The key to coming up with ways to advertise to your target market is conducting thorough research about the types of people who can benefit the most from what you're offering.
In order to reach a specific target group, you will need to take into consideration the following points in your advertising strategy:
- Define your target market
It’s important to understand that your offer of online home-based business opportunity has a target audience that can be defined. As a network marketer, your primary goal is to find ways to identify who these people are so that you can create marketing campaigns that speak to them directly.
This might sound pretty obvious, but too often most network marketers assume that what they offer the world has universal appeal and that their target audience is “everybody”! As much as we would all like to believe that, it’s never true and can get in the way of creating effective marketing campaigns that do talk to the right people.
- Identify your target prospects depending on what criteria you intend to use
An audience can be sorted any number of ways based on an almost infinite number of criteria. But your audience is unique to your brands, so you’re going to want to identify the factors that can be used to create a better connection between their potential needs and what your SFI business offers.
For starters, are there some demographic points that you can use such as age, gender or geography to begin to refine who the best prospects are for your business opportunity offer? How about criteria that matches a prospect’s beliefs, opinions, attitudes or intentions with your marketing message?
The goal of this step is to eliminate the people for whom an offer won't be relevant or important. With these people out of the mix, you can now focus your marketing messages to reach the remaining people who are most apt to be interested and willing to take some sort of action when they come in contact with your marketing message.
- Identify the best channels to communicate with your prospects
What’s the best way to reach your target audience? There is no 100 percent right answers on the best channels you can use to reach a target audience. For example you can start in your local area to search for local audience instead of going to run a nationwide online search campaign to reach your target audience. Try using an ad in your local directory or even a small local newspaper first before going on to a larger scale.
You also need to find out about how your target audience gets information. What channels do they use? Sources may include television commercials, friends and family, social networks, magazines, blogs, forums or consumer review websites. You can request media kits or rate cards to see how closely related your target market is to the markets of media you're considering to advertise with.
You want to make sure that when your target prospects are learning about the world around them that your messages are part of that information stream.
- Measure your campaign results to determine if you have targeted the right people!
You have defined your target audience, now it’s time to find out if you’re on the right path.
It’s not uncommon for network marketers to identify an audience they want to reach only to discover once the campaign starts running that a very different group of people respond to their marketing materials. Depending on the types of marketing channels you have selected, the feedback will tell you some very important facts.
The bottom line is, don’t assume that just because you have identified an audience and then determined the best criteria to select and reach that audience that your work is done. Every campaign you’ll run will teach you how to do a better job in the future. However, you need to be open to that feedback and be willing to continually tweak that information to optimize your future campaigns resulting in more and more effective results. There are always improvements to be done on every aspects of your marketing campaign as the marketing world changes rapidly.
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