Let's pretend the people in the picture above are visitors to your blog. How many people in this virtual sea of people do you think you could turn into paying customers using your current online marketing system? What would it take for your current system to convert these folks into loyal customers? In this article, learn the marketing mistakes that most people make when promoting products and services online and how to turn things around.
Back to our hypothetical scenario. Are you hoping and praying that your prospects like your marketing messages? Or are you pretty confident in your ability to convert them? These are the problems that most online business people have. If they have had the proper training and done their homework, they are confident in their ability to convert leads.
If they have just gotten online and started blasting their marketing messages to any and everyone, they may worry each day about whether people will respond to what they are saying. To manage their anxiety, they scream, spam and annoy their followers... It's a vicious cycle.
How to Turn Things Around
Making a connection with the right prospects and turning them into loyal customers is the goal of your online business. The more you know about your customers, the more you can appeal to their interests, their goals and their challenges. It's one of the many great reasons to create a profile of your ideal customer. It's also the reason you'll want to download the worksheets below. Once you’ve created a profile of your ideal customers, you can gain more confidence in what you're selling and how it fits into their lives.
One thing you can do today, that will have a big impact on your home business involves matching your products and services with your ideal customers. Follow the information in this article and use the free worksheets below to create a working profile that will help you reach important sales and marketing goals.
You will have more of an idea of what will appeal to your audience and how you can meet their needs. Your direction will become clearer as you create a your strategy to reach them. The more you are able to define your target audience (niche), the better you can be at selling more to them over time.
Improve Your Ability to Connect with Customers
Learning more about the people who are a great match for your products and services will help you speak to the heart of their problems and address their interests. Problem resolution and the pursuit of interests are what most people are looking for when they perform an online search. The goal is to reach potential customers who are actively looking for what you have to sell. The cement that helps to glue you to your prospects is how well your product or service will solve their problems or spark their interests.
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A niche market is defined as a market or audience for which a particular product or service is best suited. If there is a good match between customer needs, wants and motivation, there will be a better chance the product or service will do well from a sales perspective.
If you neglect defining your ideal customers, you'll waste time reaching out to people who could care less about your products and services. This is what most people do when promoting their products. They promote and distribute marketing materials and messages to "everyone", hoping to find someone, anyone who will buy from them.
Become crystal clear about who you will sell to, and you'll sell more!
Who Are Your Ideal Customers?
The first instinct when starting out is to try sell as much as possible to "everyone". You'll be surprised to know that you're actually not going to want to sell to everyone. You'll want to zero in on people (visitors/consumers) that have specific personality traits, problems, interests and challenges. You want to sell to people who are going to want what you're selling, and that won't be everyone.
Think of the things you like. There are certain things you love. You're more than likely involved in or attracted to those things when you're online. At a minimum, you'll be searching for information on your favorite topics. If you're adventurous you'll be finding friends, family and business contacts, joining groups, and networking with people who have similar interests.
There are also things that you have no interest whatsoever in doing. You will probably never search for the things you hate, unless they help you solve a particular problem. For example, there are probably very few people who really get into clogged drains as a hobby. But clogged drains can be a part of everyday life for home and business owners. If you have a clogged drain in your home, you may search for plumbing solutions. Plumbing solutions may be a one time search that you perform to help you solve that particular problem.
The thing to take away is that your prospects are just like you, in that they have likes and dislikes. In your online business you will only want to promote to people who are interested in the products and services you have to offer. When you're broadcasting your message to everyone, you will waste time and resources on people who could care less about you or your products.
To be successful in promoting and selling your products and services, use the free worksheets below to build a profile of your perfect customers. This exercise will assume that you are targeting consumers (vs. a business) with your products and services.
Describe the person who would use and pay for your product or service. The more narrowly you can define your target market, the better. Start with broad descriptions, save your document and return to the document later, adding more detail. Layer by layer, add as much detail as possible and remember that you can target more than one niche.
This document will become a profile of the person(s) who would be the best fit for your products and services. This profile will be the key to marketing success with your audience.
How Do Your Products Help Your Ideal Customers Solve Problems and Pursue Their Interests?
Once you know who you will be selling to, you'll want to create a complete description of your products and the problems they solve. Your products and services may solve more than one problem and be used by more than one customer type. Create one customer profile for each audience or group that you plan to target.
The product section of the two worksheets included in this set you'll be asked questions that will help you detail each product. You might want to choose two or three products that you would really like to promote to start your profiles. Build strong profiles for these products and match them with your ideal customers. Determine which problems you will help your customers solve.
Once you have completed your profiles, you will have a valuable tool that will help guide your marketing decisions, and enable you to make more money in your online business.
Worksheet Instructions:
There are two worksheets in this download, one that can be used to provide details about your products and one that you can use to provide details about your ideal customers.
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Print these worksheets and complete them using a pen and paper or use them as a template on your favorite word processing program. If you start out using a pen and paper, you will eventually want to place your profiles in an electronic format so that you can add to it over time.
Enter your first name and email address below.
Once you've completed these worksheets, you’ll have working documents that you can refine over time, as things change. If you decide to explore new markets or add new products, make sure to create a profile for those items as well.
Read our article titled Learn What Interests Your Target Audience with Google Analytics for insight on the people who are visiting your website. The information found in the article will help you further refine your customer profiles.
Open your favorite word processing program and type or cut and paste each question into a new document. Once you’ve answered all the questions on this worksheet, you’ll have a profile that you can use when creating your marketing materials and creating product descriptions.
Learn the mistakes most people make when promoting their products and services online. Download our worksheets that will help you create customer profiles and make important connections. Stop hoping and praying and take action!