Starting From Nowhere Part 6 - Talking To Your Customer

In the first few parts of this series, we have looked at how to find your best home business idea, identifying your target market, and tailoring your promotional efforts to suit the tastes of your customers.

Talking to your customers in the right way is another key element to any home business. If you are dealing with customers face to face, talking to them the right way is much easier than communicating by phone or in writing. In addition to the words used, effective communication is aided by tone of voice, facial expression, gestures and all the subtleties of body language.

If you deal with your customers by phone, you will be helped somewhat by tone of voice but, if you are relying on the written word, you have nothing else to support you. Therefore, if your communication with your customers is going to be by email or through your website's content, your words have to be chosen carefully. It is vital that your written words are perfectly clear and make complete sense but it is also important to have the right "tone" in what you write.

This is where identifying your target market is so important. For instance, you would not speak to your boss, mother or minister in the same way you would speak to your closest friends. Writing needs exactly the same considerations: you would use different words and construction when writing notes to each of these people.

If you are going to put up a website or publish a newsletter, anyone could choose to read it. Not everyone will be interested in what they read there, but that is not your problem. You cannot successfully cater for all tastes. If you tried, the result would be so bland that it would appeal to nobody. Your object is to appeal to the audience you have chosen for yourself; this is what niche marketing is all about, after all.

If you can identify with your target market, "speaking" to them in writing will be easier. For example, if you are a biking enthusiast promoting products related to your sport, you will be inside the skin of your potential customers and that is precisely where you want to be. You will know what will interest them, what they will like and, most importantly, what they want. You will, in effect, be writing to yourself. Hence the advice to try to pick a niche on a subject for which you have a passion (or at least a degree of interest).

The next best thing to actually being in the skin of your prospective customers is to imagine your customer as one particular person. This could be a real person, ie your mother, sister, brother, best pal, or it could be an imaginary composite person made up of parts of several people you know well. If you are inventing a person, you have to be able to visualise everything about them down to what perfume they use and what clothes they would choose to wear. Inventing your perfect audience representative can be fun. The intent, however, is serious and the person you invent must seem real to you. The idea is that everything you write for your audience will be you "speaking" to this one person you have chosen.

It is easier if your target market representative is a close friend or relative. You will then have the added advantage of being able to test your promotional material on them and there is no substitute for having your material read and commented upon by another human being.



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