV program, you would need to know who your audience would be before you started to plan any other details.

If you decided to produce an educational program for pre-schoolers, everything about the program would need to be designed to appeal to very young viewers. This would include the content and the vocabulary used by presenters or storytellers. The whole look and feel of the program must appeal to the right age group. You would conduct research to determine the optimum length of the program so as to match it to the attention span of your audience. Every single detail must be tailored to suit your target audience.

Promoting your home business to potential customers requires similar considerations.
Who are your potential customers? Are they senior citizens, young men, parents with young children, students, teenagers? If your intended customers were middle-aged citizens, you would not use an in-your-face hip-hop presentation; the style of presentation must be carefully matched to the tastes of the audience you wish to attract. You need to think about the language you use in your advertising and make sure it is appropriate both to your product and to the type of person you are hoping will become your customer.

If you are directing your potential customers to a website, the color scheme, the type of graphics and fonts you use will need to be carefully considered. If you are trying to sell used tractor parts to farmers, you won't want a pink fluffy website decorated with pictures of flowers. That might appeal to the odd farmer, but generally speaking a more rugged and businesslike website would be more likely to bring you success.

If you are promoting something which would appeal to several sections of society, you need to decide whether you are going to invest all your efforts into promoting to just one section or whether you will have more than one advertising campaign so that you can tailor your advertising to promote different aspects of the same thing.

As an example, think about promoting a coastal holiday resort. You might advertise it to fishermen as an ideal spot for offshore fishing with keenly priced boat hire packages. You might promote the same resort to parents with young children by emphasising the safe sandy beaches and child-friendly hotels. It is your choice whether you promote to both these groups or just select one and concentrate all your efforts there. This way, you will be presenting benefits which will appeal to your target market and avoiding the situation where you would be trying to engage two completely different types of people with a single unfocused offer.

The questions to ask yourself are: "who is my audience?" and "What are their tastes?". You must know your audience and understand their tastes before you can work on attracting them.

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