With a limited source of time and resources to dedicate to your network marketing business affairs, reaching an optimal number of prospective contacts should always remain your top priority. Far too often, network marketing training promotes every person being in your target market, but that is just too broad and far reaching. Instead, identifying a specific niche group is one of the keys to your ultimate success. Understanding, defining and selecting your target market should be one of your early business focus points, to ensure ultimate success.
Understanding your target market should be a top priority. A brainstorming session of individuals who would benefit from your products, teachings and marketing collateral is a great first step in identifying your market. If you are struggling to determine demographics, common attributes to consider include: age, location, gender, income, education, relationship status, occupation, ethnic background, personality, attitude, values, interests, lifestyle and behaviors. This is not an exhaustive list of traits, but covers many of the common target markets network marketing professionals opt to pursue.
With a brainstorming session complete, it is now time to define your market. Take the traits you arrived at during brainstorming and use these to help define your target market. If you find yourself struggling to pull the list together, use a series of questions such as the following to help shape a list:
What are your prospective customers eating?
What is their specific problem?
How can your product or service provide a solution?
Is your solution affordable to customers?
Asking thought provoking questions and performing research can save hours of work pursuing the wrong group of potential clients and expensive leads that will yield no return. By defining a market, you will be able to cater your sales and marketing efforts to reach your niche market. Professionally, you will be able to focus all efforts on reaching this specific group of individuals and servicing their specific needs. The brainstorming exercise will help you maintain a working list of attributes you find common in your customers. Use this to help formulate articles and messaging to share with customers and colleagues alike.
With a keen understanding of your customers and definition of target markets in hand, you will now be able to select a target market. Ultimately, your product and service offerings coupled with your own personal strengths should help select this prospective group of targets. Adding customer attributes will broaden the scope of your market, while subtracting characteristics will help narrow the focus of your efforts.
Spend some time reflecting on your own strengths and product offerings before choosing a target market. The more aligned this group is with your own comfort level, the higher the probability of success. You will find sales and marketing initiatives and pitches come easier when you are working with a group of individuals who share common goals and visions than an area outside of your professional or personal knowledge/comfort zone. Remember, nothing is forever, and as your business goals change, so too should your target market. Working and cultivating contacts from a predetermined group should yield higher rates of return on your ongoing business initiatives.
