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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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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Starting From Nowhere Part 4 - Knowing Your Customer

Niche Marketing - Who Is Your Customer?

To talk about niche marketing makes it sound very high-tech but the phrase "niche marketing" is about avoiding the temptation to be all things to all people. Trying to market everything to the whole world is much harder than trying to sell one item to one person. Actually it's not just harder, it is downright impossible.

Different types of people have completely distinct interests. Think about pet owners. Forget for a moment, the people who create a mini-zoo at home because they just love keeping pets. A niche marketer would not try to target "all pets", it is just too wide to be successful. There are definitely "dog people" and "cat people" in the pet owning world but you would not be best advised to try to market to both types at once.

Having identified dogs as a niche you will need to dig deeper and look at possible narrower niches, for instance: puppies, guard dogs, miniature dogs, one particular breed of dog, dog toys, dog shampoo, worming treatments, dog insurance, dog travel baskets, dog leashes, dog collars, flea powders, dog training, poop-scoopers, dog breeding, dog psychology, dog feeding, weight loss diets for dogs, curing doggy flatulence, dog chews, dog beds, furniture protectors, dog hair resistant car seat covers, dog clothing, dog wardrobes, etc. You can see how this works, so I'm sure you don't need me to provide a list for cats.

It makes no difference whether you are a website owner or a shop-keeper, you must find your niche and market it to the right section of society. Think about niches as if they were shops. If you were trying to sell high-priced designer garments, you would be more successful if you were to market them through an exclusive boutique than if you had them on show in a shop alongside low-cost, low-quality attire. The consumers who will be interested in the two types of product are two entirely different sets of people and by trying to cater to both, you will attract neither.

Your customers must be able to see at a glance exactly what you are selling, otherwise they will move on to a store where the message is clear. The products you display should identify you as an expert in a particular field: eg you are either an expert at haute couture or at bargain basement clothing. You cannot establish credibility if you try to pass yourself off as an expert at too many diverse things and, if you lack credibility as a marketer, people won't come back to make further purchases.

Think about buying gifts. It is much harder to choose a gift for someone you hardly know. You don't know what they like, what they hate or if they are allergic to anything. The best you can do is go for the blandest possible item and hope not to offend. The chances of you hitting on something they will really want are so remote as to be non-existent.

Now think about buying a gift for your partner or a close friend or relative you have known for years. You know exactly what their tastes are and you can, almost without thinking, pick out a gift they will accept with pleasure.

Your niche marketing should be like giving a gift to someone you know well, it might be your partner, your brother, your girlfriend or even yourself; it doesn't matter as long as you know who you are marketing to and offer them something you know they will want.




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Starting From Nowhere Part 3 - Finding Your Home Business Niche

What A Home Business Niche Is, and How To Find It

Having decided that you want to start your own home-based business, the next step is to identify your niche. You might have a general idea about the type of work you want to do, but you need to identify your exact niche before you start making a business plan.

The importance of finding your business niche is something you will see mentioned time and again on the Internet but it is not confined just to Internet marketing, it applies equally to any bricks and mortar business; to be successful, a business must fit comfortably into a niche. To find your niche you need to decide on your preferred area of work and find out what market exists for particular products or services associated with your preference.

For example: you might be interested in sport, but that is too wide an area to be a niche so you must narrow your area of interest. You can do this by choosing one particular sport, let's say you are a golfing enthusiast, so your niche is narrowed considerably but golf in general is still much too wide, so you need to look at aspects of golf to locate possible niches.

You might want to teach golf, or write books about golf, or sell things connected with golf on the Internet through your own website. Any of these areas can be further narrowed down but let's assume you want to sell things connected with golf. A possible niche here is selling golf clubs but that is still very wide, it can be narrowed down to bargain priced clubs, or children's golf clubs, or used clubs, or products from one exclusive manufacturer. You could also investigate golfing attire, golf shoes, or golf bags. Another possibility is selling golfing memorabilia or books about golf on eBay. These niches could be further narrowed to relate to one particular famous golfing personality.

Each time you think you have narrowed your niche sufficiently, you should do some research to find out if there is enough of a market for what you would be offering. Depending upon the results of your research, you can then look at refining your niche further or possibly combining two niches. One word of warning: don't try to invent a mixed niche. A niche selling golfing memorabilia and golfing books from the 19th century would make sense (whether it would be profitable is for you to decide), but a niche selling golfing memorabilia and rare motor vehicle parts would not work.

Having multiple streams of income (eg selling golfing memorabilia and sourcing scarce vehicle parts) is fine, but the two must be marketed separately. In the case of our example, you would need to operate a niche website for each niche and many people do exactly that. You've heard the term "niche marketing": well, that's how it's done. To be a niche marketer just means finding a product or service to appeal to a narrow section of society. If the potential market for your niche is very narrow, you expand your business by starting up in other niches, not by trying to make your niche wider. We'll look at this a bit more in the next article in this series.


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