Chapter 1 - Your CustomersEvery business book will mention them. Many business people talk about them. Some may even be able to describe them. Few will actually market to them. You will be told to get exact demographics and psychographics. Who knows who your customers are, let alone what they are like? Here is a real secret; your potential customers may not be that smart. In a global network like the Internet there are a large number of surfers who may not be as business savvy as you. Focus on the ordinary person as the baseline customer. Design pages, e-mail, processes and your business around simple and easy-to-use ideas. Assume that most people will be relatively unfamiliar with the Internet. Simple is better when it comes to Internet marketing. How do we know this? Check out Computer Stupidities at http://rinkworks.com/stupid/ for a list of recently asked online support questions. "I'd like to buy the Internet. Do you know how much it is?" Key Point I know people may be a little behind when it comes to being connected to the Internet, so let us take a look at some e-mail questions from the same site. Again from rinkworks : E-mail sent to a mailing list server: I have tried to unsubscribe, but a message appears saying that my user's name is incorrect. I have been using the same name for 77 years and should know whether it is correct or not. The following letter, received in an e-mail: Apparently I have read-only access with the e-mail, but my boss would like me to be able to send messages as well. Is there any way this can be established with my account? Or the customer that complained: Customer: "I get this error when I check my mail. It says, 'There are no new messages.'" A free service that I subscribe to called Wordtracker sends me the 500 most common search words for the past week. These are taken from various search engines across the Internet and stored in a database of over 350 million search terms. (www.wordtracker.com) This week s top 20 are: Looks pretty sophisticated, don t you think? According to Nielsen NetRatings analysis of Internet access during January 2002, of the 172.8 million Americans with Internet access, 55.5 million did not go online at all that month. All this to say - you need to have a pretty good idea of the market that you intend to sell to. In a Perfect WorldIn a perfect world, we would all have the right product for the right market. A perfect product for the Internet is one that: Do you need perfect customers? Well, you do not need them. They need you. Your job is to attract and engage them in a sales conversation. In reality, you will not find a lot of perfect customers . Internet marketing for Small Business is about attracting and engaging customers who only come close to being perfect. Start with the End in Mind Traditional marketing says the more specific you are about your target clients, the better. With the right promotions, pricing, places to sell, and product mix you will know how to speak to them, how to write for them, what to offer them and how to find them. While this exercise has value for your traditional business, using it online is futile. There is a better way. The problem is traditional marketing approaches are backwards for your online business. Every year a million other small businesses add their sites to a list of a million before them. These sites are all your competitors and only a tiny fraction of them generate any real revenues on a consistent basis. The Wrong Way This is the worst way to sell online. Follow these steps at the risk of destroying your financial health. I followed those steps when I started my online business and I see the same mistakes each day by businesses with and without money. The focus on a certain type of customer is important to your business, especially in the early days when the paychecks might no be coming as often as you would like. Have you ever bought something new that you thought was unique only to find that it wasn t && after you brought it home? The easiest example is a new car. What kind of car do you notice a lot more of when you get home from the dealership? Yours of course! Lots of people have the same model as you, some even the same color. Where were they before you bought? They were all there; you just did not see them. The same can be said for your perfect customers. They are already there, in the market that you must first identify. It is your focus on a market that already exists that will allow you to see them. The Internet marketing process reverses the traditional marketing process. The Right Way This is a gross simplification of course; there are more steps and lots of tactics and strategies to apply. However, the important thing to note is that you have to test and confirm that a market or niche exists, in which people are ready and willing to spend. Key Point Look back and you can see the companies that followed a traditional approach to marketing. They started online with an idea and money and they finished online with an idea and no money. Staking Your ClaimWorking hard, having a good product or top-notch customer service is not enough these days. Even if you have a list of satisfied customers to market to, it is not sufficient for a successful online selling strategy. In fact, a good product and top-notch customer support are the minimum standard for a small business that wants to make it online. Online there is no room for the ordinary. It is not even enough to stand out from the crowd. What is required is being special and unique. On the Internet, there is no such thing as the only game in town. The next town is only a mouse click away. In the past, a small business worried about competition. That type of competition is concerned with differentiating your products and services. Online, that type of competition is not an issue. Everyone is on the same playing field with the same products and services. The goal for a successful small business Internet marketing strategy is to become so tightly focused that people seek you out, you begin to be perceived as special and an indispensable part of a customer s life. You know you have this focus when you are niched. Do not confuse a good niche with a market niche. A small business that is successful in creating this level of focus also creates a lifestyle niche, one that meets your goals on a professional and personal level. A great Internet niche gives your small business an engine to produce the results you want in your life and in your pocket book. I have been involved in small businesses on the inside and from the outside and I can tell you that 99% of them do not have a good niche. They do not control how they are perceived or what distinguishes them. As a result, they have fallen into a business and not created one. Not picking a niche lets a niche pick you and will result in the end of your business or continued disappointment. Finding your online niche, therefore, is not an option. It is a decision you must make. You decide or it decides. If you decide, you have to pick between finding a niche and developing a niche. I am going to suggest that a perfect business does not come gift wrapped with a big bow around it. You have to work at it. So let us start crafting a good niche, and deciding what it will stand for. Deciding On Your Niche Key Point Consider These Types of Niches Poorly Filled Niches While unfilled niches are time consuming and expensive, poorly filled niches are exceedingly common. How do most people find an unfilled niche online? Personal experience! Stay on the lookout for business opportunities in your back yard and then test the market for your idea. Creating New Niches If you have time to spare, look for a new niche. If you have money to spare, create a new niche. Some small businesses have been successful creating a new niche online. In relative numbers, however it is a small amount. Fully understanding the niche that you decide on means you are able to answer these questions: How well you do answering these questions determines your success through all of the other steps. If you cannot answer these properly, it does not matter how successfully you do Internet marketing. Your business will falter then fail. Reverse Engineering Your Market Demographics - What kind of company is it that you sell to? Is there an industry description that includes size and location? For individuals you might want to find out what kind of income level, gender or education, etc. Psychographics - While demographics deal with physical issues, psychographics looks at the mental profile of a potential customer. What kind of values do they have? What category of interests do they focus on? This becomes a buying profile for the market when you can match a psychological profile to the market s wants and needs. Problems/Opportunities - Why do they need your services? What benefit do they receive if they use you? What is not working or what do they want to work better? Distribution of Your Products - Finally, you need to know where you can find them. Where do these companies/people cluster? What do they read, where do they network, and what form of mass media is connected to them? After you have an idea about a product or service and the niche it might fill you need to find out how much demand there is. Traditional marketing strategy might have you create plans around the above list. Each of the plans are designed as a strategy roadmap for the product, promotions, pricing, place (distribution), publicity and any other Ps that you want to add on. While these types of plans are beneficial to an offline business, online you can save time and follow your competitors who are doing the work for you. Want to find out about target markets, customer profiles and existing solutions? Research your competition online and follow the links to partners, vendors and customers. You can quickly build a detailed profile of a market and its potential. If you have not already done so, download or register for these four key pieces of free software. These powerful applications provide you with valuable business intelligence. The better the information you have, the smarter the decisions you will be able to make. These tools come in handy when it comes to keeping track on your competitors, customers, industry and what is happening online in the search engines. At a bare minimum install:
Do not ignore this part of Step 1. Find out where an online market exists, where customers are spending their money, what problem they are solving and if you can solve it better, faster or cheaper before you go any further. Keep in mind these points during your search:
Decide on your niche now, and a niche will not decide on you. After you have decided on a product and made sure there is a market, go back and answer the traditional marketing questions. Build your plans, document the demographics and psychographics. Then identify the big problems customers are willing to pay to solve. Building Your ProfileYou know something about products, markets and customers. Now it s time to complete the loop and confirm that you are a good fit for the opportunity. Central to effective Internet marketing is a message that connects directly to the needs of those customers who want to buy what you sell. Your profile and your perceived uniqueness are developed by taking a hard look at you and your company. Making sure that your message to the world is consistent with who and what you are as a company and an individual takes an investment of your time. The upside is that a tight message and consistent corporate profile matched with marketing to a niche market and its customers brings a huge return on investment. The small businesses that KNOW who they are and what they do are always successful. On the flip side, if you cannot get your profile and the niche profile to match you re dead in the water online. On a piece of paper, create a draft message that buyers in your online market will understand. This profile includes these details: About You What You Do When someone asks what you do, how do you respond? Here is a time-tested format that gets the attention and interest you want. This profile ideally creates a compelling message that explains exactly: who you are, what you do, for whom, why they would want it done, and, finally why they should let you fix their problem. In your traditional business, it is referred to as the elevator pitch. Type out this pitch/profile and tape a copy to the side of your computer monitor, memorize it, etch it in stone, do what ever it takes to commit it to memory. Key Point Here is the format: Solution/Benefit - Tell them the solution and benefit to the problem you just articulated. Uniqueness - Tell them what makes you different from your competitors. The Elevator Pitch Here is an example of a profile.
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